People forget how awful computing, the internet, and operating systems were in the 90s

People forget how awful computing, the internet, and operating systems were in the 90s

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youtube.com/watch?v=hWq4DWfrpu8
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My Linux PC today is not massively different to the Linux PC I was running in 98 when I upgraded from a 486 to a PII. Internet was a lot more interesting back then with Usenet still being a core component of comms, and the web is for plebs.

Sheeeet... dipswitches, modems, AOL, Usenet before it was lame, Trinitron monitors, BBS porn, no FBI party vans, Yahoo chat rooms

People who know, know....

Microshit windaids was especially terrible yes, but Amiga and Linux were good.

so no different from now then

#warez666

Internet was a lot more fun back then, people actually talked to each other and formed friendships. It's just not the same anymore.

sound didn't even work in Linux until like 2011

you wanna be friends, user?

>make a free clone of an OS from 1 9 7 8
>people insist that linux is a modern operating system

when will lincucks learn

My first distro was Corel Linux. I can't remember exactly but either it didn't even have any USB support or the USB support was incredibly basic. Also, there was hardly any software for it. How can that be good?

Nice genetic fallacy, faggot

Do you know when your display protocol X11 was invented?
1987.

You try to tell me your OS is modern when it's primarily written in a 50 year old language.

I also used Corel Linux. Because of IRQ conflicts, I couldn't use my modem and sound card at the same time. What bullshit! Eventually I found a command I could run at startup to change the IRQ of one so I could use both.

>Implying I even use X11
Wayland exists and is pretty well supported now

The internet, in general, was a much better place in the 90's.

>Do you know when your internet protocol TCP/IP was invented?
>1973.

>You try to tell me your internet is modern when it's primarily handled by a 40 year old protocol

>Implying windows isnt written in a 50 year old language
>Implying macOS/OSX isnt written in a 50 year old language
>Implying windows doesn't hang on to old ass subsystems and protocols
>Implying macOS/OSX wasn't build from BSD, NeXTSTEP and Unix

All OS'es have their roots retard.

Sound worked just fine tardmonkey. Alsa and OSS worked. It wasn't until Lennerd "fuck it all to hell" Pottering and his bullshit PulseAudio that everything went to hell for 2-3 years.

Yeah, Windows was a massive shit pile until NT came along and they stopped trying to pile turds on top of DOS. Windows 2000 was great but then they put out XP with its babyish colors and fat buttons and it was horrible. Nothing good came from Microsoft after that until Windows 7 and then they flushed that all down the loo when they hired Pajeet to make Winshit 8 and 10.

I primarily used Mac OS 8 and 9 at home when I was a teenager. Mac OS 9 was pretty terrible and I never even tried OS X until I bought on of those PowerPC MacBooks some years later. By the time 2006 came around I had bought myself a ThinkPad R60 and I was using Windows XP and then 7 on it. In 2008 I bought a bunch of machines including some SPARC boxes with Solaris and some SGI machines that ran IRIX. In 2009 I got myself a ThinkPad T400 which I'm still using and posting from, though I've upgraded the RAM, added an SSD, replaced the battery, and installed Libreboot on it since then. I still have most of my old machines, including my 90s Mac in my basement somewhere.

That's my computing experience.

That pic is comfy as fuck. Had one of those chunky phones when we had a dial-up connection. Used to get pissed when my mom needed to use our other landline so I'd listen in on her phone calls with the chunky phone and make weird noises and breath heavily 'till she started shouting at me, fucking top keks were had. Get back online then and sign into ColonyCity/CyberTown to beg for a gf. I want to go back...

damn, people were naive as fuck back then. makes you want to go back in time and warn them.

>awful

Say what you will about clunky old OSes; at least they didn't literally backdoor your system and spy on you. Also in-OS ads. If I wanted that shit I'd turn on the TV.

I never had a problem with sound on Linux or FreeBSD, but I had a good audio card.

Even today one should make fun of tards for buying shit hardware and expecting it to work. Like, in those days, would you buy a Winmodem and run Linux with it? Not bloody likely but they were eventually cheaper and more widespread than real modems.

this sick burn be turn tup

If you had a DSL connection which was just becoming available for the average consumer the late 90's was probably the golden age of the internet IMO. In the late 90's a 1.5Mbps down DSL connection was pretty much like having a gigabit fiber connection today as the vast majority of the internet and websites were built for people with 28-56k connections.

Usenet with a DSL connection in the late 90's was as close to internet perfection as it will probably ever get. You didn't have to worry about shit, had access to everything, and downloading almost anything was fast as fuck as long as you weren't on dialup.

>In the late 90's a 1.5Mbps down DSL connection was pretty much like having a gigabit fiber connection today as the vast majority of the internet and websites were built for people with 28-56k connections.


fuckin tell me about it. In my area, MediaONE paired up with Roadrunner for internet. In the "experimental" phase we were given one-way cable modems for downloads but you still had to have an analog modem for uploads BUT the optimal setup was a 33.6k modem, not a 56k. Some time in '99 they called me up and said "we have 2 way cable ready in your area and you're the only person over that way with cable internet so we wanted to see if you wanted to be the first to get it rolled out?"

After the technician finished the swap he pulled up a number of websites, the most intensive of which was pepsi.com. On a 56k modem the shit would take minutes to load. On 1.5Mb cable it was nearly instant and because I was the only person in the area with it I enjoyed nothing but the best speed possible.

> He uses a grandpa 90s operating system and call other people old
Have sex, wear a turtleneck and buy a mac ya wincuck pinhead

>the optimal setup was a 33.6k modem, not a 56k

56k modems would transmit from your end at 33.6k anyway. It's just how the compression worked. The end transmitting at 56k needed specialized server modems and a digital telco line.

I never had a problem with shit tier cards. Most audio chipsets were covered pretty well by ALSA, even crappy as fuck whitebox ESS stuff worked fine once you configured it.

Aaaaand completely fucking destroyed.

>1999

Operating systems
>Windows or Unix

General purpose language
>Language C++ or Java

Web technologies
>HTML / CSS / JS

Scripting languages
>Bash

Database
>SQL

You now know 95% of the standards required to be a programmer
What is so bad about this?

Today there are too many tools that do the same thing but continue to be supported because ???
Modern day computing is too complex and it needs to be fixed.

For consumers, computing is wonderful, they get everything for free and only pay with their information being constantly streamed to mega corps so that their lives can be spied on down to the smallest detail.

>implying that he isn't correct
>implying that linux wasn't obsolete at the time of its design
>muh monolithic kernels

Ayyy, now I don't feel so bad. I just got to pretend like it's 1999.

youtube.com/watch?v=hWq4DWfrpu8

Even then we had waifu wars

well it wasn't really that different, just much slower. looks like ign was already shitty back then.

damn son. Finally someone that has it worse than me. This is the one downside to living in this bullshit apartment. When we lived in a house Centurylink ran fiber to the house and I was gettin' 40Mbs. This apartment doesn't allow us to get fiber so we're stuck with DSL over copper lines and we're so far from the office that they can only give us 3mb/s but, as you can see, we don't even get that.

wiby.me - some user made this

A lot say "oh you're just looking at the past with rose colored glasses" but you can actually prove it was better and more fun. Google searches are shit if you just want to "surf".

You either had to use one of the 5 or so sound cards with direct kernel support, or pay for sound with OSS.

That article came out in, iirc, the early 80's. I almost want to say it showed up in Science World in '82-'83 or something like that. I remember seeing it whenever it was published.

It's easy to say it's awful when looking retrospectively obviously.

In 100 years, we're going to look back on 2017 and talk about how 'awful' it was too.

>no FBI party vans

you apparently never went on a HPAC bbs.

>People forget how awful computing, the internet, and operating systems were in the 90s
The good thing is that people looks awful as those times

I relive it by using arch.

>install emacs
>remember copy and paste actually working perfectly in emacs -nw
>something changed, maybe arch's build options, maybe emacs
>it is now FUCKED UP
>CIA niggers did this
>m-x package install xclip
>activate xclip
>C-y to yank
>minibuffer: "quit"

I listened to the minibuffer and switched to debian. Suddenly, it worked!?

Also wayland is crap and destroys ages of perfectly fine software made by sane people, leaving you with garbage made by hipsters.

Sorry user but the Doom poster in the background single-handedly invalidates your entire argument.

Eat sit and due fag.

Uhm, ok.
What was the point of this comment exactly?
I mean, I get it.
You liked the guy’s post. You realized something incredible! Mindblowing. And you want to express that. I've had those times as well... let's face it, it's a normal aspect of communication. But, your inane comments simply add nothing of value to the conversation. What does agreeing with him do? Does it make you feel old to be part of the team? Does it make you happy to say that you're following his thought patterns? Is this really what you want out of Life?
I think you can do better, son. That's why I'm going to use the parental approach, and give you a downvote. Not because I dislike you. But because I want to teach you this very valuable lesson. Contribute to conversation - to society, my friend. Don't be a follower, be a leader. Even if it means you get downteachered as I'm fairly certain I will (but I'm brave and wise enough to comprehend the ill and negligible value of internet points, so that's irrelevant).
May the force be with you, and live stronk and Casper, OP Juan Canopy.
EDIT: Getting downteachered to Holy Hell for giving sound, helpful health advice. For shame, Reddit, for shame.
I hope you are AWARE that downteachering for disagreeing with someone goes against the Reddiquette Policy of Reddit. Thus, if I discover whom is downteachering me, I will be sure to report you to the moderators. You mess with my comment karma - I BREAK YOUR ACCOUNT. Capiche?

> be me in kindergarten
> see apple ][//e
> so this is the power of computers
> leave disappointed as fuck, it's just a boring box that graphs things that has no real software or usefulness

>1999
>already being that fat

>People forget how awful computing, the internet, and operating systems were in the 90s

>the internet was the wild west and not yet a shitty playground for multi-billion-dollar companies
>you could pirate anything without consequences
>no social networking cancer
>Windows was very usable and snappy and not yet an overly bloated spyware-ridden shitfest
>MS-DOS was great, too. Fucking around with config files and qbasic, learning commands and directory structure, installing drivers...really made you understand things

Yeah, awful!

>calls people in 1990 naive
>suggests time to travel to help them

2 people now

My thoughts too

Unfortunately, every operating system of an significance is written in either C or is direct descendent, C++. There are no "modern" operating systems outside of small niches, corporate R&D, academia, and hobbyist projects. Hopefully, this will change over the next couple of decades though unikernels and such.

>Also in-OS ads.
They tried it in the 90s. For example, Free-PC.com offered you a free desktop computer with part of its screen always showing ads.

That's not the OS itself, it's preloaded crapware.

That's some spicy pasta user, but did you even reply to the right person?

>Scripting languages
>>Bash
You forget Perl and Tcl, the Node.js of Web 1.0 (but with a better language).

Awful? No. Slow? Yes, holy fuck 90s CD drives, boot times and internet/usenet were unbelievably slow by modern standards

Sure, but from the average user's perspective there was little difference.

mfw even back then
>"12 reasons why Zelda will be game of the year"

Man I used that OS and browser back then, all the hidden muscle memories were reactivated watching this. Since I was 16 it was all insanely glorious, and I was among 2-3 out of 70 in our school year obsessing about and spending all my time with HTML, JS, QB, Pascal, VB, "Web Design".. tried suse for a while around Y2K. It was fantastic because it was all thoroughly uncool (at my end, maybe not in the us), so only TRUE aficionados populated everything tech, no fakers hipsters chads --- only folks who loved this shit so much, they'd honestly do it for free or food+board if necessary

this is one of the most linux posts of all time

Those people knew what they were getting into by signing up for freepc. All three of them.
A Win10 machine isn't free and you don't opt in voluntarily.

Boy you sure are fucking retarded if you think that a unikernel is what'll be the "modern" operating system on people's personal machines. Jesus fucking christ.

You're also fucking stupid if you think unikernels are a new idea. They're literally the oldest type of kernel imaginable.

user pls... supersizing was only 29 cents extra.

t. born in 1995

Computers, operating systems (actual ones) and internet connections have greatly improved.
The Web has not. In fact, it's much worse.

Good thing I don't think either of those things, then.

no`

Yeah, but that's a kid's burger now.

>feeding kids burgers.
I thought it was a snack burger. Nobody bats an eye when I order a dozen of them and a milkshake.

Horseshit I've always made firends online

Hahhaah punters and greifing AOL tools. Beige box over to my neighbors house. Using university computers with Solaris on older backbones back in '94. FIDONET!

...

>tfw you figure out a douchebag sysop neglected to blacklist 1-900 or 911 in his callback verifier

Fuck you, playing flash games on toonami's site was the bomb back in the day My only regret is never being able to play them again.

but muh faux nostalgia le fashwave /r/the_donald A E S T H E T I C!

To me the 90s were more about video games and tv shows being really fun than PCs being good.

I would even say the 00s where the golden years of PCs because we had shit like the nehalem chips which were the most based beautiful things intel ever made. Literally the golden years for overclocking, making custom water cooled builds, etc.

Early 2000s waa the peak of human civilization. Everyone was using windows xp (the zenith of os development) the smartphone didn't exist. No (((social media))) no 4th wave femminism. People talked to each other more. Hanging out at the mall arcades meeting chicks.

Yep. Nothing was great about it... Heh.

>awful

This was all there was back then.

As much as you might loath this, it was probably people like this guy who moved gaming and tech forward while the normies guffawed and laughed.

>'The money is in the hardware'

>'People only use computers for business anyway'

>'Games are a waste of time'

>'why would you want a better mouse or keyboard anyway?'

>'People watch TV, if they want to watch a movie or something they'll go to the cinema'

>'websites are just for companies to advertise their services'

Normies did everything in their power to stop the march of technology. It was ugly, unpopular and socially stigmatized. Nerds had to drag everyone else into the 21st century and they basically got ridiculed and derided by both men and women the entire time. They still do.

Now the technology industry basically holds up our entire economy alongside shit like fucking food.

Computing was only good BECAUSE of how difficult and tedious it was. It had a barrier for entry which meant that only people who cared in the first place showed up. Now we have countless millions of newfags showing up because they learned to code (for money) or because they want to join in with our fun video games (which they couldn't even figure out how to play if it wasn't for ezmode $300 internet-connect consoles or Windows 10 + Steam)

No, they don't

>Amiga

My nig

>most Sup Forums users were either babies or non-existent when this was made
Feel old yet grandpa?

>use it
>it's all boring useless garbage
Surprise and search suck.

computers are tool not a fucking secret club

>ubuntu ships a buggered pulseaudio once in 2008
>nearly 10 years later and people still talk about linux audio like it never worked ever
it's like the only things you know about linux are the things that get repeated on Sup Forums by windows users

s/you/they/

for normies they are, guess who built the operating systems, game engines, and web technologies you use everyday?

Literally computer clubs

>tfw getting a UsRobotics ISA 56k modem so I could finally make a full switch to linux (Slackware was my jam)
>tfw didnt know what "uncomment" meant so compiled the kernel to get support for my soundcard (literally I just had to remove the # from a config file, found out later)
>tfw we got broadband and my roomates where all still on 98 or ME, and I just setup a NAT with iptables using a comand someone gave me in linuxforums.org
>tfw my k6-2 couldnt run divx well on any DE, but framebuffer was still a thing and ran mplayer from CLI to watch them without X
>tfw hooking up on irc and getting laid since most ISP redirected to their homepage that always included a web irc-based chat

I cant even remember how to compile a kernel now, miss having a functional brain.

>ALSA doesn’t allow audio from more than one source
>OSS is hardly maintained anymore and requires a kernel patch to setup
Yeah, great audio you got here

What? I had a smartphone in 2002.

xp was normie tier

win 2000 and ME were 98 perfected and stable

OSS was the default audio until some licencing shit made every distro move to ALSA that looked good at first but turned out to be utter shit. OSS kept getting updated and OSS4 had no licensing issues and was perfect, but ALSA was already dominating and had MIDI support so it died (I think, maybe its still being used somewhere)

>your internet forum won't exchange banners with other forum on similar topic in 2017
>because there is no other forum
>and your forum is dead too
>tfw you'll never meet cool people on internet forum again

i mean, Sup Forums japanese imageboard and other discords, steams, whatnot are some kind of alternative, but i'd say that old ways of internet communication were more sincere and "real" even without my nostalgia glasses. what used to be "trolling" is now basically the only way to communicate, people literally speak in jokes in order to avoid serious conversation

It wasn't that bad

i build the game engines you use every day, computers are a tool

>ALSA doesn’t allow audio from more than one source
your information is terribly outdated, dmix (software mixing) has been enabled by default for cards without hardware mixing since 2005

Operating systems? Mostly the research arms of megacorps and research institutes. Reusable game engines weren't much of a thing back then, but the impressive games were built by game companies for arcades. Hobbyists only mattered on 8/16-bit home computers.

It's a good vodka, by the way.

holy shit you are underage