I remember my dad bringing home a BBC Micro when we were kids. I knew just enough to get Chuckie Egg running.
Later we had a PC running Windows 3.1. I was an expert in crashing the plane on F-19 Stealth Fighter. One day I deleted the OS and that was the end of that computer…
Some years later we got an old Elonex PC that dad’s work were getting rid of. It was just good enough to run Windows 95. We had dial-up internet from Freeserve for a time - we would have I think 2 hours in the evening to use it.
I remember
- Trying and failing to download shitty quality videos from wwf.com (I was a huge Attitude-era Wrestling mark...)
- Playing questionable games on Newgrounds
- Trawling Yahoo directories and webrings for random weird stuff
- Trying to download a low-bitrate rip of the Macarena from Kazaa and giving up when it estimated 2 days DL time.
- Terrible browser-war era websites. Broken Javascript/HTML. BLINKING TEXT. Incompatible flash videos.
I broke our family computers so often that I knew the Windows licence key without having to look. I learned how to fix the computer out of sheer terror for what my dad might do if he came home from work to find the PC broken again.
After we got rid of the dialup I would go the library pretty much every day. I had literally boxes of floppy disks that I would stuff into my pockets so that I could download stuff to take home. Mostly old emulators, ROMs and text adventures from ifarchive.
Crazy to think the lengths I would happily go to for things we take for granted now.
Sitting there watching with satisfaction as MSDOS 6.22 DEFRAG.EXE did its thing.
Modem noises.
Reading computer magazines and books, and eagerly anticipating getting my hands on such material. Today’s kids born in an online era of infinite content just can’t imagine how difficult it was back them to get technical publications and information, printed or otherwise.
To play with fractals or cellular automata in the 80s, you read a description in Scientific American, and then wrote your own version at home. Good times.
Indeed! Computer Recreations was the absolute best. I remember implementing an algorithm from this that displayed 3d projections of a 4d rotating hypercube; then extending it to support red/blue cellophane 3d glasses (or as best as possible with a 16 colour pallette). So much fun and learnt so much!
So much this!
I remember having to order tech books from Waldenbooks, and getting blank stares from the clerk, who’d basically tell me they were never going to actually receive it after I’d waited WEEKS.
Then I finally got to visit QuantumBooks, a technical bookstore in Kendall Square Cambridge, and it was like going to heaven :)
You are in a twisty maze of passages all alike.
I don’t know if it’s just me but did anyone ever actually complete those games? I might have just about finished Zork one time years later but for all the games I started that was about it. Good times though. Scott Adams will always be a hero of mine
Of course. I’ve played a number of them, although Zork quickly showed its age (in terms of game design) compared to later text games.
To be fair I would expect someone with a user name such as your to have played your fair share of them. I would usually get frustrated when my graph paper maps stopped making sense… Likely a ‘me’ problem I think
In 8th (?) grade our larval computing lab was a row of Commodore 64 but there was only one 5.25" floppy drive between them. When you wanted to save or load your proglet you had to
- walk over to insert your floppy
- return to your seat to do your load/save
- walk back over to retrieve your floppy to free up the drive for someone else
At some point I realized that while the owner was walking back and forth you could load their code to see how they approached the assignment. And doing so did not affect their workflow or anyone else at all. It felt like the earth shifted a bit at that moment.
