Harryd91
@Harryd91@lemm.ee
- Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? 1 year ago:
I actually love vi to this day. As long as you understand the basic concepts (how to navigate, append/insert, switch between modes, save and exit) it’s great. I’m a touch-typer so I could whiz around vi like nobody’s business.
HATED Emacs though
- Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? 1 year ago:
I had similar problems with BASIC type-ins and would not eat, drink or sleep until I had figured out the problem. Trying to do the same with assembly would have killed me
- Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? 1 year ago:
All unlabelled, with a bunch of corrupted ones but you never threw the bad ones out just in case it was a one off and you really need that extra megabyte? Or was that just me?
- Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? 1 year ago:
Another thing - my windows 95 era PC was packed to the gills with bad desktop themes. Usually South Park related with annoying soundclips that played whenever you did something. Obnoxious mouse cursors and wallpapers that hurt the eyes.
I was upset when everything moved to ATX and computers powered off by themselves because I didn’t get to see the modded ‘It Is Now Safe To Turn Off Your Computer’ screen that came with the themes
- Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? 1 year ago:
Config.sys and autoexec.bat were a dark art! I think I still have an old 486 somewhere with system commander installed.
- Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? 1 year ago:
I didn’t even realise Mortal Kombat was available on those 2 platforms! My friend’s dad sold me 2 A500s, an A500+ and a crate of cracked floppies for £20 back in the early 2000s when they were out of favour. I hunted down a null-modem cable so I could copy ADFs over from the PC,. Played a lot of Premier Manager on those, and reading old disk magazines. But mostly my memories are of guru meditation errors, cleaning the dust from the mouseball and contending with dodgy floppy disks / drives.
- Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? 1 year ago:
I remember installing either Red Hat or Mandriva linux years ago and being in absolute disbelief that it was free. I went straight back to Windows when I realised i couldn’t play my games anymore and it crashed all the time but it was still phenomenal.
I never had a voodoo and my old AMD CPU + ATI card could never manage to run glide wrappers properly I don’t think. Super jealous of voodoo owners. I remember drooling over the old magazine ads they used to publish
- Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? 1 year ago:
I had an obsession with the LucasArts adventures. I hunted down copies of just about all of them when I was younger. Monkey Island being my all time favourite. Was nice that they didn’t kill you off at every opportunity like the Sierra games did.
Shareware games were crazy. I had a CD compilation of called ‘250 bat and ball games’ with clone after clone of breakout/arkanoid and nothing else. What a time to be alive
- Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? 1 year ago:
The most fun you could possibly have short of watching paint dry!
- Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? 1 year ago:
I remember we had a copy of the game Trolls, but didn’t know the password to run it. Never deterred me from spending hours typing random words in trying to guess it.
We had Lemmings and Prince of Persia too actually. I sank a ton of time into those
- Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? 1 year ago:
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
- Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? 1 year ago:
Didn’t have Repton but had something similar on an old PS1 Net Yarose compilation (demo 42 from the UK Playstation magazine). Game was called Rocks and Gems. Good times!
- Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days? 1 year ago:
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
- Submitted 1 year ago to retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org | 52 comments
- Comment on [META] What are the demographics of this community? 1 year ago:
Millennial. But we had Granny’s Garden running on an Acorn Archidedes in our country rather than Oregon Trail. I was a kid in the 90s
- Comment on Are Internet boards and Forums dead 1 year ago:
Not dead but definitely on life support. I really do miss old forums. Reddit / Discord / Fediverse don’t come close to the old community feel. Facebook groups aren’t so bad sometimes for that but then the content is organised terribly. Say what you will about forum search engines but I could always rely on being able to enter a keyword or two and get what I was looking for.
A lot of forums I frequented were actually pretty well organised with subforums. It just isn’t the same these days.
Also web forums were the absolute best for petty drama. I do miss that in a weird way. Always that one angry gatekeeper flaming everyone.