Josh Miller
is talking with
Last night, I was reminiscing with a few friends about outdated tech from our childhood. Specifically, I used to always borrow Sidekicks from classmates so I could go on AIM in class (screen name: pnkfloyd352).
What retro tech memories can you think of?
Also, hitting "4" three times to get an "i" in a text message.
And this was my first computer: maclife.com
First computer (that I remember): Compaq Presario.
I spent hours and hours on that thing playing The Sims... Anyone remember the Rosebud cheat? It gave you a million dollars so you didn't have to wait for your dumb, lazy Sims to make enough money to support the enormous 3-story house you wanted to build. (Because, let's be real, the Sims was all about building the houses, no? And who wants Ecru wallpaper?)
I very clearly remember the moment when it occurred to me that I could search Google (Ask Jeeves? Yahoo?) for cheat codes. Legendary.
i wish i could 'like' no such rosebud cheat a bajillion times
had one of these when I was 9
Oh dear, here's where I show my age a bit.
So I had a pager in high school. [1] My friends and I would coordinate buying colors so we could mix and match clips and have different colors.
I remember a classmate in high school had an Apple Newton, but I have no idea what he did with it, since they were really just glorified address books/planners.
Also, the grand daddy of modern game controllers.
Unbelievable that the first RAZR cost $600 when it came out. Still a great looking phone though.
@Nate - Tamagotchis! So good.
Also, my friend had this brick of a Nokia phone in the 4th or 5th grade that I remember being exceedingly jealous of because she could pop on and off the covers to coordinate with her outfits.
Sadly, I can still recite this in my sleep...
anyone remember getting chased by a yeti on Windows 95 in this?
*paintbucket noise*
Also, my screen names: ChocChip89 (remember setting this one up with my mom when we got AOL, feeling very adult, etc.), DealWithIt555, MadLibs176.
(Oh, and I can still — but, for obvious reasons, won't — recite more than one of my crushes'/boyfriends' screen names, too. How my heart used to sink when they'd "come online," ha...!)
First girlfriend: MaisyDaisy22
What about it taking a hour to burn a CD?
Also, immediately knowing which songs were on a CD by the first song.
> What about it taking a hour to burn a CD?
Ha, around 2002 or so I took a road trip with a friend of mine and my somewhat newly purchased laptop w/ a CD burner. We were burning CDs on the road and thought we were so bad ass.
Can't believe this hasn't been mentioned yet:
Toggling settings on that damn segmented LCD for my parents to record shows, forgetting to set it, forgetting to change tapes and taping over other stuff...
My first Photoshop
A/S/L?
Thinking I was the shit for knowing how to use
Jer Thorp talked about the significance of HyperCard at NYU DemoDays, he gave roughly the same talk at TED:
hypercard starts at 2:20
I bought my first Palm in 8th grade. Kinda baffles me how I needed a Palm to organize myself in 8th grade.
I remember 5 y.o. me typing 'run jilljungle.exe' into msdos prompt and thinking I was telling the video game character to start running XD
I spent hours on this thing because Napster didn't work for Mac
I also had the transparent case TI-83, in addition to the transparent case Palm III.
This one was special because it had apps on it, one of which was a "Study Cards" app. I would create intricate cheat sheets using the app, with 96x64 bitmap images. Now it feels like quite a feat to fit the structure of a telescope to that resolution :)
My math teacher used to come by everyone's desk to clear equations on graphic calculators before tests. Oh, the good ol' days.
This was way better than LimeWire. You could leave the client open at home, and add downloads to the queue from school.
being from a very anti-microsoft family, this was what my first computer looked like. Gnome 1 :(
LimeWire? Take this.
Tell me whatchu know bout images.wikia.com
playing pokemon blue in the car, waiting for the streetlights to illuminate my menu for a few brief seconds cause Dammit WE DIDNT HAVE BACKLIT SCREENS BACK IN MY DAY
I'm not sure if you guys have seen this before, but it might be good perspective on what was considered professional web design not too long ago.
No shame
many memories of using 'net send' on our school's network of XP computers to make the whole computer lab's terminal beep go off
YES, played so much pokemon in 5th grade.
I remember when my friend bought one of these: ipodhistory.com "Oooooh, ahhhh. The wheel actually spins!"
I still remember my pride when I first defeated brock and won the bolder badge.
Also this fucker was probably the reason I become a programmer
.
^ story of my 8 year old life.
Also this was my first mp3 player, the thing was a boss, played ogg vorbis out of the box
@Cemre - I will see your study cards and raise you pictures of Powerpoint slides on this baby: the Palm Zire 71. My HS was part of a Palm program that supplied our entire school with Palms when they were still a thing (2003-4). They were integrated into the curriculum and student life and such and were supposed to make us more tech savvy. We had a "beaming station" and our teachers (rather than printing out things like schedules and course packets out for us) would encourage us to go "beam" it down.
Unintended consequence: Our class was the first that got Palms with cameras, and some kids would take pictures of PPT slides to use in science tests because we were also encouraged to use the graphic calculator app instead of a TI...! Scandal.
Also @Josh and @Devon - In fourth grade, Pokemon took my class by storm and this guy Kevin had made a small business out of collecting the most cards via trading and buying. He kept them all in one of those gallon-size Ziploc bags and (obviously) brought them to school every day. One day after recess, a bunch of us came back to find him in tears looking down over a ledge into an air shaft where our school met the side of the next building over (I went to school in downtown SF for a bit). The owners had, I guess, put in a net about halfway down (4+ stories) to keep pigeons out, so when we looked over, you could see hundreds of Pokemon cards strewn onto it.
Someone had dumped his entire bag over the ledge to prank him. #tragic
So sad... There was a time when would have traded a week of lunch for a shiny Charizard.
Right? I once made a really stupid trade and got rid of my most favorite card — a shiny Ninetales. It may have even been to that Kevin kid. Still haven't totally recovered. (And, obviously, the first thing my mom did was give me a lesson in negotiation. Ha!)
retropages.uw.hu
When I graduated from Journalism school, I worked at a magazine. We would send the magazine to the printer on multiple Syquest disks. It would take hours for Quark to create an output file on these disks. They were also incredibly unreliable. Literally, a spinning platter in plastic. I think the largest we could afford was 88Mb. The magazine required 4 or 5 Syquests.
Wow, 88Mb sounds like a lot! I remember installing videogames from instructables.com It used to take 8 floppys to get one sidescroller installed.
^ That's not a floppy disk.
Now VV that's a floppy disk.
My Dad bought me my first album ever. It was a Red Hot Chili Peppers cassette.
RHCP was my first concert!
My first music that I bought was the Spice Girls' SPICE CD. No shame.
One of my favourite cassette's was RHCP's Mother's Milk but that was 1989...My first music I asked for (my Dad bought it for me) was Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave your Lover" upload.wikimedia.org which for some reason I liked when I was 4.
In other news... I'm old
I went to public school so there were a lot of those Nextel Walkie Talking phones...
My school mandated that we play this game youtube.com on our Apple IIes. In this game you play a slave escaping. It really taught how FUN and EXCITING slave escaping could be. PUT SOME PEPPER ON YOUR TRAIL TO THROW OFF THE DOGS!
WOW, throwback. That makes me think of the Oregon Trail computer game they used to have us play in elementary school (CA)...
WAIT. Oregon Trail wasn't just a California thing was it?! That would blow my mind if so.
Also, Erik, that is truly crazy.
Oregon trail and Number Munchers all recess.
1.bp.blogspot.com
(I was also CA)
Once upon a time in the Before Time, there was no web. So we had BBSing. The first modem I had was 2400 baud and I dialed into a bunch of local boards in St. Louis. There was a crappy magazine that published lists of numbers of valid boards - that's how "discovery" worked.
You'd use BBS's to do a few basic things: 1) discussion boards 2) download warez 3) play games. The games were text-based, asynchronous text based deals. The discussions were pretty much the same as contemporary discussion boards.
Fun personal fact: I met one of my closest friends through BBSing - another St. Louisan who many years later got me a job at Pyra Labs to work on Blogger.
BBS games!!! memories of a 8600 connection...
also, apparently Microsoft still gives away copies of Hover!
en.wikipedia.org
tangential but awesome
youtube.com
Awesome!
Thanks for your feedback! Team Branch
