That's crazy. I had no idea everyone said "look at the computer". Also, I miss being a kid. Growing up in the 90s and 00s was magical time.
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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Trading floppies at the library
Dubbing tapes with my ghetto blaster.
Spamming duckjob in AOL chatrooms.
Ahhh the good old 90s for me... Get together, play games, share information and combos about games. I remember playing Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, and trying to see who can do all the combos or fatalities while playing on the same computer. I recently find a photo from those times. Feeling a bit nostalgic.
One day a coworker announced he had bought a PC with the new 80286 processor running at 10 MHz (an unheard of blistering speed).
That afternoon the entire Engineering Department went to his house to look at it.
That was my first real computer. We had two games: where in the world is carmen Sandiego and kings quest 4 rosella's peril. There was not enough disk space to have both games (size 2 5.25 floppies each IIRC) installed at the same time. Then we got quest for glory. That was special.
No.
I think my equivalent at that age would have been going to a friend's house to watch their newly acquired colour TV instead of our B/W one.
Before that, listening to the radio.
And before that, admiring your friends newly acquired onion that you both helped tie to their belt.
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There’s a motel near where my mom lives that only recently updated their sign from “colour TV” to “High Def TV”
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Im 20 and I did this as well because cheap broadband internet didn't arrive everywhere at the same time
What about dial up? OP is clearly talking about the dial up era.
People are still on dialup today
And ota tv baby!
Old enough to know what RealPlayer was. And to use Netscape communicator.
RealPlayer still exists and I use it.
I remember when Netscape Navigator came out and it was brilliant, better than mosaic, but slow to load by comparison and we all called it bloatware.
We had internet at work (you could rlogin to different servers and some of them were fast and had internet access), but at home it was pay per minute dial up - check no one is using the phone, dial in, download email via pop3, disconnect.
I wasted hours of my life on irc but nowadays I waste hours of my life on lemmy instead.
I'm so curious, why do you use RealPlayer? I remember only ever using it because some downloadable videos were in their format. They never struck me as good quality or especially good compression. And the player itself seemed to get worse and more bloated with every update.
Uhhh, if there's a video that you don't want to be held hostage to intrusive ads or buffering during a bad internet connection, realplayer can help with that.
Interesting. So you can watch arbitrary web videos using it? That's so different than how it started!
Uhhh, the browser extension offers to download from pretty much any youtube video, but not always all. If there's one that won't download, it's worth trying again after the next realplayer update.
The videos end up in my real player videos folder, from whence I can watch them uninterrupted.
Netscape? We didn't have Internet when I grew up.
I had to learn from magazines how to configure autoexec.bat to load DOS in high memory, and ask me on boot if whatever game I wanted to run needed extended or expanded memory, and which drivers (mouse, joystick, sound card...) not to load in order to leave enough precious kilobytes of memory available for the game to fit in...
Heh, I got a computer at the end of the DOS era. For all of the things like that, a friend of mine guided me through. You might find it hard to believe but I had to wait 3+ years to even get the Internet at home after getting a computer, so my experience with browsers was mostly at school and a job I got in highschool. At home, I did get secret internet access against my parents' wishes by sharing that same friend's internet account creds and dialing in late at night. If caught, the excuse was always that I'd dialed into that friend's machine to download some files. Technically was true like 1% of the time haha. So yeah I didn't have real Internet access myself either, for a long time.
I remember editing a config/ini file to add the word HIMEM and setting IRQs manually for sound cards and things like that. Not sure I had to do all the steps you mentioned though since our first computer had 24 whole MB of ram. I think most people had 16 (or often 8) at the time!
Back then 640KB was supposed to be enough for anyone.
It wasn't.
HIMEM. SYS, if I recall correctly, allowed you to tell DOS to load as much as possible of itself (and maybe even some drivers?) into “high memory” (within the first, and probably last, megabyte, I believe) if it existed and the processor was at least a 286, freeing more of those precious 640KB for programs to run in (DOS by default didn't give them any means of addressing any more memory, even if it existed).
There was also expanded memory (EMS) and, from the 286 on, extended memory (XMS), different, incompatible, methods of addressing memory above that first MB (up to a whopping 8MB with EMS and an absurd 4GB with XMS), and depending on what the program you wanted to run required you had to choose one or the other (which became much easier once the memmaker utility came along).
Then true 32-bit software able to access the whole 4GB address space in 386s and later came along, and all that became ancient history, until we started needing more than 4GB and had to move to 64 bits.
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We used go to Internet cafes and log onto anonymous chat rooms as a tween group of three. Thought it was HILARIOUS. then eventually got computers in our houses... Dial up.. Rotten.com...etc etc... Funniest time of my life hands down. Big up maddox.xmission articles.👐 Would love to find all the random hilarious videos that made me crack up so much.
There was a seedy building in Memphis with a pretty dingy vibe that looked like a bad strip club. You could go in as a sixteen year old, get a giant extra caffeinated oreo milkshake, and play Tribes all night on the LAN
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You think my buddy had internet? We would go over to his house to play DOS games.
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AlbinoBlackSheep Ytmnd Newgrounds Fark Stumbleupon
Good shit
Diablo 2 required OVER 1GB of hard drive space to install and 3 CDs. Computer game install sizes are getting out of control.
N64 with 4 controllers and Forsaken while getting a sweet sweet 15 frames per second of motion sickness-inducing awesomeness.
LAN party just to play the Unreal Tournament demo.
Discovering you could use 3333333333333333333 as the CD key for Starcraft.
Heroes of Might and Magic hotseat multiplayer games taking all weekend.
xvid movies that would fit on a CD-R
"Have you guys heard of this broadband thing?"
Monthly nerd conclave to install Linux from the latest Linux Magazine CD. Mandrake has this new KDE 1.0 thing, looks neat.
Magic: The Gathering - Coat of Arms is dumb why does he have 2 of them AND Slivers??!
WAAAY before that: MUDs via BBS (and later Telnet/zMUD 5.55)
We ran a 2-node bbs out of our house.
For those too young to know what that means:
We had 2 computers networked to each other running the bulletin board - each with a separate dedicated phone line. Each line had call forwarding set up to the other, so users could dial either number, and if one of the nodes was available they could log in. And the real magic was that 2 users could actually live chat instead of just leaving messages. You haven't lived until you've played multiplayer TradeWars or LORD.
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We were trying to load up Leisure Suit Larry from 5.25" floppy on my friend's dad's IBM PC before he noticed we were in his office downstairs.
I had a hard time getting past that game's age verification, which consisted of trivia questions an 18-year-old American should know, because I was a 6-year-old German.
But I just systematically tried out all combinations (taking notes) until it launched. And I beat the game, learning the first basics of English that way.
So yeah, some of the first English words I learned were "preservative", "hooker" and "Spanish Fly".
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We got our first computer around 1980, there was no information superhighway then. I also remember before that, when pinball tables were pretty cool.
Pinball tables are still arguably very cool.
The millennial amount of old haha
Back when 1984 was just a story, not Government policy
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I remember getting in trouble for showing my friend questionable things I found on Newgrounds
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Typing in the original Goatse URL at somebody's house on their computer
Changing their browser homepage.
Making it their desktop wallpaper, screenshotting the desktop, setting the desktop to that screenshot, then "hide icons."
A classic prank that persisted long after into the workplace lol
I was doing this with friends as late as 2012, because all of us were poor and couldn't afford those fancy new iphones
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