What was your favorite computer based thing to do between 1985 and 1995?
Not to slight any of our younger flutherites, but I’m wondering for those of you who actually had computers(or had access to computers) back in the early days. What was your favorite thing to do, or what things are nostalgic for you? I remember the days of MUDs, BBSs, The Demo MOD scene, using lynx because it’s all I had, USENET for things other than warez and pron, IRC wars, learning to program by sitting for hours in front of apple basic or logo, leaving a wardialer running for days and rushing home from class to see what I found, reading “the manifesto” and getting chills because I could relate. There are tons of other things, but what are yours?
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Hehe, I was too little for computers before ‘92, but that was when I got my first computer, a packard bell. It came with prodigy, but I didnt really know what it was for so I just played games. I stole a game from school called jill of the jungle, using 8 1.44mb floppies. When we got aol I just messed around in chat rooms, and then discovered the darker side involving bots, punters, and other cool things. I would download shareware games, and try and resourcehack to enable the full game.
Soon we got a powermac… And I got into IRC, directconnect(pc), and mp3s before they were well known. Back then, the best search engine was altavista. Hmm, I got into a lot of things, mostly the underbelly of the Internet.
When I got broadband I started collecting fansubs, and “worked” for a scanlation group for a summer…
I wasn’t just a computer nerd though – I did play catcher on the girls varsity softball team and coached tennis in a low-economic neighborhood :P
Our first computer was a packard bell with windows 3.1!
my first pc had windows 95 on it. I mostly played games on it like starcraft and then when we got Internet(aol dialup lol) I discovered I could use Internet explorer to look at photos and videos of naked ladies hehe and so began puberty…
3d graphics on an Amiga. You had to wait days for stuff to render but that was part of the fun.
The first machine I owned was a Tandy 1000SX in 1988. It screamed along at 4.77MHz and had 320K RAM and no hard drive until I convinced my Dad to plop down $400 for a 10MB drive. I had access to mainframe terminals starting in 1982 and got to learn from some of the guys at a university near where I lived in Germany. Good times.
I’m 29, and my first PC was a 286, and I just used DOS. Dosshell was a nice improvement and I also tried Windows 2 which was basically the same thing. I remember the old Norton Utilities from way back then too.
The next computer I had ran Windows 3.0 (I was jealous of my buddy with 3.1).
Anyway, my fav thing to do in those days was ewither play the Sierra games (huge fan) or use BBS’s which were fun.
I did a lot of programming back then. In 1991 I got online and discovered email and chat and MUDS.
Playing Commander Keen on my parents’ old 486 (well, I guess it was new at the time…) I sure do miss all those great DOS games…
Omgosh, I remember commander keen and the other Apogee games… & Lemmings, jazz jackrabbit, etc
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