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

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    38·
    3 days 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@dubvee.orgEnglish
        5·
        3 days 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 model which was the consumer version of it.

        • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          3 days ago

          You’re real close to the “capacitor of death” models there. GX270s failed like a motherfucker.

            • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              3 days ago

              Between the capacitor plague and the tin whiskers from the phaseout of lead, hardware from that era failed constantly.

        • BakerBagel@midwest.social
          1·
          3 days ago

          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

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      5·
      3 days ago

      That or the ol’ tan cased dinosaurs.

      The gray Dell helped me through many-a “100 Games!” disc…

    • FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
      1·
      2 days ago

      Dell Dimension 2400. My family had the entry level model, and it still absolutely destroyed every prior computer we’d had performance-wise

    • D_C@lemm.ee
      81·
      3 days 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!

      • hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
        81·
        3 days ago

        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.

        • Treczoks@lemmy.world
          3·
          3 days ago

          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.

        • umbraroze@slrpnk.net
          2·
          2 days ago

          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.

  • dan00@lemm.ee
    16·
    3 days ago

    I don’t even know what you are talking about. I am young, very young. I enjoy rizzing in the toilets and skibiding everyday bro. So fresh. 🤙

    pls don’t leave me with the boomers…

  • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    3 days 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.

    • not_woody_shaw@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      Then you’d get a copy protected disc that wouldn’t play at all in the disc man, but you could copy it to a CD-R and that’d play just fine. To disable the copy protection you just hold shift while the cd tray closes.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    7·
    3 days ago

    I remember my first written CD. You put the CD into a transfer case and slide it into a large box. Shortly after, the empty transfer case comes back out. You have already prepared your CD image, not as a project or file, no, you had to prepare it on its own partition, on a disk that did not host anything else.

    Then you shutdown your computer, and reboot it basically into the burn program, which then tries to move the data fast enough from the disk partition to the CD burner. The speed, of course, was 1x, so this write operation could last an hour and a quarter.

    Then, your computer reboots back into the OS. You put the empty transfer case into the writer, and after some time, it comes back out with the media. And now you can finally read it and compare it to the data on that partition. Knock on wood, or whatever. Because about half the writes failed, and the media cost a fortune.

    • BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca
      4·
      2 days ago

      I let you front runners play with 1x and got a 2x with support for CD-RW, and because of it’s buffer it only trashed the expensive CD-R’s like 1/4 of the time. And I could use the computer a little if I dared!

  • over_clox@lemmy.world
    8·
    3 days ago

    I’m old enough to remember when computers didn’t even require a hard drive, they could just boot right into Basic from ROM.

  • Thyristor@lemm.ee
    7·
    3 days ago

    I started college with a 1.44 MB floppy disk in my pocket and graduated with a 1GB USB stick.

    • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
      4·
      3 days ago

      Those were pretty hard for floppies. Mine were 5.35" and cassette tape before that. But I was in high school at the time, so I probably need to respect my elder.