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.
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Desqview, swapping between GoldEd and the BBS watching the users playing LoRD and other games. And before that, scrambling to quit my game and get the BBS back up when I was using my 286 for gaming instead of leaving the BBS running.
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Those terrible, terrible CGA games that I played because for a couple years, I only had CGA and no EGA. The high pitched whine of the CGA monitor whenever I stood behind it.
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When I finally got OS/2, and could play Descent or Doom, while the BBS was handling a phone call in the background.
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Even older, printing out yet another Bill the Cat on my dot matrix printer.
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Typing in games from Compute Magazine into my Atari 130xe, but the checksum being wrong because I used abbreviated basic commands due to being a lazy typist.
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Getting killed by that darn Terminator in Zone 2 of LOD again…
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Going to my Uncle’s house to transfer all of Kings Quest 6 from 1.44mb to 1.2mb floppies.
For me as a kid growing up in the 80s, it’s absolutely walking into Radio Shack (my favorite place in the mall next to the arcade!) and seeing a TRE-80 Model II set up for demo.
Kind of intresting as I think about it that I ended up not going for a Tandy computer and instead bought an Atari ;) No regrets. I still adore my 800XL!
Copying code out of a magazine to put into debug.com to run
Flipping 5.25 disks over on Apple II since their drives weren’t dual-sided
If you don’t like vi, you should try edlin
Pressing the “interrupt” button on Mac classics and feeling like a hacker
Hey that sounds like only about 19.2k not 28.8!
X/y/zmodem wars
Lots
Oh MAN those magazine listings!
I remember my mom, bless her, reading them to me so I could type the bloody things in becauase, being partially blind, I couldn’t get the bloody page close enough to my face to properly read the infinite lines of DATA statements :)
And then, years later, they finally came out with checksum programs so you could see a number at the end of each line and compare it with what was in the magazine.
Crazy to think back, innit? :)
Loading games from big floppy disks, hearing the CLINK CLUNK CLUNK WRRRRR noises, on the BBC Micro computers at school in the early 90s. There were boxes of awesome games like Chuckie egg that we had to work out how to load during lunch breaks.
Then getting our first home computer with win 3.11 which was a huge deal then
A couple:
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CRC Errors when restoring 9-track tapes (the large reels) on a mini at work.
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A manager not knowing a removable 256meg Disk Pack suffered a heard crash. So he mounted it on 4 or 5 production drives, destroying the hardware. He did this to test if the Disk pack was OK. This caused almost a month of agony while we went looking for hardware to replace the drives. This caused manufacturing to slow down since inventory could not be ordered.
I can almost laugh now :)
