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

  • Emerald@lemmy.world
    7·
    3 days ago

    This isn’t very old lol. That computer could be from 2010 and CD’s and Sharpies were used then. Also, LimeWire was functional until like late 2010.

    • D_C@lemm.ee
      251·
      4 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
        321·
        4 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
          10·
          4 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.

        • Rose@slrpnk.net
          6·
          4 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.

          • hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
            1·
            3 days ago

            Dude would just walk up to the tape drive, masterfully tweak the screw for a second, and it’d work.

            Me too! For some reason I was the only guy in school who could do that. Fun times. 😊

            Because I had a floppy drive and that’s what I obviously preferred to use.

            In the beginning these were not available. Also I remember them costing the same as the C64 itself. As soon as I could afford one I got one obviously.

            I just another item that could a generational riddle: the hole-punch that made your one-sided floppy two-sided.

            • Rose@slrpnk.net
              1·
              3 days ago

              In the beginning these were not available. Also I remember them costing the same as the C64 itself. As soon as I could afford one I got one obviously.

              I guess I was lucky. My parents got me my first Commodore 64 C second hand, and it included the floppy drive. Guess it was affordable that way.

              I just another item that could a generational riddle: the hole-punch that made your one-sided floppy two-sided.

              Ooh, I didn’t have one of those fancy pieces of gear! I lived in a small town. Used to see disk notchers at the book/stationery store, which had the reputation of being slightly pricy place but was the only store in town that had computer stuff at the time.

              Instead, I figured out a way to cleanly cut the notch using scissors. Two horizontal cuts, then two cross cuts, then carefully cut out the remainder.

          • hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
            1·
            2 days ago

            A flathead is still a screwdriver, is it not?

            It was a Philips screw IIRC. You can also use a flathead screwdriver on them but you shouldn’t IMHO.

            • Farid@startrek.website
              1·
              3 days ago

              Then I misunderstood and was thinking of a different adjustment of the head. The one I was thinking about us when you wedge the screwdriver behind the head and bend it otwards a little for better contact. For that you need a flat tool.

      • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.caEnglish
        103·
        4 days ago

        I mean, they are half right. The music industry is eating itself. Back catalog is outperforming new releases year after year because new music is dead.

        • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.netEnglish
          4·
          3 days ago

          New music is doing fantastic, it’s record companies that are dying. Most artists just self-publish these days.

        • Thassodar@lemm.eeEnglish
          5·
          4 days ago

          Hi! I’m a musician with new music that is not dead! Check it out: www.thassodar.com

          Bonus: 99% of them are instrumental, and the ones that aren’t don’t have any actual lyrics and are only on SoundCloud.

        • Vespair@lemm.ee
          5·
          4 days ago

          New music is thriving. There is more music of almost every style and genre imaginable being released today than ever before. What’s dead is traditional music distribution channels and marketing avenues like radio, and the popular means of promoting music now reward the most dogshit meme-able content. But if you seek out music yourself, the modern era is a paradise of incredible music; don’t blame music itself for the failures of the industry to reward good within it.

          • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.caEnglish
            15·
            4 days ago

            New music is surviving. Of course it will survive. Music is an expression of our humanity.

            Thriving? I think not. When was the last time you went to a bar and people just starting singing and playing folk music? When was the last time you even heard of that happening? Once it wasn’t weird, it was normal.

            Music is dead because it has been elevated to something that is performed by the few and consumed by the many, instead of something that we all live together.

            • Vespair@lemm.ee
              2·
              3 days ago

              “Haute cuisine is dead! When was the last time you walked into a restaurant and saw aspic on the menu? When was the last time you heard of somebody serving aspic? Once aspics weren’t weird, they were the hottest fashion!”

              ^ That’s you.

              Trying to define the relevancy and lifeline of music as a whole based on the popularity of pub folk music is crazy.

              More people are making music today than ever before, as barriers monetary, technological, and knowledge-based only continue to lower with time. I have no idea how you’ve managed to draw the opposite conclusion.

    • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      5·
      4 days ago

      I had those at home when I was a kid.

      I was born around the 2000s

      It’s not really that old lol

      Granted, I was in a developing country, so the timeline of technological development is not quite the same (People’s Republic of China).

      Do people in the west still have Cassettes in the 2000s?

      • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        Those of us who can remember used those to save programs. It could take an hour or more if you had a large enough tape save a single file.

      • klu9@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        A lot of people did: home, portable, car. But a lot of people had also left them behind for ordinary CDs, CDs full of MP3s and dedicated MP3 players like Rios and iPods.

  • boonhet@lemm.ee
    3·
    2 days ago

    No, because my country was pretty much too small and poor to have brand-name sharpies, we just had felt pens with other names. Carioca I believe was the most prominent brand back then.

  • voodooattack@lemmy.world
    11·
    3 days ago

    Old enough to remember using a 3½” floppy disk to boot my first PC and mess around with GW/Q-BASIC and play DOS games.

    The disks were strongly perfumed (I guess the guy I bought my pirated games from liked to do that for some reason), and I still remember that aroma.

  • Perhapsjustsniffit@lemmy.ca
    3·
    2 days ago

    Record off the radio to cassette and an active market for pirated live shows because we lived past nowhere and it was all we had access to.

  • oppy1984@lemm.eeEnglish
    28·
    4 days ago

    2001, Dre’s album drops, nobody has it yet. In walks the kid who has a T1 line and a 5 disc CD copier with a spindle of discs. He sits down in homeroom, puts the spindle on his desk and says Dre’s new album five bucks right here.

    He sold out before the end of the day, made a good amount of cash, and was racking it in for months getting people albums that they requested because none of us could get it work with our slow connection. Of course when the two competing ISPs upgraded their networks later that year, he lost the majority of his business, but for a few months he was our pirate savior.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
      4·
      4 days ago

      There was a kid who was selling the cheat codes for pokemon he printed off gamefaqs at my school. One of my friends found out I had internet access and asked me if I would get them for him. After I did that some other people asked me as well. Eventually the kid who was selling them got wind of it and got a couple of his other friends together to jump me on the playground at recess. I remember laying on the ground looking up at him standing over me threatening me if I didn’t stop doing that and just thinking “this is really stupid…”