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.
ATM0 so you don"t wake your parents while youre dialing in somewhere
Back when custom ringtones were a thing and people still called each other frequently I used to have that as my ringtone.
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' screens that came with the themes
Don’t even breathe near it until the hard drive is parked!!
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.
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 :)
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.
Trying to fly in Chuck Yeager's Flight Simulator and not experience vertigo 🫠.
Two big ones. I bought the VIC-20 shortly after introduction when I was 21.
Big memory 1: writing machine language programs without the aid of an assembler. I couldn't afford the assembler cartridge, but I wanted to break out of the BASIC sandbox.
Big memory 2: finding a military surplus acoustic coupler modem and using the schematics to make my own connector, then writing a terminal program so I could dial in to these crazy things called BBSs.
The #1 defining moment for me has to be Second Reality by Future Crew. We got it an a local BBS not too long after it was released. It was kind of like the birth of a new era, like "ahh so this is what PCs are actually capable of".
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
Typing in a 6809 assembly program from 5 issues of a Dragon 32 magazine and having it do absolutely nothing when I executed it.
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
Got my first PC when I was ~8 in the 90s. My dad explicitly told me not to touch the 110v-220v switch on the back of the PSU. It didn't take long :)
Making my own boot discs and fucking with a balancing act of EMS/XMS virtual memory to get Descent and Ultima 7 to work on my 386.
Config.sys and autoexec.bat were a dark art! I think I still have an old 486 somewhere with system commander installed.
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? :)
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
I grew up pretty poor. When I was a kid my dad brought home a pentium 2 that didn't work. He picked it out of the garbage, told me I could have it, but that it didn't work.
We often rode the bus to school. We would get off at school and my parents would get off at work. And then we would meet them on the bus on the way home.
After getting the computer we started stopping off at the library, so I could check out books about computers. I would take them home and start reading. (I was illiterate until I was 10 years old, and this really kicked off my reading ability, to this day I still read 100-120 books per year)
Over time I was able to figure out enough to diagnose the issue (bad PSU and bad HDD), garbage pick replacements, and then install DOS from floppy I got from school.
From there I started picking up as many parts and computers as I could and filling my corner of our studio apartment with parts. I loved writing text files and documenting what I was doing, like a little knowledgebase of what I was figuring out. Eventually, we got evicted, and due to having to live in our car for a couple of years I had to give up my computer. Left it out in the curb. Ever since, I have been obsessed with terminal based interfaces and to this day almost exclusively use terminal.
