No. Not one bit.
Between the 50Hz fluorescent tubes that were common at the time and the cheap shit monitors running at 60Hz, also common at the time, I had migraines 3-4 times a week.
I categorically do not miss those days.
The mouse was the rolly ball kind, and you hoped that you were assigned a computer where it still worked properly, or you could arrive in time to grab one where the mouse still worked. Or, if your lunch period coincided with the lab class lunch period, you came in to swap mouses with the bully in the senior class.
Yeah, you could do the thing where you remove the ball and try to clean it, but that only works so much, and for so many times
I totally do.
No
I was lucky in the early 90s in that my dad had a PC for work. A 14.4 modem and random BBS’s to dial up to, and I got an interesting first experience with computers. Our local library had UNIX PCs, so I had to learn random protocols like telnet and gopher to access anything. Once I got to middle school we had labs like this. I definitely miss the LAN café feel of that era.
Man, I remember being blown away after getting a 14.4 modem after dialing up with my 2400 from the family 286… Data was instant, those ANSI greetings from the BBS were just there.
Going to university in the late 90s/early 00s, when not everyone had home computers and especially not laptops. We had the computer lab in the basement where were could go to print out essays, do research, etc.
There was the library as well with a few computers on each floor, but those were always taken, and lab access came with our tuition anyway.
Other than that and a rather simple cellphone, we were device free. We still took notes by hand, copiously highlighted lines in ridiculously overpriced text books, met with friends at the coffee shop to study, and essentially kept technology compartmentalised.
Do I miss it? Oh hell yes.
I miss the freedom. We would sneak out of class, play games, smoke weed, fuck. Sneak out of the house at 1am, cause hell, be back in bed for school. No ring cams, no cell phones. I didnt have all the bullshit of the world shoved in my face daily. Just hop on my bike, be back before night. I dont miss my circumstances though, my childhood was ruined by adults and social workers. I still remember the era fondly though. Life was good. I had friends and loves who I cared so deeply about. I didnt feel so strongly about anyone until I had kids. I dont think I ever will again.
I miss the 35 cent scribbler and way better gym equipment.
IDK how old that picture is but it reminds me of my computer class back at school and the computers at the library. Back then Windows XP/2000 was the thing but there were many older NT 4.0 machines and I think even ancient 3.51 machines too lol.
The Internet was a very different thing back then. I used to spend ages on CBBC games and other random sites I’ve forgotten by now xD
I’m feeling old, because our computer “lab” was a bunch of apple 2s, which predates this scene, which they just sat us infront of when there was free time and fucked off and didnt teach us a goddamn thing… So all I remember is sitting infront of a green glowing screen randomly hitting buttons on a keyboard doing fuckall nothing.
Yeah, my first computer lab was similar, full of old Apple 2s, lot of Oregon Trail and Mavis Beacon teaches typing. Wild that kids don’t take or have typing classes any longer. I can’t say I miss it perse, but it was great to have access to a computer when we couldn’t afford one at home.
Not even learning about dying of dysentery? Or where in the world a certain person was?
Yeah… playing runescape in computer class then the browser got blocked so I used the old .txt to .bat trick to open it
@echo off was hackerman level stuff to my peers
Fuck yeah.
We had it way better than we knew.
I miss who I was in those days. Or more to the point, I miss not worrying about bills, the state of the world, the health and well-being of my family. I miss that my biggest concerns were around school exams and girls.
And yeah, I do miss the culture of the time, and the general attitude of hopefulness that seemed to pervade. But times change, life moves on, and as they say, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Yep. There weren’t devices everywhere so we all learned about them together, hunted for Easter eggs, and trolled each other by inverting mice and flipping screens and all of that. It felt cleaner because there wasn’t an ad on every screen. I remember getting a book with exercises in it and just working through it for keyboarding, and going to the lab in a class to do research for a report (or just goof around on the Internet). I also remember in later high school when the IT director informed us very proudly the school had almost a TB of storage across our several computer labs like this.
Good times. I do also remember having THE computer for the school and it rolled in on a heavy cart.
What do you mean, old enough?
Those are fairly modern computers. They don’t even have 5.25-inch floppy drives!
