This was cutting edge tech… I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs…

  • Emerald@lemmy.world
    7·
    2 days ago

    This isn’t very old lol. That computer could be from 2010 and CD’s and Sharpies were used then. Also, LimeWire was functional until like late 2010.

  • boonhet@lemm.ee
    3·
    2 days ago

    No, because my country was pretty much too small and poor to have brand-name sharpies, we just had felt pens with other names. Carioca I believe was the most prominent brand back then.

  • Perhapsjustsniffit@lemmy.ca
    3·
    2 days ago

    Record off the radio to cassette and an active market for pirated live shows because we lived past nowhere and it was all we had access to.

    • D_C@lemm.ee
      211·
      3 days ago

      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!

      • hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
        301·
        3 days ago

        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.

        • Treczoks@lemmy.world
          10·
          3 days ago

          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.

        • Rose@slrpnk.net
          6·
          3 days ago

          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.

          • hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
            1·
            3 days ago

            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.

            • Rose@slrpnk.net
              1·
              2 days ago

              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.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    83·
    4 days ago

    I’m exactly that old.

    Edit: The PC in the image is a bit anachronistic. This is the workhorse we’re all thinking of:

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
        17·
        3 days ago

        I had an Optipex from that era too. It was “horizontal” but could also stand vertically. It was the business model.

        This one, but beige:

        The image is the Precision Dimension model which was the consumer version of it.

        • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          4 days ago

          You’re real close to the “capacitor of death” models there. GX270s failed like a motherfucker.

            • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              3 days ago

              Between the capacitor plague and the tin whiskers from the phaseout of lead, hardware from that era failed constantly.

              • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
                1·
                3 days ago

                We somehow avoided that, luckily.

                I had the pleasure of getting sold a cheap power supply though. It was rather fascinating to learn that, indeed, even burning hardware can still provide sufficient power to play games (for a few seconds).

        • BakerBagel@midwest.social
          4·
          3 days ago

          We use to flip the light gray flap all shift in computer lab in middle school. When we got bored with that, we figured out how to pop out the Dell logo and flip it upside down

    • FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
      5·
      3 days ago

      Dell Dimension 2400. My family had the entry level model, and it still absolutely destroyed every prior computer we’d had performance-wise

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      6·
      4 days ago

      That or the ol’ tan cased dinosaurs.

      The gray Dell helped me through many-a “100 Games!” disc…

    • NotSteve_@lemmy.ca
      2·
      3 days ago

      This was the first desktop I used with a big ol’ chunky CRT. I played around installing so many different windows XP themes

    • f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      I maintain dozens of the black & silver Optiplexes, they’re used in Raw Thrills arcade games like The Fast and the Furious, Big Buck Hunter Pro, Guitar Hero Arcade… They are workhorses; usually clean it and recap the power supply (which are kind of a bitch to disassemble) and they’re good for another few years.

      I still run into the blue/grey ones like your picture, but not in use. Usually stored in the basement of a bar.

      My personal collection includes a couple of first-generation Optiplexes, the beige GX1. Dell is a bigger part of my life than I ever imagined or hoped. 😅

  • voodooattack@lemmy.world
    10·
    3 days ago

    Old enough to remember using a 3½” floppy disk to boot my first PC and mess around with GW/Q-BASIC and play DOS games.

    The disks were strongly perfumed (I guess the guy I bought my pirated games from liked to do that for some reason), and I still remember that aroma.

  • SuperApples@lemmy.world
    7·
    2 days ago

    Pre-home internet I remember running a line-in to my soundblaster card from a clock radio and recording Tool’s Sober to my HDD.

    The wav file took up a good chunk of the HDD. After a good amount of funking around with encoding it was barely comprehensible and still took up too much room. Was exciting and felt like a glimpse of the future.