This was cutting edge tech… I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs…
I’m hooking two vhs players together to commit piracy old.
Older actually. My first portable music format was 8track
This isn’t very old lol. That computer could be from 2010 and CD’s and Sharpies were used then. Also, LimeWire was functional until like late 2010.
I’m older.
Let’s just leave it at that
the computer isn’t beige enough.
No, because my country was pretty much too small and poor to have brand-name sharpies, we just had felt pens with other names. Carioca I believe was the most prominent brand back then.
Naw. I’m this fucking old:
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!
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.
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.
For real? My tweaking days ended when floppy came out for the C64.
Maybe the C64 datasette never got the upgrade?
Boy, that was before I could afford a C64 with the money I made with my first computer.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t you use a flathead for that?
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.
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.
I’m old enough to know why people used pencils for cassettes. It wasn’t coincidence. Count the number of teeth in the casette, then look at the number of facets on a standard pencil.
I wonder how many will realize it’s not just a cassette tape to listen to music…
The TI/99 also had cassettes
You used a screwdriver to store 73 kB?
It’s a sonic screwdriver.
I’m exactly that old.
Edit: The PC in the image is a bit anachronistic. This is the workhorse we’re all thinking of:
Wasn’t that called the optiplex, or something similar? Pretty sure I had one myself.
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
PrecisionDimension model which was the consumer version of it.You’re real close to the “capacitor of death” models there. GX270s failed like a motherfucker.
We could swap those boards out and in like a fucking NASCAR pit crew.
Between the capacitor plague and the tin whiskers from the phaseout of lead, hardware from that era failed constantly.
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).
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
We did this too lol.
The one in the pic says Dimension 2400 on it.
Yeah, I mean to say Dimension and typed Precision. My bad.
Dell Dimension 2400. My family had the entry level model, and it still absolutely destroyed every prior computer we’d had performance-wise
That or the ol’ tan cased dinosaurs.
The gray Dell helped me through many-a “100 Games!” disc…
This was the first desktop I used with a big ol’ chunky CRT. I played around installing so many different windows XP themes
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. 😅
I think we had that one.
Record off the radio to cassette and an active market for pirated live shows because we lived past nowhere and it was all we had access to.
Im Not even 40. Leave me alone.
I’m this old:
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.
New music is doing fantastic, it’s record companies that are dying. Most artists just self-publish these days.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
A question for people who have never used a cassette. What do you think the pencil is for?
To mark the spot on the tape where your favorite song starts.
Hehe
The pencil fits in the hole. You can use that to move the tape. If it’s too loose, the tape player can draw it out and you have a mess to fix. To clean that mess up you also need the pencil to wind the tape from outside the cassette back into it.
I had those at home when I was a kid.
I was born around the 2000s
It’s not really that old lol
Granted, I was in a developing country, so the timeline of technological development is not quite the same (People’s Republic of China).
Do people in the west still have Cassettes in the 2000s?
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.
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.
I recorded songs off the radio to cassette
Me as well Some of the things I first downloaded went onto cassette tape.
Everytime I see limewire I feel left out.
Where are my Kaaza hommies at??
Napster!
What’s crazy is that none of the other P2P apps that came after ever had as nice of an interface as Napster. I guess that’s cause Napster compiled Mac and Windows native apps while most other P2P apps were Java jars.
Here!
Kazaa, Kazaa light, WinMX, DC++. I used them all.
Where are my eMule fuckers at?
That donkey was the goat.
Emule/Edonkey
Yup
No SoulSeek fans here?
That’s the modern napster IMO.
Just a shame it’s hard to automate.
How did the progression go? Napster, Morpheus, Kazaa, Limewire?
I mean sure, if you just want to skip Bearshare
And Audiogalaxy. And WinMX.
EDIT: And DCC bots on IRC.
gnutella, surely!!
I like how Justin Frankel created something to help you get stuff to really whip the llama’s ass with :)
Where did DC++ fit in?
My user name stands for KaZaA Lite User 9.
Slsk (Soulseek) was far superior. It was the best for getting full albums and leaked stuff. If you found someone with a fast connection and thick library it was like gold.
Shoutout to everyone that got Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead album with “Mike Jones” randomly played in the background.
Slsk is still around today and people swear by it.
Old enough to remember using a 3½” floppy disk to boot my first PC and mess around with GW/Q-BASIC and play DOS games.
The disks were strongly perfumed (I guess the guy I bought my pirated games from liked to do that for some reason), and I still remember that aroma.
I’m this old.
![[crumbles into dust]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/034f3400-6813-4e8c-b28a-18c23de1ee7d.jpeg){kind=link}
