I’m 27 years old. I was just talking to a buddy of mine today about the old school computer technologies that we used to have while growing up. Some of the stuff is straight up hilarious. Here’s what we used to have.
The original Juno email program. A dedicated program for email, it would dial directly into a juno phone number using the modem, to send and receive email only.
The original Netzero internet. It used to be free dial up Internet, but the catch was that you had to look at a banner ad while browsing the internet. There used to be a hack program out there that would eliminate the banner. I used this service for a couple years at least.
Computer City. I remember going in here when it first opened on eggert road in tonawanda. It was the first place to have any computer equipment in the area. I remember my father and I racing in there to get a 28.8kbps modem for $90 because it was on sale. Then the tech pushing my father to have them install the modem for $50 because most people could not do it. (PCI Modem).
Also, when my parents were broke, before we got our first computer, my parents bought me a brother word processor because they couldn’t afford a computer. I was heartbroken at getting a typewriter under the tree (probably a $300 one)… The brother actually saved files on to a 3.5’’ floppy disc.
Finally, we had this weird thing that attached itself to a Nintendo console system. If anyone can tell me the name of this, please share it.
I’m not sure if it was for Nintendo or the Sega Genesis. It used to plug directly into the system, then the cartridge would plug into it. It had a modem inside it, and you would actually plug the phone line into the system.
You could play your games against people around the country. The only problem was that hardly anyone in Buffalo had it. It would make long distance calls across the country. My parents got extremely pissed at me when they had calls to Texas for an hour on their phone bill.
I remember buying the item at Toys R Us at a steep discount, and I remember returning it later that month at the request of my father.
my first computer was made by Canon and came fully equipped with Windows 3.11. MS dos was still very functional. Technology has come a long long way in a relatively short period of time, that’s for sure.
I first got started on an IBM i think it was. It was my old man’s computer, running Windows 3.1 I think. I was pretty young but I felt so accomplished when I found the command to boot windows from dos.
My first computer was the size of my washing machine. It had dos or some old ass equivalent. It dialed up on a 14.4 modem to a bbs system that was all text based. It hooked to a dot matrix printer as sid the next three computers that we owned after that. The screen was black and green and somewhere around 9-10 inches.
My first cell phone was the zach morris phone followed by the moto startac. I had a hands free system in my car for the star tac, and I was the only ass hole in my high school that had a cell phone. My dad had a briefcase that was a phone with a cord and had a huge antenna to make it work. It took longer to open and set up than you would even be on the phone.
Lmao I remember this.
we always had to turn off turbo when my brother and I would play Scorched Earth.
When I was little, maybe 4…? or 5ish, my dad would always do stupid shit, like be in DOS… and say he forgot how to do something, so then I would be like oohh I know, you gotta do this!
Even though he knew damn well what he was doing, just wanted to see if I knew.
Tradewars 2002. (via telnet/netterm)
BBS games (LORD and ^^)
Descent.
Dune 2.
Kali. (I have one of the lowest serials for Kali still, actually. Not that I ever use it anymore
Duke3D… Shake it baby! (I was like fucking 7-8, lol. I thought the tits looked like olives complete with pimentos)
Nibbles.
Gorillas.
VBasic.
Used to play Rainbow Six hours on end… playing league games endlessly on Mplayer (Mlagger, Mgheyer, etc…).
Still have our 9.6k modems and shit laying around.
Also still have the badass 72mb HDDs and shit.
sweet yo.
aside from the old C64 and Atari 400, my first PC was an IBM compatible 80286 12.0 Mhz with a 40 megabyte hard drive. Yeah baby! That thing rocked… at the time. 1200 baud modem FTW
My first computer was a 486DX 33mhz with a turbo button. I thought it was bad ass my parents got us a DX instead of the SX. It had 4mg RAM so it was actually pretty fast for its day and I think ~120mg HD. The next year we had to choose, $200 for a color printer or another 4mg RAM. We chose RAM, crazy that 4mg cost $200. Had a 2400 baud external modem too.
Games I remember:
Wolfenstien
Corridor 7
Duke Nukem 3D
Doom 1 and 2
Myst
Lemmings
Scorched Earth
My dad had a magnavox pc. With turbo activated, it was 4MHz. and RAM was $100/MB.
It had 2 or 3 IIRC. It rand a DOS shell that looked like windows explorer.
Used to play wolfenstien with it.
I also still remember turning in hand written school reports.
I did get an OG screenname though, JoeX.