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

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    82·
    27 days ago

    I’m exactly that old.

    Edit: The PC in the image is a bit anachronistic. This is the workhorse we’re all thinking of:

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
        19·
        27 days ago

        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.

    • FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
      5·
      27 days ago

      Dell Dimension 2400. My family had the entry level model, and it still absolutely destroyed every prior computer we’d had performance-wise

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      5·
      27 days ago

      That or the ol’ tan cased dinosaurs.

      The gray Dell helped me through many-a “100 Games!” disc…

    • NotSteve_@lemmy.ca
      2·
      26 days ago

      This was the first desktop I used with a big ol’ chunky CRT. I played around installing so many different windows XP themes

    • f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      26 days ago

      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. 😅

    • D_C@lemm.ee
      231·
      27 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
        291·
        27 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
          9·
          27 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.

          • hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
            1·
            25 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·
              26 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.

      • devfuuu@lemmy.world
        8·
        26 days ago

        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.

          • devfuuu@lemmy.world
            4·
            26 days ago

            Ohhh yeah, the golden age, xvid, divx, mp3, wmv, rmvb, quicktime videos, installing codec packs in windows…

            I have a cd somewhere with the second matrix movie in 2 parts with a shitty resolution full of pixels and barely able to see with a magnifying glass, but watched it like that.

        • BenLeMan@lemmy.world
          2·
          25 days ago

          Bink videos were the hot shit for games for a while, and RAD Game Tools started a whole era of standardization for multimedia processes that culminated in DirectX. With computing power increasing along with the market share of PCs, using standardized libraries for audio & video drivers became the sensible thing to do. Previously you had games programmers eking out every iota of performance by fine tuning that stuff at an assembly level (the Origin games with their memory managers and Chris Sawyer’s amazing if kind of insane feat in creating Transport Tycoon come to mind).

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        3·
        27 days ago

        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.

          • theangryseal@lemmy.world
            2·
            26 days ago

            I put mine in a .zip file and renamed the file extension to .dll and stuck it in the system32 folder haha. Hide file extensions when done and make the file hidden. Blammo!

      • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.caEnglish
        83·
        27 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.

        • Thassodar@lemm.eeEnglish
          5·
          26 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·
          27 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·
            26 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
              3·
              26 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.

      • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        27 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·
        26 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.

  • Ken Oh@lemm.ee
    29·
    27 days ago

    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?

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
      15·
      27 days ago

      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).

      • theangryseal@lemmy.world
        12·
        27 days ago

        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.

        • PlasticExistence@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          27 days ago

          I damaged the laser on a PS2 by using a DVD-RW. They’re harder to read than a normal disc apparently, so it wore the laser down pretty quick

          • theangryseal@lemmy.world
            3·
            26 days ago

            Can you believe my original ps1 is still rocking hard with zero adjustments?

            My ps2 is currently dead, but it was because I used thicker wire than necessary when modding it a thousand years ago and I need to just heat up the solder a bit.

            That console is a nightmare to disassemble/reassemble though and it’s been down for around 15 years. I’ll fix it one day.

              • theangryseal@lemmy.world
                2·
                26 days ago

                And just saying, if it’s the 72 pin connector, you don’t need a new one. Just pop yours out and bend the pins back out. It’s very very easy, honest to God there’s no reason to get a new one. I have new ones in my closet, probably 20 of them, but I’ve never really needed to use any of them.

                If you don’t want to fool with that PM me your address and I’ll send you one.

              • theangryseal@lemmy.world
                2·
                26 days ago

                Oh man they’re so so so easy to fix.

                My childhood NES had a capacitor go out recently and the color was off. It still worked it was just ugly.

                I have like 10 of them so I just swapped my case, but for some silly reason it’s like I don’t feel connected to the “spirit” of the machine because of it.

                I’m going to have to order new capacitors and you just reminded me.

                Get that thing fixed. It’s so so easy.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
      5·
      27 days ago

      Or trying to re-burn a cdrw but it was originally not burnt with the same soft as yours 😓

      🗑️💿🚮💔

    • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      27 days ago

      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.

  • oppy1984@lemm.eeEnglish
    26·
    27 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·
      26 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…”

  • dan00@lemm.ee
    23·
    27 days ago

    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…

  • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    27 days ago

    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.

    • not_woody_shaw@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      27 days ago

      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.

    • devfuuu@lemmy.world
      2·
      26 days ago

      I ended up even buying some rewritable mini discs because they were so much smaller and still good enough space for some mp3 files.