What did people use PCs for before the Internet was mainstream?
Like back when dialup was king, or internet access was very limited.
Today you cant use a PC without being on the internet. Hell, even doing homework, or typing up a research paper involves using the internet to some extant.
I grew up on AOL, and I cant even remember what it was like. I maybe went online 2 hours a day.
played some games. what else was there? what did people use computers for?
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youtube.com
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I played games, taught myself programming, and made artwork. Before the Internet we had BBSs, which were fun because they were local to your city and the people you talked to lived nearby.
gaymen
Mostly the same kinds of things, just minus being network-connected. Games, word processing, spreadsheets, programming, CAD, etc.
Offline games, BBS, chat rooms, pr0n was just images and they took forever to load
>pr0n was just images and they took forever to load
When I had 9600 baud, a JPG took 5-10 minutes and you didn't even know if it would be good because there were no thumbnails.
Mostly offline games picked up at Target for $10-20 and the occasional Gamehouse trialware from the AOL discs that came in the mail.
>inb4 spyware
No internet, no worries.
'82 fag here
>used paint a lot just to fuck around
>played dos games on floppy
>used (pre internet) prodigy to look up news/sports info and post on BBS
>prodigy added real time chat and it was pretty amazing
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Oldish man here. King's Quest. Dad had a computer for Lotus 123 but I don't fuck with that bullshit. Still unproductive in my 30's
>Still unproductive in my 30's
i dislike knowing this feel
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Played the dankest vidya.
Made the dankest shops in PS version 4.1
Created the dankest beats in cakewalk.
Fapped to an unknown quality of poern due to being happy with what ever was shared in your locale.
If you wanna know what pre WWW internet was like go on craigslist, ftp shares, and irc channel's.
We got our first computer in 1997 for my parent's business. It was a Packard Bell setup, forget what it was named but I remember it having a 6gb hdd and 64mb of ram(?) I can't remember exactly.
I used it for MS Encarta for homework, Asteroids, X Wing vs TIE Fighter, Age of Empires, Bonus.com, and asking Jeeves some shit.
We had a dedicated phone line for our dialup too. For Age of Empires, it was a ~72 hour download for the trial version. It was totally worth it.
>Alexander pulls out his magic map
>i didn't come here for feels
I fucking loved SimCity3k. My favorite of all of them.
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I went from sc2000 straight to sc4, I feel like I missed out on a lot.
>not taking straggler trees
>2002
shiggy diggy
research about fossils
> what did people use PCs for before internet?
> posts website
Fuck off.
early 90s I used to dial into a local 1200bps STS-13 chatroom full of hackers and goths. We also had meets, which was usually in a hacker space some old warehouse with a ton of stolen equipment in it. There were secret porn BBSs that would be up at certain hours. I also wrote a magazine for haxx0rs and distributed it via front end mailer on a private FidoNet like message network.
80s besides gayming you used newsgroups and email, plus dialup into early ISPs.
before that programmers would write out by hand whatever they wanted to calculate, verify and debug their programs first then actually type them into a terminal because you only got limited access to a machine. These people were the programmers because they spent a ton of time planning their programs.
Did you even read the op?
haha you dumbcunt
*best programmers
Also I just looked up my name on bbslist.textfiles.com
FREDDI THE FISH
Putt putt was nice too
>tfw computers will never be this great again
I just wanna live in the 90s forever. I'll deal with all the inconveniences for the simplicity
Games, creating stuff (music, design...).
>Today you cant use a PC without being on the internet.
You most definitely can. It's actually a good advice if you want to get something done.
What I remember as like a 9-13 year old.
Diablo 2
School work
Porn
Talking to pedos in chat A.I.M. without knowing they were pedos.
Flash games.
The good old fucking days, everything was like the wild west, now the internet and computers are liberal controlled gay garbage.
More or less the same things, you just go about them a bit differently:
- Typing homework or whatever on a text editor, but research would be textbooks instead of wikipedia and you would print it out instead of emailing it. You might have something like Encarta helping you.
- Playing a lot of games, of course... Even offline, multiplayer games against AI seemed challenging enough. At the time quest games were very popular because you couldn't find solutions for them and would actually spend days, weeks, or months trying to figure them out - as they were intended. On rare occasions you can gather with friends and play via serial cable or on split-screen.
- Lots of interesting stuff was on CD-ROMs in the 90s. There were many places with bootleg CDs with compilations of games, software, encyclopedias, even movies. If you could afford a DVD drive you felt like a king.
- For the latest news about new hardware, games, Intel vs. AMD vs. Nvidia shenanigans and various other tech drama, there were PC magazines. Heck, there was even a bit of a masterrace thing going on there, with a little "kiddy corner" section with a few pages on console stuff in some of them. You could send them a snailmail (or if you're on the bleeding edge, an email) praising certain software and/or trolling other readers. You'd really be looking forward to those mags as they weren't just chock full of good info but they also came with a CD with demos and freeware of the stuff being talked about in that month's issue.
managing finances
word processing
spreadsheeting
amateur publishing
information management
playing games
shitposting on BBSes
all kinds of other information processing, content creation, and problem solving stuff, look through an old copy of BYTE or some shit and see all the software you could get your hands on
you didn't spend 12+ hours a day on one like you did now, they were just a tool to get a job done when needed instead of a lifestyle device
why anyone would want this when you can go out today and buy absolute top-notch '90s hardware for about the same as a shit-tier meal at mcdonalds and get all the games and software you'd ever want for it quickly and freely through the modern internet is beyond me
it's cool to mess with and look at and relive some old memories every once and a while but fuck knows what god awful overpriced piece of glacial shit you'd actually have to contend with since anything worth a shit started at $2,000 before inflation and climbed from there
Indeed my 386SX PC cost almost $2000 in 1990
For $2k today I can buy a supercomputer and have $1500 left over
>Before internet I owned....
>ZX80
>ZX81
>ZX Spectrum
>VIC 20
>ZX Spectrum +
>ZX Spectrum 128k
>Amiga 500
>Atari ST
>Amiga 1200
>An Oliviti 486 PC
>And as shit load of gaming consoles.
>Typing in programmes from a magazine or book. Buying £1.99 games on tape from the local petrol service station. Swapping disks with friends.
>Good times.
pretty much, even that sounds like a pretty decent deal for a 386SX that early in the game
$800 today will get you a nice logicalincrements gaming shitbox that will probably last you a good five years or even longer depending on what you do
$800 in 1997 got you a shitty hotted up 486 that was already garbage 2 years ago
even paying out the ass for a $6,000+ dual-socket PPro or whatever the fuck got you something that could barely run Office by the 2000s while you can load any old C2D with winshit 10 and run pretty much anything 2D you want
>Diablo 2
>School work
>Porn
>Talking to pedos in chat A.I.M. without knowing they were pedos.
>Flash games.
Sounds about right.
>not owning C64 or Atari800XL/65XE
also: are you over 40yo?
Theme park world
I think you are confusing the movie hackers with your own life user.
See This was LIT boy
I also was young so I played a lot of educational junk
>tfw Amazon Trail 3rd edition
>tfw I remember I took Rosa because she was good at fishing
>tfw child me had patrician taste in waifus
That was the great rivalry of the time, who owned a C64 or Sinclair Spectrum.
It all came down to what my family could afford.
A fat Paki at school owned a C64 which was much pricier than a Speccy. His dad owned corner shops so he could afford it. A mate of mine owned a BBC Model B which was mega expensive. Me, I lived in a council house and a Spectrum was what we could afford.
Don't get me wrong, I wasn't jealous of the shit smelling Paki or my rich mate. I was very happy with what I had.
When I was 15 I got a part time job. £100+ at that age was a good wage and I could afford what I wanted. That was the time I moved on to Amiga's and the Atari ST.
I'm in my 40's now, I have a very decent spec gaming PC and my kids have all the next gen consoles.
