I remember my dad bringing home a BBC Micro when we were kids. I knew just enough to get Chuckie Egg running.
Later we had a PC running Windows 3.1. I was an expert in crashing the plane on F-19 Stealth Fighter. One day I deleted the OS and that was the end of that computer…
Some years later we got an old Elonex PC that dad’s work were getting rid of. It was just good enough to run Windows 95. We had dial-up internet from Freeserve for a time - we would have I think 2 hours in the evening to use it.
I remember
- Trying and failing to download shitty quality videos from wwf.com (I was a huge Attitude-era Wrestling mark...)
- Playing questionable games on Newgrounds
- Trawling Yahoo directories and webrings for random weird stuff
- Trying to download a low-bitrate rip of the Macarena from Kazaa and giving up when it estimated 2 days DL time.
- Terrible browser-war era websites. Broken Javascript/HTML. BLINKING TEXT. Incompatible flash videos.
I broke our family computers so often that I knew the Windows licence key without having to look. I learned how to fix the computer out of sheer terror for what my dad might do if he came home from work to find the PC broken again.
After we got rid of the dialup I would go the library pretty much every day. I had literally boxes of floppy disks that I would stuff into my pockets so that I could download stuff to take home. Mostly old emulators, ROMs and text adventures from ifarchive.
Crazy to think the lengths I would happily go to for things we take for granted now.
I grew up pretty poor. When I was a kid my dad brought home a pentium 2 that didn’t work. He picked it out of the garbage, told me I could have it, but that it didn’t work.
We often rode the bus to school. We would get off at school and my parents would get off at work. And then we would meet them on the bus on the way home.
After getting the computer we started stopping off at the library, so I could check out books about computers. I would take them home and start reading. (I was illiterate until I was 10 years old, and this really kicked off my reading ability, to this day I still read 100-120 books per year)
Over time I was able to figure out enough to diagnose the issue (bad PSU and bad HDD), garbage pick replacements, and then install DOS from floppy I got from school.
From there I started picking up as many parts and computers as I could and filling my corner of our studio apartment with parts. I loved writing text files and documenting what I was doing, like a little knowledgebase of what I was figuring out. Eventually, we got evicted, and due to having to live in our car for a couple of years I had to give up my computer. Left it out in the curb. Ever since, I have been obsessed with terminal based interfaces and to this day almost exclusively use terminal.
Modem noises.
ATM0 so you don"t wake your parents while youre dialing in somewhere
TeeeiiiDoooŠššTrrrrŠššKrrrr ŠššPeeePrrrrrŠššPeeee
So accurate.
Sitting there watching with satisfaction as MSDOS 6.22 DEFRAG.EXE did its thing.
Copying code out of a magazine to put into debug.com to run
Flipping 5.25 disks over on Apple II since their drives weren’t dual-sided
If you don’t like vi, you should try edlin
Pressing the “interrupt” button on Mac classics and feeling like a hacker
Hey that sounds like only about 19.2k not 28.8!
X/y/zmodem wars
Lots
I actually love vi to this day. As long as you understand the basic concepts (how to navigate, append/insert, switch between modes, save and exit) it’s great. I’m a touch-typer so I could whiz around vi like nobody’s business.
HATED Emacs though
Oh MAN those magazine listings!
I remember my mom, bless her, reading them to me so I could type the bloody things in becauase, being partially blind, I couldn’t get the bloody page close enough to my face to properly read the infinite lines of DATA statements :)
And then, years later, they finally came out with checksum programs so you could see a number at the end of each line and compare it with what was in the magazine.
Crazy to think back, innit? :)
For me as a kid growing up in the 80s, it’s absolutely walking into Radio Shack (my favorite place in the mall next to the arcade!) and seeing a TRE-80 Model II set up for demo.
Kind of intresting as I think about it that I ended up not going for a Tandy computer and instead bought an Atari ;) No regrets. I still adore my 800XL!
- Programming big multi-media rigs with eight-hole paper tape and a thumb punch. #FourYorkshiremen
Trying to fly in Chuck Yeager’s Flight Simulator and not experience vertigo 🫠.
“it’s a great day for flying!”
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Playing Repton 2 also on a BBC micro in my parent’s bedroom.
Dung Beetles, Karateka, Night Driver and Transylvania on the Apple 2. Moon Patrol and Aztec Challenge on the C64. Flood, Night Hunter, Monkey Island, Technocop on Amiga. Being blown away with how much of an upgrade the Amiga Mortal Kombat was over the Master System version.
First DOS PC with dial-up. FastTracker2, using a terminal ftp finding MOD files from old Amiga favourites, FAQs, and Doom patches. BBSes, Legend of the Red Dragon and Planets: The Exploration Of Space. Writing Web 1.0 HTML pages and hacky QBasic programs for anything and everything. Fossil drivers and WinSock.
I didn’t even realise Mortal Kombat was available on those 2 platforms! My friend’s dad sold me 2 A500s, an A500+ and a crate of cracked floppies for £20 back in the early 2000s when they were out of favour. I hunted down a null-modem cable so I could copy ADFs over from the PC,. Played a lot of Premier Manager on those, and reading old disk magazines. But mostly my memories are of guru meditation errors, cleaning the dust from the mouseball and contending with dodgy floppy disks / drives.
Loading games from DOS.
Making my own boot discs and fucking with a balancing act of EMS/XMS virtual memory to get Descent and Ultima 7 to work on my 386.
Config.sys and autoexec.bat were a dark art! I think I still have an old 486 somewhere with system commander installed.
A couple:
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CRC Errors when restoring 9-track tapes (the large reels) on a mini at work.
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A manager not knowing a removable 256meg Disk Pack suffered a heard crash. So he mounted it on 4 or 5 production drives, destroying the hardware. He did this to test if the Disk pack was OK. This caused almost a month of agony while we went looking for hardware to replace the drives. This caused manufacturing to slow down since inventory could not be ordered.
I can almost laugh now :)
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Floppies. So many floppies.
All unlabelled, with a bunch of corrupted ones but you never threw them out just in case it was a one off and you really needed that extra megabyte? Or was that just me?
And I still have them. In a box. And any day now I’ll get my double speed Sony USB floppy drive and image them. And clearly I’ll still be able to open the files that are on them.
Don’t even breathe near it until the hard drive is parked!!
