[crumbles into dust]

I'm exactly that old.
Edit: The PC in the image is a bit anachronistic. This is the workhorse we're all thinking of:
- Wasn't that called the optiplex, or something similar? Pretty sure I had one myself.
  
  I had an Optipex from that era too. It was "horizontal" but could also stand vertically. It was the business model.
  This one, but beige:
  The image is the ~~Precision~~ Dimension model which was the consumer version of it.
- That or the ol' tan cased dinosaurs.
  The gray Dell helped me through many-a "100 Games!" disc...
- Dell Dimension 2400. My family had the entry level model, and it still absolutely destroyed every prior computer we’d had performance-wise
- I think we had that one.
- This was the first desktop I used with a big ol’ chunky CRT. I played around installing so many different windows XP themes
- I maintain dozens of the black & silver Optiplexes, they're used in Raw Thrills arcade games like The Fast and the Furious, Big Buck Hunter Pro, Guitar Hero Arcade... They are workhorses; usually clean it and recap the power supply (which are kind of a bitch to disassemble) and they're good for another few years.
  I still run into the blue/grey ones like your picture, but not in use. Usually stored in the basement of a bar.
  My personal collection includes a couple of first-generation Optiplexes, the beige GX1. Dell is a bigger part of my life than I ever imagined or hoped. 😅

Naw. I'm this fucking old:
- 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!
  
  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.
  
  I'm old enough to know why people used pencils for cassettes. It wasn't coincidence. Count the number of teeth in the casette, then look at the number of facets on a standard pencil.
- I wonder how many will realize it's not just a cassette tape to listen to music...
  
  The TI/99 also had cassettes
- You used a screwdriver to store 73 kB?
  
  It's a sonic screwdriver.

I'm this old:
- 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.
- A question for people who have never used a cassette. What do you think the pencil is for?
  
  To mark the spot on the tape where your favorite song starts.
  
  The pencil fits in the hole. You can use that to move the tape. If it’s too loose, the tape player can draw it out and you have a mess to fix. To clean that mess up you also need the pencil to wind the tape from outside the cassette back into it.
- 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?
  
  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.
  
  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.
- I recorded songs off the radio to cassette
- Me as well Some of the things I first downloaded went onto cassette tape.

i witnessed the creation of the mp3 format!
- RealAudio
  
  oh yeah that piece of crap i haven't missed ^^
  
  .ra files taught me why proprietary is a bad word.
  
  And rmvb files were all the rage. Those sweet video files with only 32MB... Peak compression. What the world was before h264 and before youtube existed was amazing.
  
  My computer’s mobo was so shitty, it played .midi files badly. I was shocked when I went to a mate’s and the same midis sounded like the song they’re actually supposed to be.
- And then backing them onto zip disks. Good times.
  
  Bro, Zip disks were for the porn you downloaded from WinMX.
- Mod files
  
  YES! I loved XM Tracker back in the days
- Can you tell us anything about the professors?

Everytime I see limewire I feel left out.
Where are my Kaaza hommies at??
- Napster!
  
  What's crazy is that none of the other P2P apps that came after ever had as nice of an interface as Napster. I guess that's cause Napster compiled Mac and Windows native apps while most other P2P apps were Java jars.
- Here!
  Kazaa, Kazaa light, WinMX, DC++. I used them all.
- How did the progression go? Napster, Morpheus, Kazaa, Limewire?
  
  I mean sure, if you just want to skip Bearshare
  
  gnutella, surely!!
  
  Where did DC++ fit in?
- Where are my eMule fuckers at?
  
  That donkey was the goat.
  
  Emule/Edonkey
  Yup
  
  No SoulSeek fans here?
- My user name stands for KaZaA Lite User 9.
- Slsk (Soulseek) was far superior. It was the best for getting full albums and leaked stuff. If you found someone with a fast connection and thick library it was like gold.
  Shoutout to everyone that got Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead album with “Mike Jones” randomly played in the background.
  
  Slsk is still around today and people swear by it.

Im Not even 40. Leave me alone.

I'm quite a bit older than this...
- Yeah, I was going to bring up Turbo buttons, but then realised that the Commodore Vic 20 in my bedroom predates that by quite some margin 😇
  
  I’m plastic Kawasaki keyboard on top of the C64 keyboard old.
  
  Vic 20 -> C=64 -> few 386/486 units -> AMD K6-2 and a ton of stuff after that. And maybe something in between.
  And now I'm writing this in my garage computer which I picked up from a e-waste pile at work few years back and it has more computing power than pretty much all the systems combined I had before being 18 years old. And when we (as a family) got our first "mobile" phone it was hardwired to a car electronics since they took 'a bit' more power than the supercomputers we carry in our pockets today (obviously Li-ion batteries were not a thing either, but that old Motorola NMT450 took a crapload of power by todays standards).
  It's been a wild ride so far. My grandparents were on top of the technology when they got the first landline phone around the neighborhood (I'm living in a rural area so it was not a new invention back then by any stretch) and now I can just yell to a entity in my palm to show me pictures from another planet or a high definition live video from Earth orbit.
  And still I'm somehow trying to teach basic tehcnology concepts to both my parents and my kids. It's bizarre to try and explain about benefits of touch typing to a 16 year old who thinks it's pretty much impossible for anyone to type out an essay at school containing 2000 words in an hour (33wpm)...

Remember how when you would burn a CD you couldn't use your computer lest the write buffer dropped too low and the burn world fail?
- I remember buying a stack of CDs only to find out they were +R, not -R, and this utterly useless (or something like that, can't specifically recall whether ±R/RW).
  
  I remember this being a DVD thing. By the time I got a dvd burner though mine supported both.
  The RW issue with CDs was that a lot of older players couldn’t read them.
  
  There were no CD+Rs
- Or trying to re-burn a cdrw but it was originally not burnt with the same soft as yours 😓
  🗑️💿🚮💔
- I remember the funny lines on the back when I accidentally bumped into the tower or had the subwoofer on as it was burning.
  Also holding down on the close-pin on a discman (so it would keep spinning the disc) and differently coloured sharpies were a great way to colourize your collection.

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.
- 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..."
  
  The playground Mafia, you stop cutting into my business or your going to have an extra long nap time. Capiche?

I don't even know what you are talking about. I am young, very young. I enjoy rizzing in the toilets and skibiding everyday bro. So fresh. 🤙
pls don't leave me with the boomers...
- No, the boomers had punch cards. That's an entire other level.

I remember the moment I realised my fancy new Walkman could read data CD-Rs and I could fit all my mp3s into one 700mb disc. I felt insane, majestic, limitless.
- Then you'd get a copy protected disc that wouldn't play at all in the disc man, but you could copy it to a CD-R and that'd play just fine. To disable the copy protection you just hold shift while the cd tray closes.
- I ended up even buying some rewritable mini discs because they were so much smaller and still good enough space for some mp3 files.
  
  I didn't find out about mini discs until years later. Best I knew was the lost technology of CD-RW

the computer isn't beige enough.
- Packard Bell with the ole pressing F5 on boot beep to run Doom 2.
- EMachine has entered the chat
  
  Back in my day we would chemically castrate people that used computers! They were modern day witches!
- Better? This was the one I remember running Windows 95. I'm actually shocked at how white this one is. Was everything tinted more back in the 90s? Like going to Mexico in a movie. I feel like it adds a filter.

I grew up with these.
- Not exactly this one, but I remember the old PC had 5.25 and 3.5", and the power was a big red switch, felt like you were juicing up the grid.
  
  Ya the switch to the right back. Like house breaker when you switched it on
- Quit bragging.
  
  More like dating myself.

I'm older.
Let's just leave it at that
- Yeah, I remember flippies and casettes, but I'm too young for 8 track.

We're as far away from the 90s as the 90s were from the 60s.
Ugh..
- If they produced an equivalent of That 70s Show today the "very special episode of" would be the one where 9/11 happens.
- But we are inching up to the 2060s! Lol
  
  We are closer to the 2060s than the 1960s.
  This year, 1975 is as far away as 2075.
  
  Let's hope we make it there!
- I passed the day that was farther away from my birthday than my birthday was to the start of WW2 years ago.
  
  I just checked and oh crap, me too! Almost 20 years ago...

Commodore64 gang represent!
- I remember watching my mom sit and type code for games from magazines. If she made a mistake you’d know it. “MOTHERFUCKER!!!!” rang through the entire place.
- Floppy drive. Fancy.
- That monitor was really underrated. I used it for decades for game consoles, VCRs, etc. after the C64 went obsolete.
- Hey, hey, you gotta tag that as NSFW. So sexy
- where's your cassette drive

- I'm not even 30 yet and I ripped CDs in my youth. I didn't use limewire though, we would use torrents already at that point.

Yup, and eventually I got a disk drive with LIGHTSCRIBE and just put the album art on the burned CD. I felt like hot shit.
- You fucking were, that's some fancy ass equipment right there.
- It’s funny, I finally got one of those and used it once.

Limewire? How about DC++ and eMule?
- Napster, Kazaa and Morpheus to add a few names to the hat.
  
  Ah, I forget about Kazaa and Kazaa Lite.
  
  Living the golden age. Fuck yeah. Kazaa was the life. Personally I was a heavy eMule user.
  
  Yep, Napster was the first I remember. It got sued too, by Lars Ulrich of Metallica. I also remember Limp Bizkit and some others doing a Napster tour to give a middle finger to the artists making a big deal about piracy.
  
  I still feel the pain of downloading something and the connection breaking at 90% because the other person logged off. There also wasn't any way to resume.
- Don't forget soulseek.
  
  Soulseek is still going believe it or not. Fantastic service.
- Even worse: how about M.U.L.E.?
  
  Love it, except when my M.U.L.E. goes haywire.

I remember my first written CD. You put the CD into a transfer case and slide it into a large box. Shortly after, the empty transfer case comes back out. You have already prepared your CD image, not as a project or file, no, you had to prepare it as an image on its own partition, on a disk that did not host anything else.
Then you shutdown your computer, and reboot it basically into the burn program, which then tries to move the data fast enough from the disk partition to the CD burner. The speed, of course, was 1x, so this write operation could last an hour and a quarter.
Then, your computer reboots back into the OS. You put the empty transfer case into the writer, and after some time, it comes back out with the media. And now you can finally put in into a reader and read it and compare it to the data on that partition. Knock on wood, or whatever. Because about half the writes failed, and the media cost a fortune.
- I let you front runners play with 1x and got a 2x with support for CD-RW, and because of it's buffer it only trashed the expensive CD-R's like 1/4 of the time. And I could use the computer a little if I dared!

These people are like 25-30, that’s not old yet I hope
- As one of the current generation of adults who grew up with afternoon cartoons, G.I. Joes, transformers and all the greatest movies that are so incredibly nostalgic now, I feel internally like I pretty much stopped developing mentally around age 25 and am still "with it" about much of society, but younger people now seem to think I was around during the civil war.
  Reading discussions on even Lemmy between people 20 - 30, referencing how anyone over 40 is in like, an entirely different "category" for literally any topic. Makes me feel like a shriveled mummy sometimes.
  It was all pretty funny and silly and I didn't think much of it until I tried getting a new job in my same field recently and it became abruptly clear that I was the oldest person applying for those positions even though I had been doing that work and had that experience for years and years, hiring managers always prioritize younger candidates who are more naive, seem more energetic, and are more desperate to succeed so are more willing to compromise on things like pay and benefits.
  It took a year and a half to get a new job and that was only because I knew someone who knew someone. Middle-aged people are basically treated like elderly in many fields and hiring managers will always have a bias towards people younger than themselves or people who look or act more like themselves. This isn't malicious, this is just basic human behavior. This is why we had initiatives to remind people of their biases and reconsider candidates who might not seem to fit the "Standard" you might be unconsciously leaning towards.
- These days, old is considered 25 and above.
  
  Yep, got my Zimmer frame to help me in my 30s
- The people who did this are in their 40s
  
  Not quite yet, not all of us.
- Not sure if joke or if you're bad at math.

I used to pirate games and store them here when I was a kid to play on my commodore 128
- damn your childhood was lit

Limewire was the shit. But I'm so old I started with Napster

Going from a radio shack trs-80 model 3 to those desktops was great.
Except mine didn't have floppy drives. I only had a cassette player for storage.
- That is what we had in computer science when I was in high school. The guy teaching it was really sharp. He also taught physics. He used to get mad at me for porting video games from those magazines that came with programs printed out in them. It would always be programs for c64 or some other home computer. By the end of my first year there were copies of my ported games floating around everywhere. I was the only person up til that time that every had more than a hundred percent in one of his classes. So much so he took the bonus questions off his test. It was really nice to be the best at something for once.
  
  My hot take: kids should have to learn computers on a TRS-80 now.
  But, copying games onto it from magazines was the way back then. It's how we learned.

I'm old enough to remember when that was the fancy new thing the kids were doing.
- Me too, either old enough or poor enough. I had nothing but tapes and records until I seen a kid with a Discman at school and I HAD TO HAVE ONE. My mom got me one for Christmas finally and I had already traded up for every Nirvana CD, just had them there waiting.
  I jumped to burning CDs as quickly as I could because I always wanted to be one step ahead with tech.
  It’s crazy how far behind I am now. I always buy used phones, haven’t updated anything in my pc since 2014ish, still rocking a 2009 Mac Pro for music production.
  I have, eh, how do you say? Got old? :(
  
  Technology has really slowed down a lot since that time. There is less public investment and corporations sure as shit aren't going to finance all their own R&D. So why bother?
  There's no virtue in needlessly cycling through new devices all the time just to satisfy one's own emotions.

I started college with a 1.44 MB floppy disk in my pocket and graduated with a 1GB USB stick.
- Those were pretty hard for floppies. Mine were 5.35" and cassette tape before that. But I was in high school at the time, so I probably need to respect my elder.
- I had one of the biggest usb pen drives at the time with a huge 128MB of space. It was very small too, which was nice. At same time for college it was needed to have a floppy disk to save some homework.

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.

It was great to go to college at a time when Napster and IRC rooms were in prime time, combined with a T1 fiber connection and University IT was too primitive to do anything to monitor or stop the behavior.

I'm old enough to remember when computers didn't even require a hard drive, they could just boot right into Basic from ROM.
- whipers ominously
  Double decker tape recorders.
- Apple IIe - those were the good ol days.
  
  KERNEL OK

The only thing this meme is missing are the Wendy's napkins in the glovebox of my 1991 Pontiac Sunbird that I give my ex-girlfriend to blot her eyes after this latest mix cd is finally the one to blow her fucking mind
- The yellow napkins

Ah lime wire, get a song and three random viruses for free
- How do you think we got familiar with the registry, local and user app data folders. Malware was early introduction into IT for many users.
  
  I learned to fix so many problems in order to get free music, movies, tvshows and ~~games~~viruses.
- I feel like the only person who never got viruses from Limewire. Just don't run the file called "slipknot_wait_and_bleed.mp3.exe", it's not rocket science.

I’m monochrome cga screen old. Commodore VIC 20, Philips MSX, Video 2000 old.
- Ah, a fellow ancient one from the time before color. Cheers.
  
  Back in my day we had green text on black and we were happy.
- VIC-20, my first real girlfriend.

I remember feeling like such a badass when I got a CD player that could read MP3 files burned to a disc. I'd have an entire band's discography burned to a single disc and felt like some sort of musical library with my binder full of MP3 CDs.
- Mp3 were a revolution. There was also the format wars with wmv on the table.

Yes, fuck you
- Yes! Yes!

Shiiit I had to block people at work from running bearshare and limewire
We didn't really have the right equipment for it. It was early enough in Windows that I couldn't adequately secure the developers from running crap on their workstations.
I eventually managed to get our antivirus to flag the DLLs for the applications as viruses, that caused a little bit of an uproar.

That one time I got an executable online that made girls strip on my desktop was great. Of course, the spyware and virus crap that was secretly behind it was not. I think that was the first time I did a full reinstall of Windows for the first time. Good times.
Burning CD's, ripping CD's with programs to remove the protection and save songs as MP3...
Anyone remembers cracks? You would replace a couple of files in the game folder and you could run a game without the CD, or a pirated version. These days with the online crap that is much more difficult. Or the serial number generators for some games or software because some genius found out how the software checked the number?
- Anyone remembers cracks?
  They're still going strong, even circumventing the online shit for some games. Denuvo and every company that uses it can die in a fire, tho.

My first mix tapes were cassettes recorded from the radio.
- With a boombox sitting across from a radio?
  I have no idea how I tolerated that with my cheap Koss portable cassette player. I was just happy to have the songs though haha.

Lime wire?
Try newsgroups
- the OG of absolute garbage flame wars and information pollution online. it felt harmless. i loved it. i did not believe those who said the flame wars would only get worse and more influential.

Zip drive!🙋‍♂️
- Turbo!
- SparQ! (1Gb cartridges, I was never going to fill those suckers.)

People in the thread are talking about limewire, but I think they are missing the bigger reference here.
Downloading games, burning them onto CD-Rs and then using a Sharpie to make the inner tracks of the disc unreadable as they contained the copy protection.
My only confusion is that I swear it was Playstation and not PC that worked like this.
- using a Sharpie to make the inner tracks of the disc unreadable as they contained the copy protection.
  That's something I'm too brazilian to understand. It was harder to get an unmodded playstation than a modded one that could run any burned CD
- For Playstation games you had to get one of the nicer-quality CD-Rs and burn it at a slower speed than usual. Also I remember I got a replacement disk drive cover for my PS2 that allowed you to pull it open with a hook. I'd boot up the console with a legit disc, then use the hook to open the drive without the console knowing and swap in a pirated disc.
- That sounds extremely imprecise, was that really a thing? I grew up with an NES, so I'm pretty sure I'm old enough to have heard of this (and my friend had a PlayStation). Pirated games already had any copy protection stripped anyway.
  That's why I assumed the sharpie was just for writing what's on the disc. I did that plenty.
  
  Calling it "tracks" probably gave the wrong impression. It was a ring around the hub that looked a bit different.

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.

...I'm older.
...Oregon Trail older, motherfucker.

You don't know old until you've had to change the IRQ for your sound card because wolf3d.exe's settings were different than swotl.exe.

Old enough to have a 286 as a first PC. But more on topic, I remember a time before Limewire and Bearshare. A time before Napster. MP3s were downloaded from IRC or from websites found with AltaVista or WebCrawler.
To play those MP3s? Winamp wasn't out yet. Fraunhofer Winplay3 was your only option. It had to be cracked and pirated as well. Want to multitask while playing an MP3? How about your music cutting out instead?

I'm hooking two vhs players together to commit piracy old.

I remember getting a ton of mp3 with kazaa which was shut down, replaced by limewire.
Then all my mp3 disappeared from my pentium replaced by a copyright rar file.
I hope they paid for winrar...
- My go to:
  
  Does nobody remember Bearshare?
- Napster was there before Kazaa, it was just a string of services popping up after others got shut down. Good times!

Kids, I played Leisure Suit Larry on a Macintosh II

Dusty old bones. Frog Bog, Las Vegas Poker and Blackjack, Truckin and B-17 Bomber

Pre-home internet I remember running a line-in to my soundblaster card from a clock radio and recording Tool's Sober to my HDD.
The wav file took up a good chunk of the HDD. After a good amount of funking around with encoding it was barely comprehensible and still took up too much room. Was exciting and felt like a glimpse of the future.

So, shortly after checking aboard the first fast-attack submarine I served on, in April 1991, the boat was locked down one evening, when the engineer couldn't find his Zenith SuperSport 286e computer. Suspecting someone stole it, the boat was locked down and searched - for 3 hours. Everyone was really angry... It's 2025 and I remember it well.
Anyway, after 3 hours or so, at the Captains insistence, the ENG, doing paperwork in his stateroom, let someone else in, to look for his computer. There it was, sitting plain as day, on his bunk, where his pillow should have been. The ENG said he didn't notice it, as he thought it was his pillow...gross, considering everyone else's pillowcase was white.
The Captain immediately lifted the lockdown, and all the off-duty people went home. The anger lingered though, and the Engineer seemed to have a dark cloud over his head. He was fired a few months later, and I've always wondered if it had something to do with that computer - I was just too new to know anything about the guy, and I didn't work in engineering.

I still have my 2005-2008 era Sony Vaiao in the garage at my parents house. If it booted up, I'd probably still have limewire running.
I need to wear a knee brace or use a cane, and I'm not even exaggerating.
- I still use my 2010 Vaio. If they still made them, it's definitely what I would have gone for when I upgraded.

Why must you do this to me. I'm already having a shit day and now you remind me that I was there when CDs replaced floppy. god dammit.
- Kid, I have windows 3.1 on goddamn floppies.
  
  I visited my childhood home which is now falling in. I probably shouldn’t have gone in there but I’m glad I did.
  On the side where the roof hasn’t yet collapsed I looked into the downstairs closet by my last bedroom and the only item sitting in there, pinched between the wood of the floor and the wall, was a single floppy from the Windows 3.1 set.
  I didn’t sleep for a week because of the state that place is in. :(
- Were you also there when the floppy replaced the datasette? 😊
  
  I was there when I upgraded from nothing (I.e. having to retype a software every time) to tape recorder. No other media change after that felt ever so good.
  
  Nah floppy was the earliest days storage that I legit interacted with in my life. I have held a datasette and older stuff but they were not still being used. Just stuff found in storage and the like.