This was cutting edge tech… I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs…

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    95·
    27 days ago

    I’m exactly that old.

    Edit: The PC in the image is a bit anachronistic. This is the workhorse we’re all thinking of:

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
        20·
        27 days ago

        I had an Optipex from that era too. It was “horizontal” but could also stand vertically. It was the business model.

        This one, but beige:

        The image is the Precision Dimension model which was the consumer version of it.

        • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          27 days ago

          You’re real close to the “capacitor of death” models there. GX270s failed like a motherfucker.

          • oleorunAEnglish
            6·
            27 days ago

            We could swap those boards out and in like a fucking NASCAR pit crew.

            • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              27 days ago

              Between the capacitor plague and the tin whiskers from the phaseout of lead, hardware from that era failed constantly.

              • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
                1·
                27 days ago

                We somehow avoided that, luckily.

                I had the pleasure of getting sold a cheap power supply though. It was rather fascinating to learn that, indeed, even burning hardware can still provide sufficient power to play games (for a few seconds).

        • BakerBagel@midwest.social
          4·
          27 days ago

          We use to flip the light gray flap all shift in computer lab in middle school. When we got bored with that, we figured out how to pop out the Dell logo and flip it upside down

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      6·
      27 days ago

      That or the ol’ tan cased dinosaurs.

      The gray Dell helped me through many-a “100 Games!” disc…

    • FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
      5·
      27 days ago

      Dell Dimension 2400. My family had the entry level model, and it still absolutely destroyed every prior computer we’d had performance-wise

    • f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      27 days ago

      I maintain dozens of the black & silver Optiplexes, they’re used in Raw Thrills arcade games like The Fast and the Furious, Big Buck Hunter Pro, Guitar Hero Arcade… They are workhorses; usually clean it and recap the power supply (which are kind of a bitch to disassemble) and they’re good for another few years.

      I still run into the blue/grey ones like your picture, but not in use. Usually stored in the basement of a bar.

      My personal collection includes a couple of first-generation Optiplexes, the beige GX1. Dell is a bigger part of my life than I ever imagined or hoped. 😅

    • NotSteve_@lemmy.ca
      2·
      27 days ago

      This was the first desktop I used with a big ol’ chunky CRT. I played around installing so many different windows XP themes

    • D_C@lemm.ee
      261·
      27 days ago

      Wooo, look at hoity toity FancyPants over here with their screwdriver. All we could afford to fix our cassette tapes was a pencil. And a blunt pencil at that. And it was probably stolen from school!! Screwdrivers indeed!

      • hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
        321·
        27 days ago

        The screwdriver is not for the tape. It’s for adjusting the audio head so it can pick up the data on the tape.

        When someone gave you a tape with some nice games on it there was a near 100% chance you needed to adjust your datasette to read them.

        • Treczoks@lemmy.world
          10·
          27 days ago

          Exactly. On the long run, we settled down on what we called a common calibration, a setting that allowed all of us locals to exchange tapes without constant tweaking.

        • Rose@slrpnk.net
          6·
          27 days ago

          The tape drive has a hole on the top for adjusting the azimuth, but one of my friends basically just removed the top cover entirely for easier access to the screw. I did that too for some particularly tricky tapes.

          Another of my friends had basically an unearthly knack of adjusting this stuff. Dude would just walk up to the tape drive, masterfully tweak the screw for a second, and it’d work. Which makes no sense.

          This was all a kind of mysterious part of the Commodore 64 culture to me. Because I had a floppy drive and that’s what I obviously preferred to use.

          • hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
            1·
            26 days ago

            Dude would just walk up to the tape drive, masterfully tweak the screw for a second, and it’d work.

            Me too! For some reason I was the only guy in school who could do that. Fun times. 😊

            Because I had a floppy drive and that’s what I obviously preferred to use.

            In the beginning these were not available. Also I remember them costing the same as the C64 itself. As soon as I could afford one I got one obviously.

            I just another item that could a generational riddle: the hole-punch that made your one-sided floppy two-sided.

            • Rose@slrpnk.net
              1·
              26 days ago

              In the beginning these were not available. Also I remember them costing the same as the C64 itself. As soon as I could afford one I got one obviously.

              I guess I was lucky. My parents got me my first Commodore 64 C second hand, and it included the floppy drive. Guess it was affordable that way.

              I just another item that could a generational riddle: the hole-punch that made your one-sided floppy two-sided.

              Ooh, I didn’t have one of those fancy pieces of gear! I lived in a small town. Used to see disk notchers at the book/stationery store, which had the reputation of being slightly pricy place but was the only store in town that had computer stuff at the time.

              Instead, I figured out a way to cleanly cut the notch using scissors. Two horizontal cuts, then two cross cuts, then carefully cut out the remainder.

          • hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
            1·
            25 days ago

            A flathead is still a screwdriver, is it not?

            It was a Philips screw IIRC. You can also use a flathead screwdriver on them but you shouldn’t IMHO.

            • Farid@startrek.website
              1·
              26 days ago

              Then I misunderstood and was thinking of a different adjustment of the head. The one I was thinking about us when you wedge the screwdriver behind the head and bend it otwards a little for better contact. For that you need a flat tool.

      • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.caEnglish
        113·
        27 days ago

        I mean, they are half right. The music industry is eating itself. Back catalog is outperforming new releases year after year because new music is dead.

        • Thassodar@lemm.eeEnglish
          6·
          27 days ago

          Hi! I’m a musician with new music that is not dead! Check it out: www.thassodar.com

          Bonus: 99% of them are instrumental, and the ones that aren’t don’t have any actual lyrics and are only on SoundCloud.

        • Vespair@lemm.ee
          5·
          27 days ago

          New music is thriving. There is more music of almost every style and genre imaginable being released today than ever before. What’s dead is traditional music distribution channels and marketing avenues like radio, and the popular means of promoting music now reward the most dogshit meme-able content. But if you seek out music yourself, the modern era is a paradise of incredible music; don’t blame music itself for the failures of the industry to reward good within it.

          • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.caEnglish
            15·
            26 days ago

            New music is surviving. Of course it will survive. Music is an expression of our humanity.

            Thriving? I think not. When was the last time you went to a bar and people just starting singing and playing folk music? When was the last time you even heard of that happening? Once it wasn’t weird, it was normal.

            Music is dead because it has been elevated to something that is performed by the few and consumed by the many, instead of something that we all live together.

            • Vespair@lemm.ee
              3·
              26 days ago

              “Haute cuisine is dead! When was the last time you walked into a restaurant and saw aspic on the menu? When was the last time you heard of somebody serving aspic? Once aspics weren’t weird, they were the hottest fashion!”

              ^ That’s you.

              Trying to define the relevancy and lifeline of music as a whole based on the popularity of pub folk music is crazy.

              More people are making music today than ever before, as barriers monetary, technological, and knowledge-based only continue to lower with time. I have no idea how you’ve managed to draw the opposite conclusion.

        • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.netEnglish
          4·
          26 days ago

          New music is doing fantastic, it’s record companies that are dying. Most artists just self-publish these days.

      • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        27 days ago

        Those of us who can remember used those to save programs. It could take an hour or more if you had a large enough tape save a single file.

      • klu9@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        26 days ago

        A lot of people did: home, portable, car. But a lot of people had also left them behind for ordinary CDs, CDs full of MP3s and dedicated MP3 players like Rios and iPods.

      • devfuuu@lemmy.world
        9·
        27 days ago

        And rmvb files were all the rage. Those sweet video files with only 32MB… Peak compression. What the world was before h264 and before youtube existed was amazing.

          • devfuuu@lemmy.world
            4·
            26 days ago

            Ohhh yeah, the golden age, xvid, divx, mp3, wmv, rmvb, quicktime videos, installing codec packs in windows…

            I have a cd somewhere with the second matrix movie in 2 parts with a shitty resolution full of pixels and barely able to see with a magnifying glass, but watched it like that.

        • BenLeMan@lemmy.world
          2·
          25 days ago

          Bink videos were the hot shit for games for a while, and RAD Game Tools started a whole era of standardization for multimedia processes that culminated in DirectX. With computing power increasing along with the market share of PCs, using standardized libraries for audio & video drivers became the sensible thing to do. Previously you had games programmers eking out every iota of performance by fine tuning that stuff at an assembly level (the Origin games with their memory managers and Chris Sawyer’s amazing if kind of insane feat in creating Transport Tycoon come to mind).

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        3·
        27 days ago

        My computer’s mobo was so shitty, it played .midi files badly. I was shocked when I went to a mate’s and the same midis sounded like the song they’re actually supposed to be.

          • theangryseal@lemmy.world
            2·
            26 days ago

            I put mine in a .zip file and renamed the file extension to .dll and stuck it in the system32 folder haha. Hide file extensions when done and make the file hidden. Blammo!

    • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
      11·
      27 days ago

      Yeah, I was going to bring up Turbo buttons, but then realised that the Commodore Vic 20 in my bedroom predates that by quite some margin 😇

      • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        2·
        26 days ago

        Vic 20 -> C=64 -> few 386/486 units -> AMD K6-2 and a ton of stuff after that. And maybe something in between.

        And now I’m writing this in my garage computer which I picked up from a e-waste pile at work few years back and it has more computing power than pretty much all the systems combined I had before being 18 years old. And when we (as a family) got our first “mobile” phone it was hardwired to a car electronics since they took ‘a bit’ more power than the supercomputers we carry in our pockets today (obviously Li-ion batteries were not a thing either, but that old Motorola NMT450 took a crapload of power by todays standards).

        It’s been a wild ride so far. My grandparents were on top of the technology when they got the first landline phone around the neighborhood (I’m living in a rural area so it was not a new invention back then by any stretch) and now I can just yell to a entity in my palm to show me pictures from another planet or a high definition live video from Earth orbit.

        And still I’m somehow trying to teach basic tehcnology concepts to both my parents and my kids. It’s bizarre to try and explain about benefits of touch typing to a 16 year old who thinks it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to type out an essay at school containing 2000 words in an hour (33wpm)…

  • Ken Oh@lemm.ee
    31·
    27 days ago

    Remember how when you would burn a CD you couldn’t use your computer lest the write buffer dropped too low and the burn world fail?

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
      15·
      27 days ago

      I remember buying a stack of CDs only to find out they were +R, not -R, and this utterly useless (or something like that, can’t specifically recall whether ±R/RW).

      • theangryseal@lemmy.world
        13·
        27 days ago

        I remember this being a DVD thing. By the time I got a dvd burner though mine supported both.

        The RW issue with CDs was that a lot of older players couldn’t read them.

        • PlasticExistence@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          27 days ago

          I damaged the laser on a PS2 by using a DVD-RW. They’re harder to read than a normal disc apparently, so it wore the laser down pretty quick

          • theangryseal@lemmy.world
            3·
            26 days ago

            Can you believe my original ps1 is still rocking hard with zero adjustments?

            My ps2 is currently dead, but it was because I used thicker wire than necessary when modding it a thousand years ago and I need to just heat up the solder a bit.

            That console is a nightmare to disassemble/reassemble though and it’s been down for around 15 years. I’ll fix it one day.

              • theangryseal@lemmy.world
                2·
                26 days ago

                Oh man they’re so so so easy to fix.

                My childhood NES had a capacitor go out recently and the color was off. It still worked it was just ugly.

                I have like 10 of them so I just swapped my case, but for some silly reason it’s like I don’t feel connected to the “spirit” of the machine because of it.

                I’m going to have to order new capacitors and you just reminded me.

                Get that thing fixed. It’s so so easy.

              • theangryseal@lemmy.world
                2·
                26 days ago

                And just saying, if it’s the 72 pin connector, you don’t need a new one. Just pop yours out and bend the pins back out. It’s very very easy, honest to God there’s no reason to get a new one. I have new ones in my closet, probably 20 of them, but I’ve never really needed to use any of them.

                If you don’t want to fool with that PM me your address and I’ll send you one.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
      6·
      27 days ago

      Or trying to re-burn a cdrw but it was originally not burnt with the same soft as yours 😓

      🗑️💿🚮💔

    • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      4·
      27 days ago

      I remember the funny lines on the back when I accidentally bumped into the tower or had the subwoofer on as it was burning.

      Also holding down on the close-pin on a discman (so it would keep spinning the disc) and differently coloured sharpies were a great way to colourize your collection.

  • oppy1984@lemm.eeEnglish
    29·
    27 days ago

    2001, Dre’s album drops, nobody has it yet. In walks the kid who has a T1 line and a 5 disc CD copier with a spindle of discs. He sits down in homeroom, puts the spindle on his desk and says Dre’s new album five bucks right here.

    He sold out before the end of the day, made a good amount of cash, and was racking it in for months getting people albums that they requested because none of us could get it work with our slow connection. Of course when the two competing ISPs upgraded their networks later that year, he lost the majority of his business, but for a few months he was our pirate savior.

  • dan00@lemm.ee
    26·
    27 days ago

    I don’t even know what you are talking about. I am young, very young. I enjoy rizzing in the toilets and skibiding everyday bro. So fresh. 🤙

    pls don’t leave me with the boomers…

  • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    27 days ago

    I remember the moment I realised my fancy new Walkman could read data CD-Rs and I could fit all my mp3s into one 700mb disc. I felt insane, majestic, limitless.

    • not_woody_shaw@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      27 days ago

      Then you’d get a copy protected disc that wouldn’t play at all in the disc man, but you could copy it to a CD-R and that’d play just fine. To disable the copy protection you just hold shift while the cd tray closes.

    • devfuuu@lemmy.world
      2·
      26 days ago

      I ended up even buying some rewritable mini discs because they were so much smaller and still good enough space for some mp3 files.