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.
Oh, lots. One that comes to mind is my surprise and joy when my mom brought home Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken. They had just been released. Until then I had mainly played shareware games like the original Star Trek game (that had you shooting Klingons in a top-down grid) and Captain Comic.
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
I remember using QEMM for the first time and finally being able to load games and applications that would otherwise not work.
I remember having to fiddle with IRQ settings to get sound working.
I remember the C64 emulator and finally being able to play Ultima 4 without having to constantly switch disks.
I remember the experimental OS and hardware explosions: QNX (still alive as an automotive OS), BeOS, MenuetOS, Transmeta Crusoe.
The Voodoo graphics cards!
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
Trying to fly in Chuck Yeager’s Flight Simulator and not experience vertigo 🫠.
