• tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
      50·
      9 days ago

      And the power switch was like KA-JUNK when you pushed it, because it was a big ol’ switch that actually physically connected and disconnected the power.

      “It’s now safe to turn off your computer” went away after we moved to software power control, where the operating system could signal the power supply to turn off.

      • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
        23·
        9 days ago

        I had my computer plugged into a power bar and we’d turn off the power bar to turn off the computer so that we wouldn’t wear out the switch on the computer.

        People actually thought you’d have a computer long enough to wear out its power switch.

      • Duamerthrax@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        9 days ago

        I knew far, far too many people in HS that just hit the power button without actually shutting it down.

    • Grabthar@lemmy.world
      17·
      9 days ago

      The one I remember best was having to use the DOS ‘park’ command before you shut down the PC. I guess I am that old.

      • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
        10·
        8 days ago

        Huh, never ever seen that. We always used the rule "you can shutdown the computer when you can see the C:".

        What does park do? Put the HDD arm into a parked position? Never needed that for ours, but we also had a blazingly fast 486 with a massive 250 MB hdd.

        • Grabthar@lemmy.world
          15·
          9 days ago

          Yeah, old drives didn’t autopark like the IDE drive in your spiffy 486. I had an XT growing up, and dad was militant about having us remember to park the drive when we were done with it. I think by the end of the 80s, all drives were IDE and were autoparking, so the command was deprecated.

          • bus_factor@lemmy.world
            5·
            9 days ago

            I never had to do that, because our computer didn’t have a hard drive. We booted DOS right from the floppy.

          • humorlessrepost@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            8 days ago

            Damn, I had a Tandy 1000HX (very much not a 486) and never had to do that. Maybe because, despite having a hard disk, it had DOS on its own ROM.

            • Grabthar@lemmy.world
              2·
              8 days ago

              Cool, I’ve wanted an OS ROM chip since the early nineties, and often wondered why nobody seemed to be doing it. Guess they were all along!

              You technically didn’t have to park the old MFM and RLL drives, but if you didn’t, then you just had the drive heads resting on the platters after you shut them down. Then if you bumped or moved the PC at that time, it could scratch the disk like a record. If you never tried to move it, there probably wasn’t much risk.

              From the sound of it, the HDD in your Tandy probably would have been an MFM or RLL drive, and depending on the drive model, it either autoparked the drive heads or didn’t. As a PC clone running MS-DOS, the command was probably supported, but maybe not needed. Or you may have just been the equivalent of one of those rebels who held down the power button every time they wanted to shut down the PC and always got away with it!

    • boughtmysoul@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      8 days ago

      I had a friend who edited the .jpeg or whatever in the shutdown sequence to say “it is NOT safe to shut off your computer” and waited for his family to freak out.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        1: You a veteran?

        2: Yes. No. I don’t wanna talk about it.

        Camera zooms in on 2, fades to montage:

        MiG 21 thundering overhead at tree top levels, while blasting ‘Hush’, which is being comically raised in pitch to squeaking chipmunk levels as it approaches, and then instantly downshifts by two octaves into quaalude voice after it passes overhead… it is being pursued by an f4 phantom who fires off all of his seeking missiles in a quick burst, all of which guide themselves into your convoy of m113s, as well as a nearby mortar emplacement

        squad is slowly advancing through Hue with no resistance thus far… and then suddenly, from 3 different directions, VC on mopeds, blasting ‘Surfin Bird’ and headbanging maniacally, rapidly approach the unit… 2 are shot, but one makes it through, moped detonates with the force of 4 bundles of TNT

        … rocket pod armed mi8s and hueys pieroutting around each other in the night sky, throwing unguided rockets everywhere, taking out ground bound friend and foe alike, both ultimately running out if ammo and then crashing into the ground sideways and upside down…

        Camera pops back to 2, slowly zooms out.

        2: … I don’t … don’t wanna talk about it.

      • cazssiew@lemmy.world
        5·
        9 days ago

        Oh man, I found chip’s challenge again a few years back (it took forever because I couldn’t remember the name) but I totally forgot about rodent’s revenge!

    • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
      24·
      9 days ago

      Random tangent, my dad edited the system file that contained that message to “It’s not safe to turn off your computer” when I was like 5 and it kinda fucked me up for a bit.

  • Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works
    47·
    9 days ago

    I mean, I’m in my early 40s and I’ve started with ms-dos. According to this meme what am I? A fucking dinosaur? Am I that old?

    • Karjalan@lemmy.world
      6·
      9 days ago

      I remember playing a hotseat game with my friend and his brothers ( I think heroes of might and magic 2) and I accidentally big toed the power button, just like in this picture 😅

      Everyone was pretty gutted, although we then found out that autosave happened every turn, what a releif.

    • neox_@sh.itjust.worksFrançais
      4·
      9 days ago

      I’m in my late 20s and started with ms-dos too. And even tried OS/2 to check I wasn’t missing something before upgrading to 3.1 then XP 😂

  • cobysev@lemmy.worldEnglish
    321·
    9 days ago

    What’s all this newfangled content being posted as old? My first computer had Windows 3.11 that you booted to from a command prompt. It was an amazing graphical upgrade from the command line computers. Now you could actually see what you were doing on the screen instead of typing commands and hoping a document would print with your data.

    Before that, I used Apple IIe computers at school, with their solidly green command line interface. I remember being taught how to program instructions with those computers. You had a “turtle” (green triangle) that you needed to move to a specific spot on the screen, and you typed in commands to make him move.

    Whatever content is in this meme, it all released long after I grew up and became an adult. You young whippersnappers.

      • bus_factor@lemmy.world
        7·
        9 days ago

        I’m an elder Millennial, and I remember when we got old enough to use the 386 machines at school. Before that we were using DOS.

        Our first home computer was bought second hand and didn’t even have a hard drive, just two 5.25" floppy drives, and also ran DOS. We’d have kids from the entire neighborhood visit to play games on it, because although it was second hand it was also very rare to have one.

        I was 12 when Windows 95 came out. All this stuff looks waay newer than that. I’d say this draws the line for old at the older part of Gen Z. Millennials aren’t even on the scale.

        • samus12345@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          6·
          9 days ago

          The oldest Millennials are 44 now, and the term is still sometimes used to mean “young people.” But only by older people.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          9 days ago

          Are you also a member of the ‘Oregon Trail and Number Munchers on the school computer lab’s Apple II’s’ club?

          Along with like… KidPix, lol?

          Or am I a bit younger than you?

    • lechekaflan@lemmy.world
      9·
      9 days ago

      You had a “turtle” (green triangle) that you needed to move to a specific spot on the screen, and you typed in commands to make him move.

      Ah. LOGO.

      • cobysev@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        Oh man! I had no clue what the program was called. We used it way back in my kindergarten/1st grade days, so I’d long forgotten the specifics. Thank you! This is exactly it.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    25·
    9 days ago

    Man, I am even older than this.

    Multiple times I was disconnected in the middle of a Starcraft match over our 56k modem… because my dad was getting a goddamned fax sent to him over the same line.

    These are all fancy pants, high res … XP, i think?.. icons compared to Win 95 and 98.

    Now excuse me while I teleport back in time and jack back in to the Matrix Online beta via an actual telephone line… we didn’t even get DSL untill a year or two after it fully released.

    Going fully angry old man mode:

    You whippersnappers have absolutely no clue what pain is.

    Pain is playing Battlefield 1942 on a 56k modem with literally zero servers you can connect to being under 150 ping, the vast majority of them being 200, 300+.

    Those packets had to march across shitty rural phone lines uphill, both ways! And a storm would throw a tree onto them every 3 weeks!

    Pain is your shitty eMachine being so underpowered that the only way you can actually play through HL2 is all settings at minimum, and then also when Alyx is getting teleported out of Kleiner’s lab, you have to look at the ground, because the 8 or so particles with bloom that spin around her, + the flashing color negative post processing effect… is too fucking difficult for your moldy, sprouting potato of a pc to run without CTDing or even segfaulting.

    • Glitterbomb@lemmy.world
      12·
      9 days ago

      When your starcraft LAN matches keep lagging out on the default option IPX. You try the other option but it says not installed. So you have to figure out how to reconfigure your network adapter in windows 98 to use this new thing called TCP/IP. You’re in middle school and youtube doesn’t exist.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        6·
        9 days ago

        … You go to the GameFAQ board to ask for help, rofl.

        EDIT:

        Blam, you timewarp 25 years into the future and realize… holy shit, Blizzard could have built Battle.net into Steam before Valve did, but they completely went all in with WoW instead.

        EDIT 2:

        You warp back to the late 90s, and are extremely confused as to why the ‘replay’ of your last Starcraft game diverges into a whole ass alternate reality after about the 3 minute mark of a 90ish minute match.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        8 days ago

        About half a decade younger than that, just picked up pc gaming as a hobby at a young age.

        But yes, I know that there are many significantly older gamer folks / tech dorks here on lemmy… but there are also now a lot of Gen Z folks, and even some Gen A… who just actually did not ever experience the ‘pre-internet’ era at all.

        It gets difficult for me to manage my age perception whiplash at times.

        I apparently look young enough that people irl, only 10 years older than me (or less) still refer to me as ‘a bright young man with my whole future ahead of me’, as if I’m in my early 20s… while people 10 years younger than me refer to me as an ancient elder gamer online, and irl, once I tell them my actual age, oh now I’m an uncle, I’m an old man.

        ??? confused millenial noises ???

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        8 days ago

        Ok so… hear me out.

        You know how the common aphorism for dog years is that 1 dog year is 7 human years?

        BF 1942 came out in 2002.

        60 year difference.

        …

        I hereby propose a ‘Gamer Age’ formula:

        (Real Age - Youngest Age you first put over 50 hours into a single game) * 6

        …

        So if you are now 40, and you mainlined Starcraft when it came out in 1998, your gamer age is 78… pretty old, seen a lot of shit in your time.

        If you are 20, and broke 50 hours into Fortnite at age 14 (when Fortnite first released), your gamer age is 36… middle aged, been around the block a few times.

        If you are 16, and broke 50 hours in Fortnite when you were 14… your gamer age is 12 (lol), you are still a little nooblet in terms of gaming experience.

        If you are 60, and put 50 hours into a Pacman cabinet when it came out in 1980… gamer age is 240, true elder, arcane wizard status.

        If you are Lord British (Richard Garriot), and you use the release date of the first game he developed (Akalabeth) as the 50hr game…

        He works out to a minimum of 276, which is almost certainly a low estimate… by my reckoning, he could potentially be as old as 330…

        …few know such things precisely, such is the nature of a truly ancient one, hahaha.

        …

        If I run this for myself… first game I put more than 50 hours into would have been… Sonic 3 / Sonic & Knuckles, think I broke the 50 hour mark in '96…

        So… my gamer age works out to 174.

        Unnaturally old, by no means the eldest of the wizened ones, but considerably more experienced than most would guess by my physical form, rofl.

        …

        Now, this isn’t a perfect metric, as … you could argue the 50 hour threshold should be some other number… and that it doesn’t account for people who have played a whole lot of games, but only a single playthrough… so it is kind of biased toward ‘hardcore’ gamers…

        But it does seem roughly in line with the way online lingo and vocabulary and memes seem to work.

        And also, non ‘hardcore’ gamers are probably not going to care about any kind of ‘gamer age’ metric.

        …

        Thoughts? Suggestions? Critiques?

    • last_philosopher@lemmy.world
      5·
      9 days ago

      Let’s be real - we always assumed that we could hear our parents walking in but there’s no way they didn’t sneak up and check what we were watching once in a while

      • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
        6·
        9 days ago

        if they saw the depraved smut I was cranking to I can guarantee my ass would be a paraplegic from the whoopin I would have got.

        they didn’t know. they’ll never know.

  • Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.caEnglish
    23·
    8 days ago

    Heh, this is brand new software and tech as far as I’m concerned. I remember when the computer did not automatically boot into windows and you had to cd c:\windows and then win.exe.