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

  • Admiral Patrick
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    1 month 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
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        1 month 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.

    • @D_C@lemm.ee
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      21 month 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!

      • 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.

          • @hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 month 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.

  • Brave Little Hitachi Wand
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    11 month 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.

  • @boonhet@lemm.ee
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    11 month ago

    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.

  • Ken Oh
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    11 month 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
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      1 month 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
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        11 month 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.world
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          11 month 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
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            11 month 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
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                11 month 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.

    • Natanox
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      11 month 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.

    • @Valmond@lemmy.world
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      11 month ago

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

      🗑️💿🚮💔

        • Kind of a joke few would get. For a period of time in the late 80’s into the early 90’s it was very hard to get a german made VCR. Odering them straight from there wasn’t really a option. You could only get them at high cost unless you knew someone in the military over there. They would go to the local PX, buy one and ship it home. It was good way to make really good quality copies.

  • @Emerald@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

      • Jerkface (any/all)
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        11 month 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
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          1 month 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
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          01 month 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)
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            1 month 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
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              11 month 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.

      • @devfuuu@lemmy.world
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        1 month 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.

        • @BenLeMan@lemmy.world
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          11 month 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).

        • dohpaz42
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          11 month ago

          It was better than WAV; a nice bridge over to MP3.

  • @voodooattack@lemmy.world
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    01 month ago

    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.