You could only watch cartoons after school or on Saturday mornings.
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.
Dire Straits were Calling Elvis in 1991 tho.
there was a time without cell phones? no way!
To continue installing a game you had to type in the 7th word found on page 16, paragraph 3 on line 4.
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.
My jpeg stopped downloading cause my roommate picked up the phone.
Internet you could hear, literally.
It is now safe to turn off your computerI edited the file to change ‘now’ to ‘not’ just for grins.
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.
Also:
And then there was the worst sight in the world…
Glad you didn’t embed the worst site in the world.
“Scars from Ogrish run deep“, the kids wouldn’t know
Oh no! I wonder what the numbers mean. Looks like a hex dump of a 32-bit integer, probably an error code given that the number is so small.
It means “your Mac is dead. Buy a new computer.”
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.
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
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.
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.
Driving long distances to places you had never been before usually involved books of maps, pre-planning, a navigator, and help from strangers.
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.
I still play the role of navigator to this day…
My wife tries, bless her spacially-challenged heart
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.
I love how the title is “Tell me what it means” and then 747 replies later, no one has done that.
Flip the plastic chicklet in your floppy disk so you dont accidentally erase it.
Same thing for VHS tapes. That had to be something **super **important, like if they showed Raiders on TV
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
We’d put tape over the holes, I remember recording Death Metal albums over my parents old exercise cassettes, for example.
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…
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.
IRQ 5, DMA 1
BLESSED THE DAY PLUG AND PLAY WAS INVENTED
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…
