What was computing like in the 90s?

If you had a proper desktop computer, you were a working stiff or a proper nerd.
This changed after the early 2000s.

I used to make custom artwork using a crappy stylus and upload them to AOL message boards. My mortal kombat characters were somewhat popular. Back then we had stupid slow modems so an image the size of OP probably would have taken 5-10 minutes to transfer.

>>61240995
I was a mac user, so frequent system crashes followed by waiting five minutes to reboot. With a fucking paperclip.

Gaming was fun. Having to constantly mess with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS because you never had enough fucking memory. People today have it so easy. They complain about how slow 4GB is, and like man I wish back then your shit would have just been slow. If you couldn't free up that extra 16KB of memory your game flat out wouldn't boot.

Picture, for a moment, the Web you knew about only existing as far as /g/'s 10th page. That's how small communities were back in the day on Usenet. Even smaller if you were a fan of some real niche stuff.

Flame wars lasted for months, not hours.

Games were primarily marketed by breathless and shamelessly lying magazines.

BBS systems fought on until the mid 90s -- AOL was the knife through that particular heart unless you were into some deep, deep underground shit.

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>What was computing like in the 90s?

A lot like Moore's Law.

I miss the exponential growth of computing power we used to get, but I do not miss having to spend thousands of dollars every year or so upgrading. Hell I'm still using a Sandy Bridge i7 today because it's still plenty powerful for any software I throw at it. If you asked me in the late 90s if I thought I'd ever sit on a single platform for six years straight I'd think you were out of your fucking mind.

Also local dialup BBSes until the late 90s because nobody could afford minutes on the Internet.

>>61241098
Rule of thumb growing up:
2400bps -> 14.4kbps -> 33.6kbps -> 56kbps
1hr -> 15min -> 5min -> 3min per megabyte

>>61241189
>monstrous 64MB of RAM
>still can't load X-Wing because not enough conventional memory

>>61241294
>tfw AOL bills you 2 minutes just for opening the client and making the connection handshake

When I was 10 I used to pretend I was a 16 year old girl in chat rooms then I would lure perverts over to IM and send them trojans in the guise of pictures.

>>61241294
>Games were primarily marketed by breathless and shamelessly lying magazines.
So at least that much is still the same.

>>61241019
I live in Australia and my family had a proper desktop computer from the early 90s onwards, though I don't remember having internet until around 1997. By the late 90s I think it was pretty normal for households to have at least one computer unless they were poor.

>>61241354
>2400bps
>1hr

Ah yes, I remember the first file I ever downloaded from AOL was a free trial of the educational game "Alphaman." It took an hour to download the megabyte-sized file, filled my entire hard drive, and arrived named alphaman.zip. I had never heard of that file extension or even file compression before. The journey to figure out what a zip file was required multiple trips to a library and kickstarted my interest in computer science.

>>61241189
This. My first hard drive was 1.2GB and my computer had 4mb of ram. 4. This was enough for windows 3.1 and a few games. I don't even download media less than 1GB per hour anymore.

Much nicer.

>>61241407
>AOL at 2400 baud
>1MB filled entire hard drive in AOL era

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digital cave painting with Paint.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAExa9P7hME

>>61241423
No spam.
And then the Jews found usenet.

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>>61240995
>With a fucking paperclip.

Windows users had paperclips too

>>61241437
>No spam.
>And then the Jews found usenet.

No lie, I was the faggot that spammed newsgroups with junk to push everything out of retention. I set up the bot on a computer in my college lab which had an astoundingly fast T1 line.

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was anyone else there?

>>61241426
>not having an IBM clone from a business liquidation sale in 1991

>>61241472
I must have been lucky. My first Windows machine was a Gateway2000 with a P5 and 350MB hdd

>>61241459
hipcrime?

>>61241472

Nobody fishing hardware out of the scrap heap had money for time on AOL.

Also the shareware version of Alpha Man was only like 100kb if we're talking about the same scrabble/sokoban type game.

Starcraft and Diablo were considered scandalously violent and gory.

>>61241533
God do you remember the horror that greeted Crusader: No Remorse

That game had a gun that vaporized people down to their skeleton in a way we wouldn't see again until Fallout and Mars Attacks

>>61241019
Computers started getting cheap cheap around 97' and were almost free when buying internet plans by 99'

>>61240995
You had to open up and clean your mouse on a weekly basis
Software was installed via floppy disc or CD ROM instead of downloaded off the internet.

Pornographic images took forever to load, and streaming video was still science fiction.

Pizza flowed so freely that you couldn't avoid it even if you were trying to.

my first was an apple iie. and then a mac se.

i was able to run a local BBS off that mac. got a substantial amount of callers and played a lot of shareware games

>>61241568
Trade Wars for LIFE

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Computers were actually fun

>>61241472
>IBM clone

"I'll take terms I haven't heard in 25 years for $600, Alex"

>>61241583
DIPSWITCHES

JUMPERS

Actually needing a special tool to pull chips from their sockets because the legs were so goddamn fragile

Turbo buttons

Everything was made out of ABS plastic and steel

>>61240995
Everything sucked and was pretty much constantly breaking. If you went two weeks without needing to fix something, from removing lint from your mouse, to fixing something that went wrong in Windows 3.1, you felt lucky.

That said, the 90's had Red Alert, so there was that.

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>>61241578
>rival corp exploits citadel shield bug for invincible planetary shields
>retaliate by setting off 20 genesis torpedoes and putting their home sector way over the planet limit two minutes before daily maintenance

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Playing video games late at night with the shrieking of the PC speaker keeping your parents up

I remember the first psx emulator "bleem". Catch was, it took about a week to download an iso.

>>61241613
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZQdAyb-8_M

I could annoy the shit out of anyone by firing up this baby

>>61241583
I used to download games, a few at a time, to a floppy disk at the library, then bring them home and play them. I wanted to relive some of the old games that I painstakingly retrieved the other night, so I wrote a script to download and extract a site's entire catalog. 90's me would be jealous. Computers are still fun.

>>61240995
Irritating. Software was buggier and hardware took longer to set up and often conflicted with each other.

>>61241592
That painful transition period between jumper/dip IRQ settings and plug & play, when plug & play never fucking worked right and you wished you had your jumpers back so you could fix the conflicts yourself.

>>61241617
Plus the .PAR files because MEDIEVAL.R15 was incomplete due to a missing newspost.

>>61241564
>Pizza flowed so freely that you couldn't avoid it even if you were trying to.

fuck i didn't even realize that pizza stopped being a thing whenever 3 or more people gathered somewhere, but you're right.

>>61241613
I remember finally convincing my dad to get an AdLib for our 486.

When I first heard not only crisp realistic sound effects but also music tracks that I had no idea were in the games it pretty much blew my mind.

>>61241189
Fucking scraping the barrel for every kb of memory possible. Now im running loaded 32gbs for no reason. Times have changed

>>61241460
This was the place to be if you couldn't afford AOL

mfw Warcraft multiplayer on Heat.net
mfw 10six
mfw Allegiance on MSN Gaming Zone, the best space game of all time

>>61241644
>hardware backdoors in everything
>computers are still fun
yeah no

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>you will never celebrate windows release day every again

>>61241644
I used to go to the local library one summer, sit down at a PC, fire up telnet and play a MUD literally all afternoon and no one had a clue what the fuck I was doing there all day

>>61240995

[MENU]
MENUITEM = windows, Windows
MENUITEM = emm, DOS with EMM386
MENUITEM = himem, DOS with HIMEM
MENUITEM = dos, standard DOS

You need 570 kByte (?) of free RAM to run the freshly bought Ultima 7. Without EMM386. Better start tinkering with the drivers right now.

We had shit like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xJSstGwB8s

>>61241692
This has always been the case

Something like this https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.os.linux.slackware/hWy0h_Sxaug/nlIAOVx25XwJ

So basically like it is now but with slower shit and usenet and newsgroups instead of chans and forums

>>61240995
It was exciting yet frustrating. The latter is primarily for family members in particular.

>>61241740
that pentium sound hit me right in the feels

>>61240995
Building a home supercomputer prorgam from WeirdStuff Warehouse

>>61241592
>sockets for components

>>61241836
>BIOS extension roms

>>61241851
Ah yes, I burned a boot ROM once. I don't remember which one it was, probably something related to KA9Q.

>>61241759
We have always been at war with Oceana.
Fuck off revisionist.

We didn't need heat sinks or fans for any of the chips in our computers. Which was good because the cases we had were too small, poorly ventilated and needed tons of ribbon cables to connect everything.

>90% download
>Time elapsed 12 hours
>*calls your house*

>>61241936
joke's on you, we had ISDN

but seriously, it broke the connection? I only got the "line busy" signal

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>big download is at 99%
>mom picks up the phone

>>61241945
ISDN was noice. No modems understood call waiting until late into the decade.

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>>61241936
>get into the Anarchy Online beta
>Take a week and a half to download the game on 56k
>Start patching
>Game goes gold before I'm done downloading the beta

>>61240995
CS with 56k modem. Then 256 kb ADSL, holy shit it was fast. Also, AMD Athlon 600 MHz 4ever

>>61241936
Why wait to download Netscape Navigator?
[Order CD Now]

Buying magazines with tons of freeware, demos and games because it was cheaper to buy than to wait.

People were dumber.
A lot dumber.
I did very similar things.

It was actually pretty shit

>>61240995
there wasn't much to do except discuss the simpsons or have cyber sex with old german guys over ICQ

>>61241957
Oh I see, that makes sense then. We didn't have teh internets until like 1998

>>61240995
I recall not being able to get landline calls and be on the internet at the same time.

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>>61240995

>>61242140
newfag get out REEEEEE

>>61241922
The jet turbine hard drives and PSU fans more than made up for the noise though.

>>61240995
>pre-dotcom bubble
>software devs in huge demand
>IT in huge demand
>completely reparable/modular hardware
>Win 95 and Win 98 can be installed from a directory or LAN or whatever, it just works

must have been fucking glorious

>>61242412
>Win 95 and Win 98
>just works
anon…

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>>61242412
>must have been fucking glorious

>>61242499
>I was a prolific Win 98 user in 2000's and it never did that
Not once? I was a prolific mac OS X user in 2000s and it LITERALLY never did anything like that.

>>61240995
all i really did was talk on irc still talk to some of those people, oh and programed still doing that to

>>61242412
It would have been glorious but for the H-1Bs who almost but did not quite speak English.
The Sun Ultra 2 platform as a server or workstation. Now that was glorious.

>>61242508
Not once, I actually didn't get the blue screen meme and someone had to explain it to me

>>61242073
>lamer
I almost forgot this insult even existed. Used a lot in broodwar.

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>>61241652
hownu.ru

>>61241690
click on heat.net

>>61242412
>Win 95 and Win 98 can be installed from a directory or LAN or whatever, it just works

...said no one ever.

>upgrade your Amiga to one MB of ram in order to play Monkey Island
>finally getting 486 for christmas
>fiddle with autoexec.bat and config.sys for hours to make gaymes work
>learn how to use DOS
>fuck around with qbasic to cheat in nibbles and gorillas
>Win95 comes along, install it using a gazillion floppy disks, be blown away
>parents get slow as fuck internet modem and buy Pentium with Win98
>check out internet, it is the wild west
>open lycos and search for porn
>OMG
>download real media player and watch an average 5 hours of porn a day
>play Age of Empires, Day of the Tentacle etc all the time
>install Napster and start pirating shit like crazy

The 90s were an incredibly good time!

>>61241354
THIS GUY GETS IT

>it was the best of times
>it was the worst of times

>>61241406
Everyone had a desktop anon and could print a document or play a dos game but the difference was there were rare superpowers only had by a few before year 2000

>cd burners
>cable modems
>Internet >56k
>decent sound
>multiple monitors
>removable hard drives

All that was expensive voodoo back then - you only had all of them if your Dad was engineer or sysadmin

Practically the equivelant of owning a hot rod back then

FUN STORY: I ripped all my music to DAT and carried around a Sony TCD-D7 in highschool because it was cheaper than cdrw at the time and skip proof

Games where fun back then.
Heck, I could spend weeks playing demos

The internet was a lot less same-y, every website had its own totally unique culture. The internet has become a lot more consolidated since the early/mid-2000s and every community has pretty much the same feel to it with the exception of the odd in-joke, 99% of the shit you see on every website is just jokes taken from the overarching social media internet that everyone is a part of. It used to be you'd find a forum and have to lurk for months before you felt confident enough to even make a simple introduction thread (which you would fuck up and the resident XX_DEMON_GOD_XX global mod would lock), it was a genuinely exciting experience to find a new site back then. Nowadays I probably don't go to more than 5 different sites on a daily basis, my bookmarks list 20 years ago was at least 20x that size and they all truly felt like their own unique little communities, going from one forum to another was like entering a completely different world. Of course there were a few "memes" back then that you'd probably see across different websites, but they were a much smaller part of the experience, most jokes were unique in-jokes that would make zero sense to anyone who hadn't lurked for months beforehand.

>>61240995
FUCK GOOGLE

>>61243314
Kibo was always part of the experience.

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Computer shows were advertised like monster truck shows

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFf-mMxo8JI

>>61242535
Today's "noob" is not even an insult. Just somebody new to the game.

Hit up the archive and watch through The Computer Chronicles, it basically documented everything as it happened from the early 80s up until the early 2000s.

Here's a pretty nice documentary about the rice and fall of BBS'

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgE-9Sxs2IBVgJkY-1ZMj0tIFxsJ-vOkv

I fucking love the fact that underage fucks and newfag redditards will NEVER experience it. That's all I care about.
Games were amazing, even your shitty co-op games these days can't compete,they've only evolved in graphics,but devolved in heart and gameplay.
Websites were interesting and just surfing the net was a RPG adventure in itself, full of wonders and curiosities, not to mention without cancerous JS. These were the little things that made it great, truly an end of a great era. What underages experience now is just a cheap copy of all that.
>b-but porn loads faster these days haha checkmate
don't try to debate me, I'm not in the mood. Oh how much I love the fact that I experienced it and many people here didn't.

>>61243429
>no cancerous JS
>1990s
Are you sure you remember the 90s?

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>>61243438
>not to mention without cancerous JS

>>61243438
This, web design in the 90s was absolute cancer, you had to have 3 different browsers installed because everything used bullshit JS or non-standard HTML that only worked on specific browsers.
>open page in IE
>doesn't work
>open netscape
>open a different page
>doesn't work
>go back to IE

There's a lot of shitty things wrong with the modern internet but thank fuck everything is now mostly standardised.

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>>61240995
L A N P A R T I E S

Gaming has changed with online multiplayer.. Everyone is sitting alone in their room instead of getting together. It was so much more fun when you could have a beer with the guys between Duke3D/Quake/C&C sessions.

It was fucking shit thats how it was
>slow as crap PCs
>loud as fuck PCs
>apocalypse tier internet speeds
>shit quality pics, music, porn
>crashes and corrupted hard drives out of ass
>wanna play a game? Too bad, here fiddle with those files for the next hours and MAYBE it will work
>wanna download something? Pray no one will call you or your parents for the next couple days
>eye burning colours on sites and shitty designs no matter where you looked at

Who says internet and computing in general was better back then is deluded. We are literally having an internet golden age right now.

>>61243438
indeed I am. Unless you're talking about bonzibuddy crap, I do not recall ever having to deal with cancerous JS back then.Sure,some websites were riddled with it and were basically unusable, but at the time, that was a sign that it must be shit and nothing of value. Funny thing is, with my fast internet these days, websites should load instantly ,but they don't because bloat and 4MB webpages. It is not much different from back then when I had a crappy dial up modem my uncle set up for me

>>61243495
Internet golden age my ass. There were countless valuable technologies that were totally decentralized in nature that were and have been totally dismissed since they were developed and not for a lack of utility but rather accessibility. It's truly fucking unfortunate too since they could've been used to effectively oust providers if they failed to keep up their end of the bargain. Now we have hypercentralized systems from brain to tail that can and do track even the most infinitesimal moves of an individual over the web, the worst part is we pay them for these shitty asymmetrical connections to the outside that are misadvertized and garishly limited in an arbitrary fashion to net them more profit.

>>61241773
is this... real?

>>61243486
>486

Neat

>>61240995
Comfy.

Family had a P1 100MHz CPU with 166MHz Turbo. Then bought an athlon64, 1GHz. Played Silent Hunter, Half Life, Counter Strike, Starcraft, Warcraft 3, chatted on my ISP's online chatrooms. Downloaded 128kbps mp3s with our home ISDN line. Going to LAN parties. Then also spent loads of time outdoors, building forts, riding bikes with friends, shooting one another with bb guns, lighting trashcans on fire.

Being a kid in the 90s was great. Now everyone is just 'meh' about everything, getting excited is considered ADD and interests are called autism. People separate themselves by interests and into cliques, lame.

>>61243754

>blow shit up
>shoot people

9/11 ruined everything ... I am pretty sure I would be a terrorist back then if they used today's standards

I really feel bad for kids these days... They will never know the thrill of shooting potato cannons at the local park with shotgun level decibels that you got from the Jolly Roger cookbook on sneakernet 1.44mb floppy while listening to pantera you recorded to cassette from Napster from your 14bit creative live soundcard that pretended to 16bit

>>61240995
A lot of yelling at my sister to get off the phone, AOL busy signals, laggy online quake, epic Friday night lan parties playing much less laggy quake. Also known as the best time of my life

>>61241613
boners indeed.

>>61243840
Kek. My buddies were recording rock music with CakeWalk Pro Audio on their MMX-233 PCs and Creative Live(?) cards, whichever one had S/PDIF in. When it worked, it was magical.

>>61240995
More fun. Because everything was happening so fast, hardware almost doubled in speed every year, every advancement was exciting. The 90's was amazing to experience in regards to computing.

>>61243866
>not producing 1337 modules with trackers instead

I still listen to my old stuff every now and then. Dat nostalgia..

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>tfw I was born in 1997

>>61243866
Oh my brother mass feels right there.

People don't understand but when soundcards first appeared with that yellow 3.5 spdif in / out it was a trancendant experience !

I used to record to / from my DAT and just having that pure 16/48 connection was magic. I recently dug out an old DAT tape with some of the earliest tracks I did in reason and they sound amazing. The HDD is long long gone but a few projects live on thanks to that spdif !

>>61243866
you're remembering right, the soundblaster live! is a thing
in fact, i'm still using my later live! 24bit pci, still works and sounds great

>>61243958
You have to back

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>>61243967
>1997 was 20 years ago

>>61240995
Dunno. Family was too poor to afford one back then. Used to mess with display pc's at walmart. Some shit always took the mouse balls so I learned to navigate win3.1 with the keyboard.
Friend had one with AOL but I want really into that.

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Who /turbo/ here?

>>61240995
My first pc had 8 gb hdd and 128 ram and win 98 such fun times but we still had emulators on that time a lot of dos ones and we discovered internet very late and dialup actually made us react like those kids in vintage mag pics who were blown the fuck out by computers. Thats how flash games made us react

I used to play pirated amiga 500 games and print out shitty paint drawings on a dot matrix printer. Also workbench 132 was the shit... I'll never forget that early text to speech capability.

>>61241690
Allegience is now freeallegience. Found an old box, like new of allegience dumpster diving once. Cool game.

>>61243967
there are possibly people itt right now born after 9/11

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>>61244027
My first HDD literally had 10 Megabytes and SO MANY FUCKING GAMES fit on it.

Makes me mad how developers just waste resources all over the place nowadays.

Also
>Monkey Island 2 released
>Still only have that fuck old 8088 with the 10MB HDD
>Dad copies the 3.5" MI2 floppies to 5.25" floppies at work because I don't have a 3.5" drive
>Fucking awesome thanks dad
>It's 9.6 MB or something like that. Delete ALL MY GAMES because it's fucking Monkey Island 2
>spend an eternity copying all those floppies to my HDD
>run MI2
>"Monkey Island 2 requires a 286 or better CPU to run"
>realize I've just deleted all my games and don't have backups
>cry for hours

Saddest day of my childhood, tbqh. Dad got me a NES for christmas and everything was great again.

>>61244071
what about the original installations disks?
you bought the games, didn't you?

>>61244147
No one bought games back then, anon.

I think the only two games I've bought during that time were Mechwarrior 1 and Civilization 1. Both totally worth it, though.

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Highly dithered.

>>61244267
did i hear you right? did i hear you say... that you copied a game without paying?

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>>61244440

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>>61244071
>>61244267
>>61244440
>he copied that floppy

>>61243479
>This page is optimized for Netscape 3.0+ and 1024x768 resolution

>>61242463
Why was it always 0E

>>61240995
awesome

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like that

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>20 years later people will ask what it was like to phonepost and you'll get to tell the story of butthurt desktop computers and the troubles you went through

for me.
>usenet was more popular than the web and the users weren't utter shit.
>UNIX was everywhere. Learning SunOS from a shell account was fun.
>IRC was exactly the same as today.
>Linux just started to be a thing for us plebs with 486's and no access to UNIX big iron machines (>$7 grand computers)

>>61243900
>using trackers
pleb-tier. I wrote my own amigamusic editor/player, which never saw the light of day. I cracked another, which actually did.

>>61243965
Nice. The tunes they were producing had surprisingly passable sound quality. I could easily imagine some of them in the closing credits of Bill Paxton softcore movies.

>>61246724
The same reason it's always signal 11.

>>61240995
computer as fuck

>tfw I used my parents's Amstrad computer from like 1982 as my first ever computer, in the mid-1990s when everyone else had a more modern computer
>tfw I remember getting a new computer in 1998 and being frankly unimpressed
>tfw I still remember an Internet forum for The Simpsons where everyone was illiterate and I was shocked that people didn't write in full sentences
>tfw there was nothing really on the Internet so I just played G-Police and Redline Racer and Age of Empires all day

>tfw no more Microsoft Encarta, ever again ;_;

>>61240995
back in 2001 my sister spent 2k on a bag of shit amd 6400 desktop from pc world, she used it for about a month andsold it to me for 800 quid! i torrented the fuck on that thing in the days of limewire and icewire, still have the thing knocking about somewhere...came with a tft monitor and a whopping 180gig harddrive.

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>>61243486
We had lanparties regularly up until 2007/2008, thats when I really felt online gaming took over.

Lan was removed from most new games and internet connections in the normal household was so fast the file sharing aspect of lanparties was gone aswell.

There truely was something special about the time before smartphones and broadband in every home. I feel sad the kids growing up today will never experience that.

The internet was a secret club of academics, techies, and rich nerds. There were no BRs, pajeets, grandmas, or normies.

Everything was slow and broke all the time. There was a lack of standards and 4k 60fps porn webms.

>>61240995
Too mechanical

>2017
>Not running a HF BBS for your friends and whoever overhears it

>>61250479
bit of a double edges sword, the filesharing aspect
on one hand it's nice that it's feasable now to download whatever you want, whenever you want, within a reasonable timeframe (most people, at least)
but on the other, it's just not nearly as satisfying once you actually manage to get ahold of it, also no excitement finding something you didn't know you wanted by browsing other peoples' shares at a LAN, it's kind of like digital garage sales, never know what you'll find

Remember when Yahoo! wasn't shit?
Remember when antiviruses came on ISA cards?
Remember when you had to manually set the DIP/Jumper/IRQ/All the hard drive bullshit or your computer wouldn't work?
Remember those lovely CMOS batteries that would explode and eat the traces off your motherboard if you didn't catch it in time?

>>61240995

You know, it was a simpler time. I'd get up and pay for the internet by the hour to check the news, log off and play Mega Race or stuff like Wolfenstein or Jill of the Jungle. Eat lunch. Play a little Duke Nukem or Commander Keen.

It was nice.

But it was dark ages expensive dude. Jesus it was expensive.

>>61240995
World started to adopt Windows in the early 90's and it's gone to shit ever since.

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>>61246724

>>61250850
I remember the controller for my hard drive was $150 and the whole 286 in 1989 was about $6500. Back then, you bought it wholesale and immediately tried to sell it for retail to continually fund upgrading. Worked for me up to the Pentium 60Mhz.
Amazing how cheap things are now. I had a Tallgrass 20Mb external drive with integrated tape. The tapes were $230/ea and the 20Mb drive was $8000, but it was an old beastie going back to the mid-80's.

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>>61250926
Maybe $2995US but I live in Canada so over 9000.

I just miss how separate everything was. You got "online". You used your "username". You did online things and then you hang up the phone line and that was that. You are no longer online now. I guess this mentality is ingrained in me and I can't shake it.

I still make time to be "online", then when I put it into sleep mode or whatever, the "online" time is over. Granted the capabilities have expanded. I might download some movies and plug a hard drive into my TV. I might play an oline game. But once they are downloaded it is over and the online time is done. Once I quit the game I am done being online.

And hell, am I the only person that actually talks on Usenet?

Its seeping into reality too much. Far too much.

>>61249371
>limewire
>torrents

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Fun.

fffffffffffffffffffff beep ffffffffffffffffffffffff *yellow light* fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff *wipes sweat and glances at plastic casing* ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff (i am swallowed whole)

>>61242059
People are still dumb, its not that they become smart its that the technology became easier to access to them.

I mean for fucks sake look at Apple now, and what was at some point Windows 8. We do not live in an age of power users, we are in an age of instant simplicity.

>>61241443
I unironically miss Clippy.
I miss those weird helper mascots in general. they had charm even if they were pointless.

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>>61243989

>>61241354
>>still can't load X-Wing because not enough conventional memory
Fucking X-Wing, that game was a memory whore.

>>61243358
anon do we need to have a talk?

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>>61241144

holy shit I forgot all about that. Yeah like every fucking 45 in youd have to jam a paperclip in that hole to get it to turn on again.

If you had an Amiga or an Apple it was fucking great, If you had a 386/486 it sucked balls and you were probably using DOS or some shit.

>>61241356
sub7?

>>61241019
My family seemed to have one through most of the 90s. Needed something to play Doom and C&C on.

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What I hated most about this time was the fact that even though we had a 56K V90 modem we could only connect to our ISP at 28.8K. Something must have been wrong with the phone lines. Getting cable internet was fucking wonderful.

>>61251351
Most internet service providers don't provide usenet feeds anymore so very few people even have access to them without going out of their way and paying more for a third party provider.

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I miss having some sense of novelty or exploring.

I don't necessarily miss the nightmare hunting certain information could be, or the waiting times, but I do miss exploring. I still explore sometimes, but the topography of the web is very different. It's much harder to break out of centralized systems and go on a journey through abandoned pages, or through weird pages set up by individuals not quite linked into social media or indirectly via imageboards.
(pic is only partially related, since if I was time-travelled back to 2007 I could basically do everything the same as I do it now, but it shows direction of travel.)

>>61254903
Same. Also when it rained you may or may not lag and randomly d/c.

>>61241144
>>61241568
>>61252641
>>61252658
You guys all had Macintoshes? Did you have 68k's or PowerPCs? Where there any games?

>>61255304
*were

>>61240995
>What was computing like in the 90s?- 172 posts and 35 image replies shown.
windows wasn't a steaming pile of shit and it actually gave you useful error messages && not

something happened :^(

>>61255383
bluescreens always provide very little useful information, you're supposed to open the memory dump yourself in an external program

>>61255383
>9x wasn't a steaming pile of shit
o i am laffin
it was easily the worst mainstream OS line of the 90s

>>61255383
>windows wasn't a steaming pile of shit

Are we from the same timeline? Because I clearly did not live through your 90s.

>>61255397
>bluescreens always provide very little useful information

Eh... The 9x BSODs usually at least told you which VXD shit the bed.

>>61255455
>Are we from the same timeline? Because I clearly did not live through your 90s.
dude you weren't even born in the 90s sit your ass down

>>61255462
I was born in the 70s so I guess that's technically a correct statement.

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you could actually get a job

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>>61255462

>>61240995
The growth was astounding.

>i486SX2 - Got it around late 1994
Had Dos on it, Norton Commander was my defacto "operating system" as we'd see it today. It was the GUI that I used all the time.

At first I only ran shitty old games beacuse thats what everyone here had here in Croatia. Stuff like Dangerous Dave 1 and 2, Commander Keen 1-5, LHX, Prehistorik, Lemmings, Sim City and Sim City 2000, Prince of Persia, Superfrog, The Blues Brothers.

Then slowly new games started to trickle in

Jazz Jackrabbit
Aladdin
Lion King
Prehistorik 2
Doom 1 and 2

But these were pushing my PC to the brink.

I had to skip a lot of famous games too because I had no CD Drive. So I never played Command and Conquer and shit until late 1997.

I got my Pentium MMX 233Mhz with a S3 Virge. That blew my mind. It was a huge step up. Not only did I have Windows now that blew away Norton. I also had a mouse now and a CD drive. That opened up such a massive amount of video games to me.

Then cames shit like Red Alert, Age of Empires, Starcraft, Warcraft 2, Quake 1, Quake 2, Worms 2, Comix Zone, Hexen, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D, Tomb Raider, Blood, Carmagedon, GTA, Need for Speed, Crock, Dark Reign, Captain Claw, Diablo, Atomic Bomberman.

Then in 1998 we had

Half life, Unreal, Need for Speed 3, Dune 2000, Cesar 2, Delta Force, Anno 1602, Theif...

It was crazy how many games we had back then thanks to Piracy. I payed like 4$ for a game if that.

But I had to run all the games at 320×240 or 400×300 to get stable FPS. At first I complained how shitty NFS 3 ran at 640×480. Sure it looked amazing but for it to be playable settings had to be turned way down.

My 1.5 year old 1000$ PC was already shit. Little did I know it was because I had no GPU. If only I knew it wasn't even all that expensive.

It feels like good games or innovative games these days get released at a pace of maybe 1~3 a year.

Until 2005 or so it felt like 10 fucking amazing games per year was the norm.

>>61255455
True, but getting the details of a bluescreen is very trivial in NT if you know what you're doing (and if you don't know what you're doing then you probably don't need the information anyway)

>>61241189
Tech autism did not come naturally to me. By setting this hurdle, games encouraged people to learn about computers. Had I grown up later, I would never find myself browsing /g/.

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My father used pic related until 2002 or something. These days he's got a slow amd-something running Windows XP. His office is a blast from the past.

Yahoo, Microsoft, and Aol were major players. Lots of college kids spent their time meeting cuties on Aol chat. Not sure if Napster was 90s, but you were gonna be downloading for a while even one song unless you downloaded at the Uni. Everyone regretted not buying Yahoo stock when it was cheap. Apple was a loser.

Play awesome games, dune 2, commander keen, warcraft etc. Program shit in visual basic. Download dr. Dre mp3s and hit on cuties on msn and icq.

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Late 90s, but I always thought these were cute.

>>61251811
how badly did he hurt himself?

>>61257038
I have one. They're cute until the second something breaks and you have to disassemble the entire thing to reconnect one cable.

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gifcities.org

Anyone else want to cry those old nostalgic tears with me?