This was cutting edge tech… I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs…
Naw. I’m this fucking old:
Wooo, look at hoity toity FancyPants over here with their screwdriver. All we could afford to fix our cassette tapes was a pencil. And a blunt pencil at that. And it was probably stolen from school!! Screwdrivers indeed!
The screwdriver is not for the tape. It’s for adjusting the audio head so it can pick up the data on the tape.
When someone gave you a tape with some nice games on it there was a near 100% chance you needed to adjust your datasette to read them.
Exactly. On the long run, we settled down on what we called a common calibration, a setting that allowed all of us locals to exchange tapes without constant tweaking.
For real? My tweaking days ended when floppy came out for the C64.
Maybe the C64 datasette never got the upgrade?
Boy, that was before I could afford a C64 with the money I made with my first computer.
The tape drive has a hole on the top for adjusting the azimuth, but one of my friends basically just removed the top cover entirely for easier access to the screw. I did that too for some particularly tricky tapes.
Another of my friends had basically an unearthly knack of adjusting this stuff. Dude would just walk up to the tape drive, masterfully tweak the screw for a second, and it’d work. Which makes no sense.
This was all a kind of mysterious part of the Commodore 64 culture to me. Because I had a floppy drive and that’s what I obviously preferred to use.
Dude would just walk up to the tape drive, masterfully tweak the screw for a second, and it’d work.
Me too! For some reason I was the only guy in school who could do that. Fun times. 😊
Because I had a floppy drive and that’s what I obviously preferred to use.
In the beginning these were not available. Also I remember them costing the same as the C64 itself. As soon as I could afford one I got one obviously.
I just another item that could a generational riddle: the hole-punch that made your one-sided floppy two-sided.
In the beginning these were not available. Also I remember them costing the same as the C64 itself. As soon as I could afford one I got one obviously.
I guess I was lucky. My parents got me my first Commodore 64 C second hand, and it included the floppy drive. Guess it was affordable that way.
I just another item that could a generational riddle: the hole-punch that made your one-sided floppy two-sided.
Ooh, I didn’t have one of those fancy pieces of gear! I lived in a small town. Used to see disk notchers at the book/stationery store, which had the reputation of being slightly pricy place but was the only store in town that had computer stuff at the time.
Instead, I figured out a way to cleanly cut the notch using scissors. Two horizontal cuts, then two cross cuts, then carefully cut out the remainder.
I’m old enough to know why people used pencils for cassettes. It wasn’t coincidence. Count the number of teeth in the casette, then look at the number of facets on a standard pencil.
I wonder how many will realize it’s not just a cassette tape to listen to music…
You used a screwdriver to store 73 kB?
It’s a sonic screwdriver.
i witnessed the creation of the mp3 format!
RealAudio
oh yeah that piece of crap i haven’t missed ^^
It was better than WAV; a nice bridge over to MP3.
.ra files taught me why proprietary is a bad word.
And rmvb files were all the rage. Those sweet video files with only 32MB… Peak compression. What the world was before h264 and before youtube existed was amazing.
Don’t forget good ol DivX
Ohhh yeah, the golden age, xvid, divx, mp3, wmv, rmvb, quicktime videos, installing codec packs in windows…
I have a cd somewhere with the second matrix movie in 2 parts with a shitty resolution full of pixels and barely able to see with a magnifying glass, but watched it like that.
Bink videos were the hot shit for games for a while, and RAD Game Tools started a whole era of standardization for multimedia processes that culminated in DirectX. With computing power increasing along with the market share of PCs, using standardized libraries for audio & video drivers became the sensible thing to do. Previously you had games programmers eking out every iota of performance by fine tuning that stuff at an assembly level (the Origin games with their memory managers and Chris Sawyer’s amazing if kind of insane feat in creating Transport Tycoon come to mind).
My computer’s mobo was so shitty, it played .midi files badly. I was shocked when I went to a mate’s and the same midis sounded like the song they’re actually supposed to be.
And then backing them onto zip disks. Good times.
Bro, Zip disks were for the porn you downloaded from WinMX.
Well, yes… In hidden folders cause I was a l33t h4kz0r in my youth. But that’s just between me and you.
I put mine in a .zip file and renamed the file extension to .dll and stuck it in the system32 folder haha. Hide file extensions when done and make the file hidden. Blammo!
Mod files
YES! I loved XM Tracker back in the days
Can you tell us anything about the professors?
Im Not even 40. Leave me alone.
Everytime I see limewire I feel left out.
Where are my Kaaza hommies at??
Here!
Kazaa, Kazaa light, WinMX, DC++. I used them all.
Napster!
What’s crazy is that none of the other P2P apps that came after ever had as nice of an interface as Napster. I guess that’s cause Napster compiled Mac and Windows native apps while most other P2P apps were Java jars.
Where are my eMule fuckers at?
That donkey was the goat.
Emule/Edonkey
Yup
How did the progression go? Napster, Morpheus, Kazaa, Limewire?
I mean sure, if you just want to skip Bearshare
And Audiogalaxy. And WinMX.
EDIT: And DCC bots on IRC.
gnutella, surely!!
I like how Justin Frankel created something to help you get stuff to really whip the llama’s ass with :)
Where did DC++ fit in?
My user name stands for KaZaA Lite User 9.
Slsk (Soulseek) was far superior. It was the best for getting full albums and leaked stuff. If you found someone with a fast connection and thick library it was like gold.
Shoutout to everyone that got Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead album with “Mike Jones” randomly played in the background.
Slsk is still around today and people swear by it.
I’m quite a bit older than this…
I don’t even know what you are talking about. I am young, very young. I enjoy rizzing in the toilets and skibiding everyday bro. So fresh. 🤙
pls don’t leave me with the boomers…
No, the boomers had punch cards. That’s an entire other level.
2001, Dre’s album drops, nobody has it yet. In walks the kid who has a T1 line and a 5 disc CD copier with a spindle of discs. He sits down in homeroom, puts the spindle on his desk and says Dre’s new album five bucks right here.
He sold out before the end of the day, made a good amount of cash, and was racking it in for months getting people albums that they requested because none of us could get it work with our slow connection. Of course when the two competing ISPs upgraded their networks later that year, he lost the majority of his business, but for a few months he was our pirate savior.
Remember how when you would burn a CD you couldn’t use your computer lest the write buffer dropped too low and the burn world fail?
I remember buying a stack of CDs only to find out they were +R, not -R, and this utterly useless (or something like that, can’t specifically recall whether ±R/RW).
I remember this being a DVD thing. By the time I got a dvd burner though mine supported both.
The RW issue with CDs was that a lot of older players couldn’t read them.
I damaged the laser on a PS2 by using a DVD-RW. They’re harder to read than a normal disc apparently, so it wore the laser down pretty quick
Can you believe my original ps1 is still rocking hard with zero adjustments?
My ps2 is currently dead, but it was because I used thicker wire than necessary when modding it a thousand years ago and I need to just heat up the solder a bit.
That console is a nightmare to disassemble/reassemble though and it’s been down for around 15 years. I’ll fix it one day.
I have an NES that just needs a simple fix. I keep saying that I’m going to get to it too.
And just saying, if it’s the 72 pin connector, you don’t need a new one. Just pop yours out and bend the pins back out. It’s very very easy, honest to God there’s no reason to get a new one. I have new ones in my closet, probably 20 of them, but I’ve never really needed to use any of them.
If you don’t want to fool with that PM me your address and I’ll send you one.
Oh man they’re so so so easy to fix.
My childhood NES had a capacitor go out recently and the color was off. It still worked it was just ugly.
I have like 10 of them so I just swapped my case, but for some silly reason it’s like I don’t feel connected to the “spirit” of the machine because of it.
I’m going to have to order new capacitors and you just reminded me.
Get that thing fixed. It’s so so easy.
There were no CD+Rs
My recollection is very hazy, it was such a technological blip.
Or trying to re-burn a cdrw but it was originally not burnt with the same soft as yours 😓
🗑️💿🚮💔
I remember the funny lines on the back when I accidentally bumped into the tower or had the subwoofer on as it was burning.
Also holding down on the close-pin on a discman (so it would keep spinning the disc) and differently coloured sharpies were a great way to colourize your collection.
I remember the moment I realised my fancy new Walkman could read data CD-Rs and I could fit all my mp3s into one 700mb disc. I felt insane, majestic, limitless.
Then you’d get a copy protected disc that wouldn’t play at all in the disc man, but you could copy it to a CD-R and that’d play just fine. To disable the copy protection you just hold shift while the cd tray closes.
I ended up even buying some rewritable mini discs because they were so much smaller and still good enough space for some mp3 files.
I didn’t find out about mini discs until years later. Best I knew was the lost technology of CD-RW
I grew up with these.
Not exactly this one, but I remember the old PC had 5.25 and 3.5", and the power was a big red switch, felt like you were juicing up the grid.
Ya the switch to the right back. Like house breaker when you switched it on
Quit bragging.
More like dating myself.
Really. I guess you really are young. My turn
My turn:
wait, are these older than 1984(my first computer)?!???
I’m older.
Let’s just leave it at that
Yeah, I remember flippies and casettes, but I’m too young for 8 track.
Oh boy. I remember seeing an 8 track system once… I was very curious, and honestly, I still don’t have any of the answers I wanted. They’re just no longer relevant. The tech was old when I was a kid.
I used dial up, so anything that’s post-Internet, I’m probably older than. I still remember the idiot news anchors going “move over Internet, here comes the world wide Web”… They’re literally the same thing. What the fuck are you talking about?
I grew up with a Bally Astrocade from birth. My dad had bought the tape peripheral, but I don’t think he knew what the hell to do with it. Just sat in the box.
We had dozens of cartridges for it though. I think he just liked buying new tech, because I never saw him playing it.
A new use for my cassette recorder.
Other than storing programs in it?
We’re as far away from the 90s as the 90s were from the 60s.
Ugh…
If they produced an equivalent of That 70s Show today the “very special episode of” would be the one where 9/11 happens.
But we are inching up to the 2060s! Lol
We are closer to the 2060s than the 1960s.
This year, 1975 is as far away as 2075.
Let’s hope we make it there!
I passed the day that was farther away from my birthday than my birthday was to the start of WW2 years ago.
I just checked and oh crap, me too! Almost 20 years ago…
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I’m not even 30 yet and I ripped CDs in my youth. I didn’t use limewire though, we would use torrents already at that point.
Yup, and eventually I got a disk drive with LIGHTSCRIBE and just put the album art on the burned CD. I felt like hot shit.
It’s funny, I finally got one of those and used it once.
Commodore64 gang represent!
I remember watching my mom sit and type code for games from magazines. If she made a mistake you’d know it. “MOTHERFUCKER!!!” rang through the entire place.
Floppy drive. Fancy.
That monitor was really underrated. I used it for decades for game consoles, VCRs, etc. after the C64 went obsolete.
where’s your cassette drive
Hey, hey, you gotta tag that as NSFW. So sexy
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