'Ye Old Computing Machines

Fukuyama

Anyone ever have nostalgia for the computers of days gone by?

It seems like yesterday I was listening to my friends dad's old Windows 95 PC click click click as it booted up so we could look at porn for the first time. (Went well - printed off hefty amounts of it to sell on the playground market at school ).

Also, floppy disks. Everytime you go to save a Word document or whatever you have to click on a floppy disk yet I doubt younger people (keep in mind I'm only 19) would have a clue what it is!

And VHS tapes... I remember the excitement of pushing one into the player and the disappointment when you realised you had to rewind it ALL the way back!!

Sometimes I'm watching a movie from the 90s or whenever and I go 'Oh yeah! Remember that!!"



Anyone else ever miss old technology.

Naikon

Dial Up.

El Weirdo

Sharp MZ700 FTW.

KeithM89_old

Wikipedia has nothing on Encarta.

stupidusername

Dean0088 wrote: »

I remember the excitement of pushing one into the player and the disappointment

...eh eh? :pac:

You'd appreciate it more if you realise the effort it took to do that on my phone

Atavan-Halen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

mr kr0nik

oric 48k. no more to be said

dvpower

KeithM89 wrote: »

Wikipedia has nothing on Encarta.

Yes it does :pac:

melekalikimaka

KeithM89 wrote: »

Wikipedia has nothing on Encarta.

Webster man myself

Vicxas

I remember when the computer used to tell you it was safe to shut off. ah bless.

Mr. Denton

atavan-halen wrote: »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

♫ Hey Com-puter nerd, you will be connected in no time. ♫

AnonoBoy

I remember when a floppy disk was just that - floppy.

51/4" disks for the Apple II.

And your monitor had one colour - green. That was it.

Yeah!

latenia

25 years on I've yet to hear better game music than Robocop on the cpc464

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCDf6p0OAj8

nibtrix

pfft, floppy disks... We had to load from a casette tape, it took twenty minutes and every time you died in the game you had to rewind back to the beginning and load all over again. Those were the days...

Mr Benevolent

Ah the funny loading screen for the C64.

It was shit.

AnonoBoy

nibtrix wrote: »

pfft, floppy disks... We had to load from a casette tape, it took twenty minutes and every time you died in the game you had to rewind back to the beginning and load all over again. Those were the days...

Cassette tape?

You were lucky to have it.

We had to input data using punch cards and we had no monitor only print out from dot matrix printer to let us know we were standing in a clearing, to the north was a river, to the south was a road.

El Weirdo

Confab wrote: »

Ah the funny loading screen for the C64.

It was shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GqXXLSfT7g

Krusader

Listening to the radio with a blank tape in the cassette with your finger hovering over the record button, waiting for your favourite song at the time to come on, it did, you banged on the REC button and 10 seconds in the DJ would talk over the track, used to fúcking hate that, piracy was a game of chance for the perfect recording

AnonoBoy

Crosáidí wrote: »

Listening to the radio with a blank tape in the cassette with your finger hovering over the record button, waiting for your favourite song at the time to come on, it did, you banged on the REC button and 10 seconds in the DJ would talk over the track, used to fúcking hate that, piracy was a game of chance for the perfect recording

Did you ever play a data cassette in your stereo?

I used to love that squeal.

strokemyclover

I remember programming games on the Atari 800XL - you'd spend days typing in hundreds of lines of code from a book which meant nothing to an 8 year old only to find the game was a piss poor line representing a snake who'd chase dots on the screen and grow larger each time it ate them .....For that time and effort at that age and time I thought I was creating a new TRON world FFS! :mad:

Disappointing computing at it's best!

syklops

I wish we could go back to the days of having to input init strings to set up your modem. It was a kind of initiation test(get it?). If you got it wrong or couldnt figure it out, then you were just too stupid to use the internet. A happier time.

I miss web crawler, it was the search engine I first used. No matter what you search for, you got the dead porn stars website somewhere in the results.

I was watching a video from a conference recently(I think it was Def Con), and a guy mentioned floppy disks. He said "To anyone in the room under the age of 20, a floppy disk is like a USB memory stick only flatter, and you need about 27 of them to install Windows 95."

Back in my day there were no ads on the internet. Only porn and warez.

ejmaztec

Whatever happened to Wordstar?

An old boss of mine paid £400 for the program, and the last time I saw it for sale, it was £9.99 full price.

TouchingVirus

AnonoBoy wrote: »

I remember when a floppy disk was just that - floppy.

51/4" disks for the Apple II.

And your monitor had one colour - green. That was it.

Yeah!

We had yellow

Mr. Denton

I have a dedicated PC that runs emulators for all the old 8bit , 16bit and arcade machine games. A lot of them are rubbish by todays standards but at least they load instantaneously now

Agricola

Learned to use MS Word on a rickety old pc in school in the mid-90's. I remember making sure to carefully save whatever auld claptrap our computing / religion teacher had us typing up. Then we'd all make our way to the big steel cabinet at the end of class to place our precious floppy disks in there for safe keeping untill the following week. It was all so strange and new. Like we were working at NASA for 1 hour a week!

Kids these days with their pendrives the size of postage stamps and their cloud storage, dont know they're born!

seaniemoylan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6u7PFUi2Ic&feature=related :cool:

Mint Sauce

Erm. Dont you still click on the floppy disk to save word documents.

Krusader

AnonoBoy wrote: »

Did you ever play a data cassette in your stereo?

I used to love that squeal.

I had an Amstrad that played big fúcking cartridges, they cost 'bout £15-£20 which was a lot of money at the time. My mates had Commodore 64s the games were cassettes and only cost around £3, always hated that

Krusader

Netscape was the browser to use

InTheTrees

AnonoBoy wrote: »

Cassette tape?

You were lucky to have it.

We had to input data using punch cards

Punch cards? You were lucky. We had to prepare sheets of vellum and inscribe our code using exotic inks...

:rolleyes:

InTheTrees

Crosáidí wrote: »

Netscape was the browser to use

mosiac ftw

:cool:

ScumLord

I remember playing labyrinth on the BBC micro and making my own games. Then accidentally deleting the game I spent weeks typing out and not playing any games until the super Nintendo and windows came out.

chin_grin

Crosáidí wrote: »

Listening to the radio with a blank tape in the cassette with your finger hovering over the record button, waiting for your favourite song at the time to come on, it did, you banged on the REC button and 10 seconds in the DJ would talk over the track, used to fúcking hate that, piracy was a game of chance for the perfect recording

Tommy Tiernan wants his joke back................:pac:

AgileMyth

irish-stew wrote: »

Erm. Dont you still click on the floppy disk to save word documents.

You do. But people under a certain age wouldn't know what it is. We see a floppy disk represtenting the save symbol whilst they only see the save symbol.

stimpson

Anyone remember Tomorrows World in the ILAC centre?

The most fun you could have as a 10 year old was going in there and typing:

10 PRINT "boobies"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

And then you would run. Ahhh memories...I remember Google when it was all fields.

El Weirdo

El Weirdo wrote: »

Sharp MZ700 FTW.

I had one of them - ended up soldering wires between it and a crappy casio keyboard to make the worlds most pathetic drum machine:
* 4 drum "sounds"
* dreadful timing
* often misfired
* sequence program (loaded from tape) accepted four strings of 1s and 0s representing ons and offs for the different drum sounds

Happy days...

stimpson

InTheTrees wrote: »

Punch cards? You were lucky. We had to prepare sheets of vellum and inscribe our code using exotic inks...

:rolleyes:

Luxury. We had to write all our code using ones and zeros. And during the war there was a shortage of zeros and I had to write an entire operating system using just ones.

Krusader

chin_grin wrote: »

Tommy Tiernan wants his joke back................:pac:

Didn't know he had that in his routine, was just a life observation, that the majority of people can relate towards

mudokon

nibtrix wrote: »

pfft, floppy disks... We had to load from a casette tape, it took twenty minutes and every time you died in the game you had to rewind back to the beginning and load all over again. Those were the days...

And you had to put up with this noise while it was loading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlsDmALohQQ

My name is URL

I had an Amstrad 464plus.. used to spend days on end typing thousands of lines of BASIC so I could play games.. worked about 1% of the time.

Still miss it though

7sr2z3fely84g5

Videotapes-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhOb7SogssE

DWCommuter

stimpson wrote: »

Anyone remember Tomorrows World in the ILAC centre?

The most fun you could have as a 10 year old was going in there and typing:

10 PRINT "boobies"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

And then you would run. Ahhh memories...I remember Google when it was all fields.

Ahh yes. Used to hit the branch in Dawson street. The Oric was on display. Had to be circa '85. All that typing to make the computer go "beep". I thought I was in an episode of ****ing Star Trek.

DWCommuter

mudokon wrote: »

And you had to put up with this noise while it was loading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlsDmALohQQ

Arcade version of Out Run was epic.

Daith

Modifying autoexec.bat to get Monkey Island to work

InTheTrees

Daith wrote: »

Modifying autoexec.bat to get Monkey Island to work

LOL

It seemed like once you knew how to mess with the Autoexec.bat and the Config.sys, you could do almost anything..

Show Time

nibtrix wrote: »

pfft, floppy disks... We had to load from a casette tape, it took twenty minutes and every time you died in the game you had to rewind back to the beginning and load all over again. Those were the days...

Or get fed up tem minutes into the loading and go out and play football.

Unpossible

I used to hate it when the new cogs were not the exact size to the millimeter, Mr Babbage would get angry and call us ignorant commoners.

Irish_Elect_Eng

Unpossible wrote: »

I used to hate it when the new cogs were not the exact size to the millimeter, Mr Babbage would get angry and call us ignorant commoners.

Difference Engine Rocks

ednwireland

my godson (13) was delighted to play a 1st gen gameboy recently
he had only seen one in a museum

i feel old

BrianD3

I remember collecting caps from Fairy Liquid bottles to help my primary school get an Apple Mac. It was a promotion by Proctor & Gamble who make washing up liquid, toothpaste, washing powder etc. You collected evidence of having purchased their products and after what seemed like ages they'd give you a computer. Big excitement in the school when it arrived.

This would have been late 80s. I seem to remember something similar happening in secondary school in the early 90s but I think it was shop receipts rather than fairy liquid and toothpaste caps that needed to be collected.

Eric Cartman

ednwireland wrote: »

my godson (13) was delighted to play a 1st gen gameboy recently
he had only seen one in a museum

i feel old

I had one of those , i feel old now too

the joys these new kids will never know

14.4k modems that were a big metal slate made by US robotics.
5.25 and 3.5 inch floppy disks , including that really reasuring click when you turned the handle on the 5.25" drive to lock the disk in
QBASIC and other BASIC programming systems
hypercard
COBOL (i still have cobol sheets in a book , you used to send them to IBM to be encoded on cards i think)
Zip Drives - how 100mb on a disk was unimaginable
MO (Magneto optical) drives - most people will never have seen these
LS120 - A 120mb floppy disk standard that was optical inside a floppy case , it was madness
when UPC was called CableLink
ISDN being considered fast internet
Dot Matrix Printers