04/09/2020 at 15:29 • Filed to: None | ![]() | ![]() |
![]() 04/09/2020 at 15:34 |
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Too old to die young now.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 15:37 |
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What’s that you say, sonny ? My hearing aid is acting up.
I made this into a Zoom background for a meeting today.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 15:39 |
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That’s just wrong... without the music.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 15:43 |
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Yup, now I feel old.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 15:47 |
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I was trying to spare unsuspecting readers the ear worm that comes with listening to it.
Als0, I remember first listening to it at normal speed on the Disney soundtrack as a kid. Now that’s old.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 15:48 |
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![]() 04/09/2020 at 15:49 |
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![]() 04/09/2020 at 15:52 |
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The Flying Toasters and Johnny Castaway were the bane of my existence in my first job after college as a network admin. Everyone in the organization would come up with bootleg copies of these digital vermin. Invariably those bootleg copies were virus-ridden. I was a digital Orkin man.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 15:58 |
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pfff. I’m so old that when I got the first Space Quest game, our PC’s CGA graphics meant I got to play it in full 4-color glory.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 16:00 |
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I still have the book! My mom held onto the books I had and we used them for our kids.
This book isn’t my book, but it’s the one I’m talking about!
![]() 04/09/2020 at 16:07 |
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Hahaha, nice screensaver.
I have a VIDEO! An actual video of an astronaut eating a floating banana on my Encarta CD-ROM.
Why would I ever dust off my physical encyclopedias when I can just take the dust cover off the PC, turn the power strip on, boot up, take a piss, finish booting, load the disc into my CD-ROM drive (2x speed, biatch!) and then find the AVI under “Space”?
EPIC. I mean, it doesn’t have any sound because not everyone has $250 laying around to add sound to their PC. 16-bit Soundblasters don’t grow on trees.
It was like having a $3,000 TV set that did everything a TV could do...but worse.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 16:08 |
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Oh god, I remember a coordinated plan that involved every kid opening that page at once in the computer lab with the volume all the way up.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 16:25 |
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I never had it per se, but I certainly remember when it appeared, and that it was a big thing. so yes, I am old.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 16:29 |
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Oh fantastic! Those get hard to hold onto. Sometimes, I can get a printing by going to half price books or something, but nothing is better than the copy you grew up with.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 16:30 |
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That’s really hard to do. How well did you manage to sync it?
![]() 04/09/2020 at 16:35 |
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Oh, it wasn’t synced at all, everyone just opened it at roughly the same time based on the wall clock. It was the end of the period, the idea was to just walk out and leave the room like that. Not being synced makes it even more annoying.
Most of us were stopped in the hallway and made to come back in and fix it.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 16:39 |
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I’m hearing it in my head, and I approve.
My little computer party trick was to program the screen on the Commodore PET s or TRS80s in the computer store to scroll rude words. Essentially, sophomoric pranks were my primary motivation for learning BASIC.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 16:50 |
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That was a good motivation though
![]() 04/09/2020 at 17:25 |
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I remember it existing. The real question is did you have Simpsons sounds for computer sounds
![]() 04/09/2020 at 17:25 |
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Aaaand saved
04/09/2020 at 17:37 |
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Not Simpsons, but I do remember Win95/WinXP themes.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 17:44 |
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Version 4? In color? I had After Dark v1.0 in black and white.
Uphill. both ways. get off my lawn.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 17:54 |
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I worked at Computer City (a Tandy company) in the early 90s and I sold a LOT of soundblaster 16 multimedia kits - sound card, CD ROM drive (and interface card?) and speakers.
More than once, a customer came in and asked to purchase “a multimedia” and when I handed them a kit, they got all agitated and said they didn’t need the kit, just “the multimedia” which was either just a sound card or just a CD ROM drive.
![]() 04/09/2020 at 18:45 |
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Ha! I just quoted "Movin Out" by Billy Joel to a friend and that I could probably jump in a singalong of any 52nd Street or Glass Houses song from memory! For whatever reason I have youtubed "Honesty" recently
![]() 04/09/2020 at 23:37 |
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I do indeed recall.
However, I also recall that my first computer did not have it, because it ran GeoWorks (later known as GEOS). It wasn’t powerful enough to run Windows 3.1 smoothly.
![]() 04/10/2020 at 09:15 |
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“Do you want PCI or VESA?”
“I have Visa or American Express...”
I’ll never forget ordering our family’s first and only PC 6-7 years after the Commodore stopped working well. IIRC, it was 1993 and cost about $2,300 (or $4,100 today if you ignore Moore’s Law a little). By the time Dell started soft-selling us on the upgrades like a sound card and speakers for $200, or a modem for $100, I was like “Don’t worry, dad, I can install those later!”
Fast forward 3 years, I’m leaving for college. I managed to get a CD drive installed, and sound was courtesy of the headphone jack (on the CD drive only) and some hand-me-down speakers. I can’t remember if we ever got an internal modem on it, I think we just did external because it was easier. Opening the case was at least 10 screws, not a quick clamshell. And then you’d cut yourself on the rough cut metal.
The days before USB and plug-n-play were a lot tougher than today. All the jumpers and addresses, interference with other devices...