What was computing like in the 90s?

What was computing like in the 90s?

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If you had a proper desktop computer, you were a working stiff or a proper nerd.
This changed after the early 2000s.

I used to make custom artwork using a crappy stylus and upload them to AOL message boards. My mortal kombat characters were somewhat popular. Back then we had stupid slow modems so an image the size of OP probably would have taken 5-10 minutes to transfer.

I was a mac user, so frequent system crashes followed by waiting five minutes to reboot. With a fucking paperclip.

Gaming was fun. Having to constantly mess with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS because you never had enough fucking memory. People today have it so easy. They complain about how slow 4GB is, and like man I wish back then your shit would have just been slow. If you couldn't free up that extra 16KB of memory your game flat out wouldn't boot.

Picture, for a moment, the Web you knew about only existing as far as Sup Forums's 10th page. That's how small communities were back in the day on Usenet. Even smaller if you were a fan of some real niche stuff.

Flame wars lasted for months, not hours.

Games were primarily marketed by breathless and shamelessly lying magazines.

BBS systems fought on until the mid 90s -- AOL was the knife through that particular heart unless you were into some deep, deep underground shit.

>What was computing like in the 90s?

A lot like Moore's Law.

I miss the exponential growth of computing power we used to get, but I do not miss having to spend thousands of dollars every year or so upgrading. Hell I'm still using a Sandy Bridge i7 today because it's still plenty powerful for any software I throw at it. If you asked me in the late 90s if I thought I'd ever sit on a single platform for six years straight I'd think you were out of your fucking mind.

Also local dialup BBSes until the late 90s because nobody could afford minutes on the Internet.

Rule of thumb growing up:
2400bps -> 14.4kbps -> 33.6kbps -> 56kbps
1hr -> 15min -> 5min -> 3min per megabyte

>monstrous 64MB of RAM
>still can't load X-Wing because not enough conventional memory

>tfw AOL bills you 2 minutes just for opening the client and making the connection handshake

When I was 10 I used to pretend I was a 16 year old girl in chat rooms then I would lure perverts over to IM and send them trojans in the guise of pictures.

>Games were primarily marketed by breathless and shamelessly lying magazines.
So at least that much is still the same.

I live in Australia and my family had a proper desktop computer from the early 90s onwards, though I don't remember having internet until around 1997. By the late 90s I think it was pretty normal for households to have at least one computer unless they were poor.

>2400bps
>1hr

Ah yes, I remember the first file I ever downloaded from AOL was a free trial of the educational game "Alphaman." It took an hour to download the megabyte-sized file, filled my entire hard drive, and arrived named alphaman.zip. I had never heard of that file extension or even file compression before. The journey to figure out what a zip file was required multiple trips to a library and kickstarted my interest in computer science.

This. My first hard drive was 1.2GB and my computer had 4mb of ram. 4. This was enough for windows 3.1 and a few games. I don't even download media less than 1GB per hour anymore.

Much nicer.

>AOL at 2400 baud
>1MB filled entire hard drive in AOL era

digital cave painting with Paint.

youtube.com/watch?v=KAExa9P7hME

No spam.
And then the Jews found usenet.

>With a fucking paperclip.

Windows users had paperclips too

>No spam.
>And then the Jews found usenet.

No lie, I was the faggot that spammed newsgroups with junk to push everything out of retention. I set up the bot on a computer in my college lab which had an astoundingly fast T1 line.

was anyone else there?

>not having an IBM clone from a business liquidation sale in 1991

I must have been lucky. My first Windows machine was a Gateway2000 with a P5 and 350MB hdd

hipcrime?

Nobody fishing hardware out of the scrap heap had money for time on AOL.

Also the shareware version of Alpha Man was only like 100kb if we're talking about the same scrabble/sokoban type game.

Starcraft and Diablo were considered scandalously violent and gory.

God do you remember the horror that greeted Crusader: No Remorse

That game had a gun that vaporized people down to their skeleton in a way we wouldn't see again until Fallout and Mars Attacks

Computers started getting cheap cheap around 97' and were almost free when buying internet plans by 99'

You had to open up and clean your mouse on a weekly basis
Software was installed via floppy disc or CD ROM instead of downloaded off the internet.

Pornographic images took forever to load, and streaming video was still science fiction.

Pizza flowed so freely that you couldn't avoid it even if you were trying to.

my first was an apple iie. and then a mac se.

i was able to run a local BBS off that mac. got a substantial amount of callers and played a lot of shareware games

Trade Wars for LIFE

Computers were actually fun

>IBM clone

"I'll take terms I haven't heard in 25 years for $600, Alex"

DIPSWITCHES

JUMPERS

Actually needing a special tool to pull chips from their sockets because the legs were so goddamn fragile

Turbo buttons

Everything was made out of ABS plastic and steel

Everything sucked and was pretty much constantly breaking. If you went two weeks without needing to fix something, from removing lint from your mouse, to fixing something that went wrong in Windows 3.1, you felt lucky.

That said, the 90's had Red Alert, so there was that.

>rival corp exploits citadel shield bug for invincible planetary shields
>retaliate by setting off 20 genesis torpedoes and putting their home sector way over the planet limit two minutes before daily maintenance

Playing video games late at night with the shrieking of the PC speaker keeping your parents up

I remember the first psx emulator "bleem". Catch was, it took about a week to download an iso.

youtube.com/watch?v=AZQdAyb-8_M

I could annoy the shit out of anyone by firing up this baby

I used to download games, a few at a time, to a floppy disk at the library, then bring them home and play them. I wanted to relive some of the old games that I painstakingly retrieved the other night, so I wrote a script to download and extract a site's entire catalog. 90's me would be jealous. Computers are still fun.

Irritating. Software was buggier and hardware took longer to set up and often conflicted with each other.

That painful transition period between jumper/dip IRQ settings and plug & play, when plug & play never fucking worked right and you wished you had your jumpers back so you could fix the conflicts yourself.

Plus the .PAR files because MEDIEVAL.R15 was incomplete due to a missing newspost.

>Pizza flowed so freely that you couldn't avoid it even if you were trying to.

fuck i didn't even realize that pizza stopped being a thing whenever 3 or more people gathered somewhere, but you're right.

I remember finally convincing my dad to get an AdLib for our 486.

When I first heard not only crisp realistic sound effects but also music tracks that I had no idea were in the games it pretty much blew my mind.

Fucking scraping the barrel for every kb of memory possible. Now im running loaded 32gbs for no reason. Times have changed

This was the place to be if you couldn't afford AOL

mfw Warcraft multiplayer on Heat.net
mfw 10six
mfw Allegiance on MSN Gaming Zone, the best space game of all time

>hardware backdoors in everything
>computers are still fun
yeah no

>you will never celebrate windows release day every again

I used to go to the local library one summer, sit down at a PC, fire up telnet and play a MUD literally all afternoon and no one had a clue what the fuck I was doing there all day

[MENU]
MENUITEM = windows, Windows
MENUITEM = emm, DOS with EMM386
MENUITEM = himem, DOS with HIMEM
MENUITEM = dos, standard DOS

You need 570 kByte (?) of free RAM to run the freshly bought Ultima 7. Without EMM386. Better start tinkering with the drivers right now.

We had shit like this

youtube.com/watch?v=3xJSstGwB8s

This has always been the case

Something like this groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.os.linux.slackware/hWy0h_Sxaug/nlIAOVx25XwJ

So basically like it is now but with slower shit and usenet and newsgroups instead of chans and forums

...

It was exciting yet frustrating. The latter is primarily for family members in particular.

that pentium sound hit me right in the feels

Building a home supercomputer prorgam from WeirdStuff Warehouse

>sockets for components

>BIOS extension roms

Ah yes, I burned a boot ROM once. I don't remember which one it was, probably something related to KA9Q.

We have always been at war with Oceana.
Fuck off revisionist.

We didn't need heat sinks or fans for any of the chips in our computers. Which was good because the cases we had were too small, poorly ventilated and needed tons of ribbon cables to connect everything.

>90% download
>Time elapsed 12 hours
>*calls your house*

joke's on you, we had ISDN

but seriously, it broke the connection? I only got the "line busy" signal

>big download is at 99%
>mom picks up the phone

ISDN was noice. No modems understood call waiting until late into the decade.

>get into the Anarchy Online beta
>Take a week and a half to download the game on 56k
>Start patching
>Game goes gold before I'm done downloading the beta

CS with 56k modem. Then 256 kb ADSL, holy shit it was fast. Also, AMD Athlon 600 MHz 4ever

Why wait to download Netscape Navigator?
[Order CD Now]

Buying magazines with tons of freeware, demos and games because it was cheaper to buy than to wait.

People were dumber.
A lot dumber.
I did very similar things.

...

It was actually pretty shit

there wasn't much to do except discuss the simpsons or have cyber sex with old german guys over ICQ

Oh I see, that makes sense then. We didn't have teh internets until like 1998

I recall not being able to get landline calls and be on the internet at the same time.

...

newfag get out REEEEEE

The jet turbine hard drives and PSU fans more than made up for the noise though.

>pre-dotcom bubble
>software devs in huge demand
>IT in huge demand
>completely reparable/modular hardware
>Win 95 and Win 98 can be installed from a directory or LAN or whatever, it just works

must have been fucking glorious

>Win 95 and Win 98
>just works
user…

>must have been fucking glorious

>I was a prolific Win 98 user in 2000's and it never did that
Not once? I was a prolific mac OS X user in 2000s and it LITERALLY never did anything like that.

all i really did was talk on irc still talk to some of those people, oh and programed still doing that to

It would have been glorious but for the H-1Bs who almost but did not quite speak English.
The Sun Ultra 2 platform as a server or workstation. Now that was glorious.

Not once, I actually didn't get the blue screen meme and someone had to explain it to me

>lamer
I almost forgot this insult even existed. Used a lot in broodwar.

hownu.ru

click on heat.net

>Win 95 and Win 98 can be installed from a directory or LAN or whatever, it just works

...said no one ever.

>upgrade your Amiga to one MB of ram in order to play Monkey Island
>finally getting 486 for christmas
>fiddle with autoexec.bat and config.sys for hours to make gaymes work
>learn how to use DOS
>fuck around with qbasic to cheat in nibbles and gorillas
>Win95 comes along, install it using a gazillion floppy disks, be blown away
>parents get slow as fuck internet modem and buy Pentium with Win98
>check out internet, it is the wild west
>open lycos and search for porn
>OMG
>download real media player and watch an average 5 hours of porn a day
>play Age of Empires, Day of the Tentacle etc all the time
>install Napster and start pirating shit like crazy

The 90s were an incredibly good time!

THIS GUY GETS IT

>it was the best of times
>it was the worst of times

Everyone had a desktop user and could print a document or play a dos game but the difference was there were rare superpowers only had by a few before year 2000

>cd burners
>cable modems
>Internet >56k
>decent sound
>multiple monitors
>removable hard drives

All that was expensive voodoo back then - you only had all of them if your Dad was engineer or sysadmin

Practically the equivelant of owning a hot rod back then

FUN STORY: I ripped all my music to DAT and carried around a Sony TCD-D7 in highschool because it was cheaper than cdrw at the time and skip proof

Games where fun back then.
Heck, I could spend weeks playing demos

The internet was a lot less same-y, every website had its own totally unique culture. The internet has become a lot more consolidated since the early/mid-2000s and every community has pretty much the same feel to it with the exception of the odd in-joke, 99% of the shit you see on every website is just jokes taken from the overarching social media internet that everyone is a part of. It used to be you'd find a forum and have to lurk for months before you felt confident enough to even make a simple introduction thread (which you would fuck up and the resident XX_DEMON_GOD_XX global mod would lock), it was a genuinely exciting experience to find a new site back then. Nowadays I probably don't go to more than 5 different sites on a daily basis, my bookmarks list 20 years ago was at least 20x that size and they all truly felt like their own unique little communities, going from one forum to another was like entering a completely different world. Of course there were a few "memes" back then that you'd probably see across different websites, but they were a much smaller part of the experience, most jokes were unique in-jokes that would make zero sense to anyone who hadn't lurked for months beforehand.

FUCK GOOGLE

Kibo was always part of the experience.

Computer shows were advertised like monster truck shows

youtube.com/watch?v=wFf-mMxo8JI

Today's "noob" is not even an insult. Just somebody new to the game.

Hit up the archive and watch through The Computer Chronicles, it basically documented everything as it happened from the early 80s up until the early 2000s.

Here's a pretty nice documentary about the rice and fall of BBS'

youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgE-9Sxs2IBVgJkY-1ZMj0tIFxsJ-vOkv

I fucking love the fact that underage fucks and newfag redditards will NEVER experience it. That's all I care about.
Games were amazing, even your shitty co-op games these days can't compete,they've only evolved in graphics,but devolved in heart and gameplay.
Websites were interesting and just surfing the net was a RPG adventure in itself, full of wonders and curiosities, not to mention without cancerous JS. These were the little things that made it great, truly an end of a great era. What underages experience now is just a cheap copy of all that.
>b-but porn loads faster these days haha checkmate
don't try to debate me, I'm not in the mood. Oh how much I love the fact that I experienced it and many people here didn't.

>no cancerous JS
>1990s
Are you sure you remember the 90s?