Which was usually right next to the smoking section.
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I remember loading games from tape. Youâd have a standard tape recorder hooked up to your 8 bit micro (I had an Acorn Electron). Youâd type the command to load the game and press play at the same time and then wait half an hour with your fingers crossed.
Usually youâd have friends round and hot-seat. If it loaded thatâs what you played for the rest of the day because it was too much hassle to load anything else. And there were no saves and games were insanely hard.
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Remember the âinternet yellow pagesâ style printed books that listed website URLs?
Or Computer Shopper Magazine, which was an inch-thick set of ads from companies selling individual computer parts and accessories? Youâd price out a case, PSU, motherboard (there werenât many types), CPU, RAM, disk drives, cables etc. and order everything by phone from six different companies. I built my first PC that way â a 10MHz Turbo XT 8088, with 640K of RAM, a Hercules monochrome graphics card (720x350 resolution), one 3.5" floppy drive and one 5.25" floppy drive.
RAM came on DIP chips rather than SIMM or DIMM, which youâd manually put in the sockets, like this:
When I built mine I installed every one of those chips backwards. Only one chip was ruined and had to be replaced.
For a few years, if you were a gamer you upgraded every 4-6 months. If not a new CPU, at least a new GPU.
It still feels weird to me that Iâve had my current computer since 2011 and it still plays new games just fine, with just two GPU upgrades (one of which was forced by the first one dying). And I havenât needed a fresh reinstall of Windows either.
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The peeing section in the pool is right next to the non peeing section, soâŚ
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My sister had an electric typewriter for writing papers. It sounded like a machine gun. It was also really hard to type much more than 60 words per minute even on an electric typewriter because the keyboard had such a different feel from a computer keyboard
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Those were the best sites ever IMO. Iâd just find some math professorâs personal webpage, and there would be mathematical puzzles, corny jokes, offbeat political opinions, pictures of random family members⌠Stuff to keep me entertained for hours. Then Iâd move on to the next one in the web ring.
Then Iâd run into Mahir Cagri or similar. But I didnât care. The early internet was still fun despite (because of?) all the Mahirs.
I used Lynx for web browsing and Pine for email. I also used Usenet newsgroups and thought they were the shit.
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We had pretty comprehensive sex ed in Jr High.
We even had a guest lecture with Sue Johansen where she demonstrated how a condom works with a banana. 
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The first word processor program I used was EdLin. (Edlin? edlin?) It was a DOS program, and I used it to write Duran Duran fanfic and really bad poetry. It was the early/mid 80s, I was barely a teenager, what do you want?
That doesnât make me as nostalgic as DBase III, though, where I made my first database. I sigh, and then remember that the command line was actually a pain in the ass, and mice fucking rock. And, then feel a little let down because no database in the intervening years has ever matched the high I got from the first one.
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This is sex ed in the rural US:
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Edlin? Yuck! As soon as I could, I got MicroEMACS.
Back in the day, I needed something better than a line editor to cope with Power C on my old Corona PC. A big 512 k RAM! Two DS DD (720 k) 5-1/4 floppy drives! Nice green monitor, but proprietary video, unfortunately, so, if I wanted to use MS-DOS 3.3 rather than OEM DOS 1.2 (definitely!), graphics modes were right out of the picture.
I see that Mix Software, who put out Power C, is still in business. It doesnât look like their products have changed in a couple of decades.
Edit: Time flies when youâre having a good time (and memory flies with it). DS DD for 5-1/4" drives was 360 k. 720 k was the capacity of 3-1/2" DS DD floppies. That kind of drive was not common when I had the Corona.
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we played Oregon Trail that way in the 2nd grade, and another game we really liked called Miner.
LoadingâŚ
being able to run more than one program at a time took some getting used to. but we say âappsâ now, which sounds dumb to me. even âapplicationâ sounds dumb. its a program.
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What a wonderful program. I loved the control you had. I bought my first copy (version 4?) in about 1985 or so when we were in Salt Lake City. I remember driving down to Provo to the main office for some reason â maybe to get an upgrade? I forget.
Then first Novell (?) bought it, and then Corel. And MS Word took over. Bleah.
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Our first computer was a Corona. Got it in 1984. I remember using Multimate as a wordprocessor, which saved each page separately onto diskette. You had to repaginate every now and then, and the drive would grind away. Then we found out about RAM drives, and it sped up a lot. My current computer is probably a million times as fast.
I recall having fun doing stuff that would futz with Multimate â it wouldnât crash immediately, but it would do weird stuff like inserting letters into menus and such as you typed.
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When I hear âappsâ, I automatically think of the twice-baked potatoes at TGI Fridayâs. Because Iâm old.
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Just a few years as a server did that to me also. Iâll take a TRav app, w/ ChikParmSan, pls. Jeebus, thinking about myself at 23 (20+ years ago) waiting tables at a mall restaurant, that makes me feel older than everything else in this thread.
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So youâre saying you were an app server?
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And both obsolete.
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