I remember my dad bringing home a BBC Micro when we were kids. I knew just enough to get Chuckie Egg running.

Later we had a PC running Windows 3.1. I was an expert in crashing the plane on F-19 Stealth Fighter. One day I deleted the OS and that was the end of that computer…

Some years later we got an old Elonex PC that dad’s work were getting rid of. It was just good enough to run Windows 95. We had dial-up internet from Freeserve for a time - we would have I think 2 hours in the evening to use it.

I remember

- Trying and failing to download shitty quality videos from wwf.com (I was a huge Attitude-era Wrestling mark...)


- Playing questionable games on Newgrounds


- Trawling Yahoo directories and webrings for random weird stuff


- Trying to download a low-bitrate rip of the Macarena from Kazaa and giving up when it estimated 2 days DL time.


- Terrible browser-war era websites. Broken Javascript/HTML. BLINKING TEXT. Incompatible flash videos.

I broke our family computers so often that I knew the Windows licence key without having to look. I learned how to fix the computer out of sheer terror for what my dad might do if he came home from work to find the PC broken again.

After we got rid of the dialup I would go the library pretty much every day. I had literally boxes of floppy disks that I would stuff into my pockets so that I could download stuff to take home. Mostly old emulators, ROMs and text adventures from ifarchive.

Crazy to think the lengths I would happily go to for things we take for granted now.

  • Frater MusEnglish
    8•1 year ago

    In 8th (?) grade our larval computing lab was a row of Commodore 64 but there was only one 5.25" floppy drive between them. When you wanted to save or load your proglet you had to

    • walk over to insert your floppy
    • return to your seat to do your load/save
    • walk back over to retrieve your floppy to free up the drive for someone else

    At some point I realized that while the owner was walking back and forth you could load their code to see how they approached the assignment. And doing so did not affect their workflow or anyone else at all. It felt like the earth shifted a bit at that moment.