Random Nostalgia

This morning I unintentionally posted a long-ish thread on Mastodon reminiscing about past computer-using. Then I remembered I have a blog, so I decided I'd publish it here too (with some very light editing) because why not?

I spent a few minutes showing the kids Windows 3.1 running in a browser PC emulator (what a time to be alive).

They didn't like the windows-inside-windows thing.

Then we dropped down to DOS and their first comment was, "Delete everything!"

It took me a moment to remember the DOS delete command, but we did it. We deleted everything. DOS just lets you do it.

This is what they took from us.

I've spent most of my waking life on a computer and I honestly cannot remember what I did most of the time.

Back when Windows 3.1 was on my PC, what the heck was I doing with it?!

I have no idea.

Prior to regular BBS or internet access it's not like I had a ton of programs to run and I couldn't afford a bunch of games. It wasn't even easy to pirate stuff when you didn't know anyone personally who had any stuff to pirate!

Maybe I just tweaked configs and tested games a lot?

I dunno.

In the Apple II/C64 era before we got a PC I did have several shoeboxes of pirated disks, though, so there were many games to play. But even then, I can't remember very many specific games.

What the heck was I doing?!

I recall spending a lot of hours making levels for Lode Runner.

I also spent a ton of time trying to learn from often-outdated BASIC books I got from the library. Many times they were for systems I didn't even have so the BASIC wasn't always compatible which caused sometimes unsolvable (to me at the time) issues.

I recall spending a lot of effort around 6th or 7th grade plotting Super Mario Brothers characters on graph paper and coding them into a BASIC game I was making all by hand. I had a running and jumping Mario that way at one point.

But I often see posts of people nostalgic for specific games from the 8-bit era and I can hardly remember any. I had an Apple II clone called a Laser 128 and I remember when dad bought it from some reseller in town, they threw in a box of free software and that was one of the reasons he agreed to buy it. I didn't know at the time that the ENTIRE BOX was pirated or what that meant. It was just how things were back then in some places as far as I knew. Wild to think about.

I got my first modem when I still had the C64 which was pretty outdated even then. My modem was 300 baud, baby!

I remember learning that they go faster than 300 and I had serious FOMO for a long time.

What was I doing at 300 baud when it took positively FOREVER for just a menu screen on the BBS to transfer? I... don't know?

But I loved it enough to desperately want a faster modem.

It was the idea of possibility that was intoxicating.

Later on when we got a PC, we didn't initially get a modem because of course that cost a lot extra and my parents really didn't "get it."

I begged a lot over a long period of time.

As I recall, I believe I had to do a whole bunch of snow shoveling one day before they'd agree to take me to Radio Shack so we could get a modem.

It was 2400 baud. Holy shit, dudes! SO FAST!

Between the speed and juggling when I was allowed to use the phone, it took me a week to download the Doom shareware demo.

The anticipation almost killed me.

You'd think having grown up with those old slow speeds I'd be more patient, but no, I think I've become increasingly impatient as things got faster and better. Someone should study this.

Because of some quirk of how I learned about computer stuff and, maybe, the exact book selection my library had, for the longest time I was pretty convinced the only two ways to program a computer were BASIC or Assembly language.

And a lot of the BASIC books left me with the impression that Assembly was almost like... unknowable. I had no idea how to even dip my toes into that world at all. I never ran across anything that told me how to do it or what I'd even need. Nothing that clicked, anyway.

So in my early PC days, I found QBASIC which made sense - of course there was BASIC! But beyond that, I had no idea. So the notion of installing or finding a compiler, for example, was just... foreign. I didn't really get it. Didn't know about it.

Eventually I started to realize there was something called C... and Pascal... and some other things that sounded expensive and exotic. But I didn't have access to any of that stuff and didn't know what questions to ask to get it for a long time.

But things changed quickly.

My memory isn't great at dates or what happened in what order, but I entered high school in 1994 and at the same time, during the summer before high school, I got my first job at a BSS startup (it was just a guy in his apartment initially) that eventually (kinda quickly) turned into the first dial-up ISP in town.

Everything changed so fast during this timeframe.

At the start of high school, BBSs were hot stuff. By the end, some people in town were on cable Internet.