Tell me what it means

To continue installing a game you had to type in the 7th word found on page 16, paragraph 3 on line 4.
- But you need this special plastic lense to record the word, but you only get that one.
- I remember the wheel that came with monkey island and test drive 3. I disassembled that shit and made xerox copies, then gave them to my friends.
- Huh? What does this mean?
  
  Old anti piracy measure.
  Games were on floppies and could be copied trivially. Games also came with a printed instruction manual. If you bought it, you'd have the manual. If you're just playing a copy you wouldn't. So type one word from a specific page so we know you own the game.
  
  wheel that came with monkey island
  http://www.oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a-pirate

Once a person left the house, you couldn't reach them unless you know where they will be and called that place.
- I never really thought of it this way before, but we really shifted from calling places to calling people.
  
  My parents would call people they knew depending on the city they were driving through because it wouldn't be long distance (oh yeah here's one, the scumbag phone companies would charge you more when you weren't calling a local number, meaning within the same county/parrish/borough, usually by the minute). They even did this once they had mobile phones! Imagine nowadays contacting someone because you're going through their city. It's like, "Hey, I like you, but not enough to see if we can meet up for a little visit just to say hi all because the phone call is cheaper."
  
  For any kids out there …. If you’re frustrated with your parents always texting to know where you are, can you even imagine parents calling the houses of all your friends to find you?
  
  Dire Straits were Calling Elvis in 1991 tho.
- My grandmother still had the list of her friends’ numbers tacked on the wall next to her telephone stand (which was a little table and chair in the entry way with the house phone, notepad, pencil, and ashtray), and each was a four digit number along with the city name to tell the operator. You’d pick up and wait for the operator – no dialing – and then say ‘Midland 4119’ or whatever, then a person physically connected you.
  By the time I was young, they’d replaced that with dialing, but it was recent enough that she hadn’t taken down her cheat sheet yet.
- Nonsense, you paged them and then they called you back from a pay-phone.
  
  Sure, if you were wealthy enough to have a pager.
- And you only had to dial 7 numbers (at least in the US)
  
  when I was wee we only needed to use 5 digits for many years. The system would assume the first digit you dialed was the final digit of the initial group. When they switched us to the full 7 digits people acted SO annoyed: who's got that kind of time when you're using a rotary phone?
  
  That feels too region specific, NYC has had 10 digit dialing since the turn of the century (I believe there was even an episode of Seinfeld explaining it when they wouldn’t give him a 212 area code), while many other areas have had it less than a decade and I believe some rural area areas still allow the local 7 digit.
  
  Technically, you do still need just the seven numbers if you're calling locally. The phone system will just assume you're calling the local area code if you don't dial one. In my area, it's pretty easy because the only people who don't have the local area code (there's only one even though it's far from a rural area) are people who moved here and never changed their number.

My jpeg stopped downloading cause my roommate picked up the phone.
- Internet you could hear, literally.

It is now safe to turn off your computer
- I edited the file to change 'now' to 'not' just for grins.
- I remember exiting Windows 3.1 to the MSDOS command prompt and then shutting down.
- Oh man, I still remember when Windows finally powered your computer off when you shut down. My poor Nana spent half an hour trying to turn off my uncle's computer because she kept hitting the power button just after that showed up (as was tradition) but after the computer transitioned to power off, so it just kept turning on.
- I'm not old enough to know this one.
  
  Old computers wouldn't turn themselves off, they had no mechanism to control whether they remained on. Power was controlled by a heavy duty switch on the side of the PC (some manufacturers moved it to the front or something too, but many had it on the side/back).
  When ATX became a thing, power controls were done by a trigger wire from the main board to tell the PSU to turn on fully. This is how things are still done. With 80+ Silver/gold/whatever rated PSUs they actually don't really turn off anymore, power draw just drops to next to nothing when the system is "off".
  The hardware switch would physically disconnect the power to the PSU. So when you shut down, this message was displayed, most notably by Windows 9x, to inform you that it had finished the shutdown process and you could flick the switch to turn the power off, and it wouldn't cause any damage to the system.
  
  I'm not young enough to know what "cap" and "no cap" mean

This station now concludes its broadcast day.
That's right. At a certain time of night, TV stations would just stop showing things until morning.
- I feel like even the concept of a tv station is a bit outdated despite technically still existing.
  "Entertainment companies used to decide what shows were playing at 5pm"

Games used to come with books to read, and their anti-piracy measure was to give you a page number and tell you to enter the first word on the page to activate the software.
Of course, you'd copy that floppy and write the code word on the label for your friends.
- Lol I had one like that - I made a copy for a friend, but it wasn't just one code word, it could be any one of about a hundred - but he was dedicated, he figured it out somehow over the course of a few weeks.
- You could copy the manual on a xerox machine. Of course some publishers were smart and printed the manual in such a way it any copies came out as an illegibly dark mess.
  So naturally you took a legitimate manual, manually transcribed it, and made copies of the copy.
- IIRC, it was Greg Norman's Shark Attack that had a thing where it would give you a small pixel art picture of the top-down view of a golf course, and you had to go through the game manual and enter in what page that golf course picture appeared on... so we just got a photocopy version of the manual
- I miss manuals.
  Used to rip open the shrink wrap with my teeth and pour over the manual in the backseat of the car on the way home when I was a kid.

Insects. At night there would be plenty of insects under every singe street lamp. The windscreen would be full of yellow goo after driving in summer.
- Snow. It used to last the whole winter and not just 2 days here and there.
  
  I keep being told that the canals used to freeze over and people would skate on them.
- Of course the amount of insects drastically reduced, but for the windscreen there is another thing to take into account: Cars today are extremely aerodynamic. Even new Jeeps and the F150s are aerodynamic. Because of this, the insects are pushed away from your windscreen instead of against it, which is one of the main reasons why your windscreen isn't full of insects anymore.
  The only real exception to this is the Mercedes G-Class, but I doubt that a lot of us will ever sit in one
  Edit: apparently I'm wrong: https://feddit.de/comment/8318194
  
  This is a myth and has been debunked.
  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-splatometer-tests-reveal-huge-decline-number-insects
  The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance. It also found a parallel decline in the number of swallows and martins, birds that live on insects.
  The second survey, in the UK county of Kent in 2019, examined splats in a grid placed over car registration plates, known as a “splatometer”. This revealed 50% fewer impacts than in 2004. The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects.
- This is so sad.
  
  It realy is.
  I see this kind of realy devastating change in many areas in nature. There used to be frogs in our garden when I grew up, I would listen to them every evening right outside my bedroom window. Now they are gone.
  I see it in the Forests, where huge swats of trees have died over the last couple of years. There are areas in our forests now, that look like war zones, because drouth followed by to much rain in combination with invasive bugs have killed or weakens them so much.
  Going back another generation, my brother, who is 16 years older, told be about field hamsters who where so plentyfull in the fields, that the local kids would earn money by hunting them and turning their corpses in for money in the village center. In the 16 years between my bother and me the European field hamster has, consequently, gone almost extinct. I never have seen one in my life.
  And while all this is by its nature very anecdotal, these are areas where climate change and the way we treat nature as something alien realy feels close to me. And to be honest: It fucking scares me.

You could only watch cartoons after school or on Saturday mornings.
- I remember rushing home to catch The Flintstones.
  
  I would rush home to watch GI Joe. If I got there quick enough I could catch the last few minutes of Jem.

Flying being a really fun and nice experience.
You could walk your family members/friends right to the gate without going through any screening. As a bonus, everyone wore shoes and not their worst clothes too.
My first flight I was by myself before I was even a teenager yet, and the airline had a specific flight attendant watch after me until my grandparents picked me up on the other side. She was awesome and I kept the flight wings the captain gave me for decades. It was not unusually good customer service.
In fact, before MBAs McKinsey'd the world, interactions at most businesses were actually pleasant... Nearly every restaurant or store actually cared about customer satisfaction in the before times. I can't tell you how nice that was having a social contract. It was a genuinely nice thing (*racial and gender provisions apply, offer not valid in all areas) Instead of expanding the umbrella to everyone, we drained the public pools and now it's normal..

I think I see boobs!
- And then, every so often, when the moon was in the right phase and the stars aligned, it would come in perfectly clearly for a few glorious seconds.

Driving long distances to places you had never been before usually involved books of maps, pre-planning, a navigator, and help from strangers.
- My family always went on holiday to Ireland so they had a map for it. When I was little I used to love opening that thing and picturing all the places we could go.
- I still play the role of navigator to this day…
  
  My wife tries, bless her spacially-challenged heart
- The good ol' Road Atlas.
  Also an excellent autism diagnosis tool.
  
  No joke. My parents are convinced I'm autistic because I used to read the yellow pages (British phone book) to calm down when I was little.
- And you stuck to the main, very large highways instead of trying the smaller routes. I always wonder if the Waze era of travel has helped or hurt smaller communities.
  
  Great question.
  One of the examples that comes to mind is from the SF Bay Area:
  Los Gatos residents say Google's Waze app causing gridlock, blocking only wildfire escape route
  There has to be some coffee shop or antiques store somewhere that navigation apps have brought back from the brink though.

Receiving junk mail Internet CDs
Waiting patiently to record a song you liked
Setting the clock and a timer to record something on your VCR
The planet Pluto
Wax lips and candy cigarettes
Tang
Translucent electronics
Cheat Code books
1(800) COLLECT & "00 it's magic!"

Flip the plastic chicklet in your floppy disk so you dont accidentally erase it.
- Or, as my lazy ass would do sometimes, move the slider and grab a magnet so maybe my "homework" wouldn't load and I'd get another day.
- Cutting a notch in your floppy disk to write protect it....
  
  Don’t forget the stickers to un-write protect it :-)
  
  Chewing up a piece of paper and shove the goo into the holes of a casette you didn't like so you could record on it
- Same thing for VHS tapes. That had to be something **super **important, like if they showed Raiders on TV

If I wanted to talk to someone who wasn't in the same location as me, I had to know the ten digit number assigned to them.
- If they were in the same city, you only needed 7...

- Not if you disabled the sound so you could sneakily get online at night without your parents noticing! I was so happy when I figured that out and could quit nervously smothering the modem in pillows when connecting.
  I don't know if that always worked. I didn't figure it out until we were on a 56k modem. Maybe it didn't work with older modems.
  
  ATL0 I think.

When you call someone it was normal for someone else to answer and you had to be careful because they could be listening to your call.
- Party lines! You'd share your phone line with one or more other households. When the phone rang they all rang with alternating short-long rings to identify which house on the line the caller intended to call. So if someone calls you at 2am, several of your neighbors know about it because their phones rang too. Even better, being a snot nosed kid I knew how to take a set of headphones and clip them onto the line. You'd hear both sides of the conversation of any house on the party line without dropping the call voltage too much and getting caught. That meant no one talked about anything private on the phone, everyone else could be listening.

Using pencils to manually rewind cassette tapes.

Tamagotchi and a Walkman with skip protection

MTV only had music video
- Video killed the radio star. Still remember watching Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit ad nauseum.
- MTV existed

Using two VCRs to edit a video project for English class.

I love how the title is "Tell me what it means" and then 747 replies later, no one has done that.

My speakers used to be able to let me know I was about to receive a call on my cell phone.
- Can you elaborate? What would happen?
  
  You’d hear a distinct repetitive buzzing sound in the speakers right before the phone rang.

It's a US thing, where the glory of SCART was unknown thus they had to continue using the antenna input of their TV to connect their consoles to, also, as far as I'm aware only NTSC has fixed frequency assignments. Elsewhere in the world you just programmed the TV to display the console's output on whatever number you wanted, or, if you had a proper input for non-antenna signals, switch the TV to "AV".

Sound blaster compatible, irq5, dma1
The magic config to make sound work in DOS games

I would go to the video rental store to play video games.
- God, renting games from blockbuster was amazing.
  Played so many great GameCube games that way.

Needing to memorize the home phone numbers of all my friends

Hit the coin return button on everything and randomly get lucky once in a while.

Y'all remember the turbo button?
- Yes, and I was astounded to learn that it's function is actually the opposite. It slows your computer's processor down to near-8086 speeds for software (games, mostly) that didn't use timers but was rather tied directly to the CPU clock speed.
  Unless you mean the "turbo" button on your NES Advantage controller. That button's primary function was to annoy the shit out any adults within earshot by spamming the jump noise or pause-unpause jingle.

The random one that I remember and don't see anywhere, is the tv getting staticky whenever we ran the microwave

Most of "The Anarchist's Cookbook" wouldn't work today because of the Internet and electronic receipts.

Disk 13 of 18
- GOD-DAMN windows installation

Blow in the cartridge if it doesn’t work. 💪

"At the tone, it will be 8:45 exactly." Beep

MonsterKing is young enough that he doesn't know you could push the slider and it would work on channel 4.

Using a hole punch to make 5 1/4" disks double sided! Saved a lot of money!
- I finally found one I don't understand!
  
  5 1/4" floppy disk drives had little sensors that would detect a notch in the side of the rectangular disk sleeve (well outside of the round magnetic disk inside). Open notch meant "writeable". Manufacturers would sell "one sided" disks cheaper with missing notch for the backside of the disk to prevent using it. You could use a hole punch to pierce the soft plastic sleeve and make a "writable" hole at the correct spot. The disks inside were identical on both sides, there never was a "one-sided floppy disk", technically. This was during the "C64 and everybody got the games by exchanging floppy disks on the school yard" phase of home computing (ca 1985). Prices for floppy disks mattered a lot back then.

I referred to Jennifer Connolly as Stifler's mom and this zoomer gave me a blank stare.

Buying the car kit so I could connect my CD Walkman (with 15 second ESP) to the cigarette lighter and cassette deck in my first car.

When you bought a thing you owned it.

IRQ 5, DMA 1
- BLESSED THE DAY PLUG AND PLAY WAS INVENTED
- I don't know what exactly that means but I know there was no sound without it. Guess I'm slightly younger.

I noticed if the TV was off or on (muted and black screen) without looking at it, but my parents did not.

Failing at a pc game wasn't necessarily on you. It could also be on the dirt gathered by the ball inside your mouse. Later, of course, you realized it was on you all along.
- Or the ball simply fell out lol

TV had an end. After a last program or movie that ended after midnight, broadcast stopped and it only showed the test card.

Want to kmow the weather, lottery results, TV channel program for the day and other info? Go to your TV and check the teletext
- I am still using teletext every single day (albeit on my phone). It‘s my preferred way to get all the relevant news in the morning.
- Want to book a holiday? Teletext. Want to play a daily quiz? Teletext. Want to check live football scores? Teletext.
  
  At some point much later teletext even go a chat function. Was with SMS, extremely expensive.Soome people went ham on the relationships zone (and at some point there was also a 18+ zone for dirty talk during the night)
- Wow, I'd somehow never heard of teletext. What country did you use that in?
  
  At the time I think in most western Europe teletext was a thing. Imagine you had this menu on the TV with pages that have graphics of the Atari 2600, and you access by inserting 3 digits codes on the page, seeks the page for you, and presents what's in there. This was, in a nutshell, teletext

I actually know what this means, from getting my mom’s Atari to work on my grandmother’s TV
I think it was channel 2 for that one though, idk. We switched to using the flatscreen because of the annoying high pitched noise. (To the annoyance of all retro gamers who read this)

Channel 3 was an actual channel in my area, so we used the dip switch to select channel 4 instead.
- Cleveland?

When you turned the TV on you had to wait a minute for it to 'warm up'. The black and white image would slowly emerge out of the darkness.
- And then it made that "warm up" sound, like a "klank!" Or something clicking inside the tv

I remember when printers would print without being sassy & extortionate.
- Big caveat, printers have always been unholy hellish abominations that sense your fear and exploit it right before delivering that so important THING you need to print
  
  PC LOAD LETTER? What the fuck does that mean?

To refuel your car, first flip down the license plate.
- I expected most of the things is this thread to be typical Gen X or Millennial stuff, but some of these post read to me as if I’m talking to someone from the late 19th century

Game consoles didn't come with a storage card, so you had to keep the game running or restart every time.
- OMG that reminded me of my best friend's Commodore 20 - which had no disk drive, so to play a game you had to manually type in the BASIC code for it each time before playing.
  
  I remember having a text to speech program on my windows 98(?) PC that required me to type a long string of stuff into the command prompt. We had it written on an index card and I remember it taking forever to type in. Between starting up the computer, typing in the code, and having it actually load if typed correctly the first time, it was nearly a 30 minute endeavor just to laugh at a computer voice say "poopy butthole herpes".

Abort, Retry, Fail?
- Retry
  
  Abort, Retry, Fail?

I remember summers without smoke.
- Conversely, I remember rivers on fire.
  (e: I think that was our biggest clue at the time we were fucking up.)

Oh man… I said “box art” the other day and my buddies daughter pointedly asked what I was talking about :-)
- Do you mean on video games?

It also had a switch to make it work on channel 4 if you, for some bizarre reason, were a weirdo and needed that.
- What if you had two consoles and needed the switch to go from one to the other?
  
  you piggybacked one through another. whatever you turned on would interrupt the signal and output the system in question.

Smoking or non-smoking?
- "Non-smoking"
  Gets seated at the border next to 4 heavy smokers anyway 🙃
  Also, sitting in the smoking section of the airplane. Like, how insane is that? Not only does it seem like a grotesque idea to light fire in a metal bird thousands of feet in the sky at hundreds of nautical miles per hour. But you also can't exactly crack open a window. What a terrible experience.