Yo, what was your first computer? How old were you, where and how did you get it, what did you do with it, etc.
JCPhoenix @ JCPhoenix @beehaw.org Posts 30Comments 382Joined 2 yr. ago
JCPhoenix @ JCPhoenix @beehaw.org
Posts
30
Comments
382
Joined
2 yr. ago
I'm almost 37. I remember as a kid being my parents' "navigator' on family road trips with the map. My parents still carry an atlas in their cars, but ofc, they're using GPS on their phones/cars like anyone else.
As far as actual pre-Internet, I was on the Internet at a pretty young age (back then). I think was 8 or 9 when my dad signed us up for AOL. Roughly 1995/1996. And I was all over that (only briefly did he put a filter on my account). So I don't have a whole lot of experience truly being pre-Internet. I was playing online PC games while my friends were playing on the N64 or whatever.
As a kid playing in the neighborhood, I either called my parents from my friends' houses (which I rarely did to my mom's anger) or periodically stopped back home. Or at the very least, be back before the streetlights came on.
I had a cell phone by 9th/10th grade, esp since I was involved in band and other activities. I think I used pay phone maybe once before that? And then never again.
I was driving before GPS was widely available on phones (which existed pre-smartphone), but you just printed out MapQuest directions before leaving. Which obviously relied on the Internet.
So yeah, I don't have much experience pre-Internet, really.
I think that's the case. Like they're not unheard of here in the US. Like I could go out to the store right now and buy one. Wal-Mart or Target or a home goods store still sell htem. A lot of schools and colleges still have them in classrooms. But at home or in the office, I suspect they're more decorative than anything. Like all clocks in my place are digital. The only analog clock I have would be a watch in some box that I have that I never wear. I think my parents have one, like a small mantlepiece one. Otherwise, everything else is digital.
Analog watches are probably the most common encounter. But with so many, including me, using smartwatches, how common are they actually?
I worked at a small MSP 2020-2021. Some of our customers needed access to government sites for reporting. The fact that some of these pages still had the "Best Viewed in Internet Explorer" badge or language was sad and frightening. Luckily there's browser compatibility mode in Edge (which as you mentioned is probably just changing the user agent string), but still. My dad works in govt IT and even he's encountered internal sites that require ActiveX. He has to sometimes figure out workarounds.
I did have one medical client that used some web charting/reporting platform. And it required a specific, long outdated version of Firefox. We had to intentionally turn off updates in Firefox so they could access it. Anything newer than that version and the site wouldn't load. It was very strange.
Trackball or bust.
Deleted
Permanently Deleted
Jump
I never really gave up reddit. I mostly did in the aftermath of the API loss; certainly didn't access it on mobile anymore (at least not signed-in to reddit).
But pretty quickly I realized that some communities on reddit, such as ones related to my job field, are pretty vital. Unfortunately, they haven't been replicated to Lemmy, or are still pretty nascent. This goes for some of my interests/hobbies as well. Yes I could "be the change you want to see in the world," but...I've done that on reddit before when I helped found a subreddit. I don't really care to do that again. There's one Lemmy community I'm trying to push a little bit, but I'm not a mod there, nor do I have the energy to build a community all over again. Sorry.
Anyway, I go back to reddit as needed. But only lurking, at least until about October, when I started commenting again.
I do try to not spend all day on reddit like I used to. My goal is to only go to reddit when I need information. Like I still do google/ddg searches with "reddit" as one of the keywords. And once I find what I need/want, I leave. But there are times when I catch myself scrolling my frontpage.
Idk. Reddit isn't going anywhere. Even in May/June, I knew that. Reddit wasn't built overnight (My account is like 13yrs old); it won't go away overnight. And the same applies to Lemmy and other sites. It'll take time before they get anywhere close to reddit, if they ever do. And that's OK.
I also don't have a problem with visiting different sites and communities and maintaining separate accounts all around. I have my Beehaw account; I have an account on Lemmy.World, since Beehaw defederated to LW; I have a separate account on Kbin, because I didn't initially understand that Kbin was just Activity Pub frontend; I have accounts on Tildes and other sites. I have a standalone Mastodon account on an instance. My Pixelfed account is entirely separate. And I do use all of these. That's OK. I'm not looking for "one account/site to rule them all." Even when I was mainly on reddit, it wasn't like that was the only place I was on. Different places have different things I'm seeking or like about them. Reddit just happens to be one of those sites. That's all.
I picked up Cobalt Core on a whim during this current Steam sale. I don't really play deckbuilders, but this is a super fun game. It's a roguelike with heavy FTL vibes. I have yet to get that far in it because...
I've been playing tons of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. I bought it during the summer sale on Steam, but only started playing it now. It's a mystery game similar to the Phoenix Wright/Ace Attorney games (probably because it's made by Shu Takumi, who also made PW/AA), but instead of investigations and court cases, the main gameplay revolves around limited time travel and then trying to make Rube Goldberg machine-style scenarios to prevent people from dying. And some of the challenges are, well, challenging to figure out how things work together and in what order to use or manipulate items. It's fun.
That's not even remotely true. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of old-school forums out there, some from the earlier days of the Internet, that still exist. And they're not all huge. Tildes, the platform OP mentioned, only does limited invitations, and isn't particularly large, yet is vibrant (reddit post-API certainly helped). You can see here that Tildes has about 25k registered users; I imagine the vast majority aren't active or only lurk. The same goes for tons of small communities on Discord.
I would agree if Beehaw was just starting off as just another forum out on the web. That's certainly a hard task to start on from literally nothing. But Beehaw isn't starting from nothing. As one of the larger Lemmy instances, a userbase has already been established. Of course, not everyone will come over to a standalone site or stick around for very long if they do migrate, but it is entirely possible for a smaller community to exist in a standalone configuration over time. As long as community members find value in it, and as long as admins/mods are willing to help grow the community, even it if is slow, people will stick around.
Not everywhere needs to be reddit, and not everyone wants that anyway.
I had a good Christmas. Actually got to have a Christmas with my family this year. Last year, I got caught up in that Southwest Airlines meltdown so I didn't get to spend it with my family. I avoided that this year by flying Delta down to my folks (and SWA did have some issues in the run-up to Xmas again this year due to weather at Chicago-Midway causing some chaos across the SWA system). Still flew SWA home; in fact got home about 30min ago.
Debating whether to go see my friends later today. It's a 5hr drive and basically today is the only day I can go, and then I have to be back by Friday night. It's currently 3:30a here. So if I decide to do this, I'd have to leave by noon at the latest. So we'll see how I feel in the morning.
Nothing big planned for NYE. Probably just get a bottle of champagne for myself and some Chinese takeout, as usual.
Hope everyone enjoyed the holidays, got some time off, and some time for R&R, too!
I still think you're engaging and charming. Even if you were quiet for the last two days.
Several years ago, when I was more just the unofficial office geek, our email was acting up. Though we had Internet access as normal. At the time, email (Exchange) was hosted on-prem on our server. Anything server related, I'd contact our MSP to handle it. Which usually meant they'd simply reboot the server. Easy enough, but I was kinda afraid and hesitant to touch the server unless the MSP explicitly asked/told me to do something.
I reported it to our MSP, expecting a quick response, but nothing. Not even acknowledgment of the issue. This was already going on for like an hour, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I went to the server, turned on the monitor...and it was black. Well, shit. Couldn't even do a proper shutdown. So I emailed again, waited a bit, and again no response.
Well, if the server was being unresponsive, I figured a hard shutdown and reboot would be fine. I knew that's what the MSP would (ask me to) do. What difference was them telling me to do it versus just me doing it on my own? I was going to fix email! I was going to be the hero! So I did it.
Server booted up, but after getting past the BIOS and other checks...it went back to black screen again. No Windows login. That's not so terrible, since that was the status quo. Except now, people were also saying Internet all of a sudden stopped working. Oh shit.
Little did I know that the sever was acting as our DNS. So I essentially took down everything: email, Internet, even some server access (network drives, DBs). I was in a cold sweat now since we were pretty much dead in the water. I of course reached out AGAIN to the MSP, but AGAIN nothing. Wtf...
So I told my co-workers and bosses, expecting to get in some trouble for making things worse. Surprisingly, no one cared. A couple people decided to go home and work. Some people took super long lunches or chitchatted. Our receptionist was playing games on her computer. Our CEO had his feet up on his desk and was scrolling Facebook on his phone. Another C-suite decided to call it an early day.
Eventually, at basically the end of the day, the MSP reached out. They sent some remote commands to the server and it all started working again. Apparently, they were dealing with an actual catastrophe elsewhere: one of their clients' offices had burned down so they were focused on BCDR over there all day.
So yeah, I took down our server for half a day. And no one cared, except me.
Team Kick Sauber? That just sounds weird. Like they want to get rid of Sauber.
Project Zomboid, hands down. Valheim is good, too.
But only with friends. And that's case with pretty much all survival games; I won't play by myself.
I guess Minecraft, as well, but I mostly play Creative. So to me, it's hardly a survival game.
Ah I stand corrected on the Android side. I assumed there was some licensing going on. I'll correct that.
I'm enjoying Beehaw. I really haven't looked around at other instances that much, but it's pretty chill here.
Yeah because I'm sure GM's shit will be better. Idek why I'm addressing this: we all know GM doesn't want to pay Apple or Google. That this is really about more renting and never owning. They just want more money.
GM, just say that. We know you're a gigantic money-hungry corp. You all don't have to lie and pretend to care about safety. We're not a bunch of idiots. We get it, even if you all suck for doing this.
I'd say I hope GM crashes and burns again, but then the government will just bail them out again.
People, and especially teens, still use Snapchat? That's surprising. I remember when that was super popular in the late 00s/early 20teens with my friends (I never really used it). I don't think anyone that I know my age (mid 30s) uses it anymore. Which I suppose makes it "cool" again.
Ooh that's pretty neat and inexpensive. Thanks for sharing!
Not having to work. I was 12 or 13 at the turn of the millennium. So not working was nice.
I probably miss my Gameboy Pocket (and Pokemon). Yeah the screen was tiny, not in color, and it wasn't backlit, and I have a Switch and Steam Deck and of course an smartphone, but...Idk, the Pocket was just so quaint and cute. I could just play that play Pokemon for hours on end, anywhere I wanted, without disturbing anyone. Which I did, sometimes even at school, which eventually got it confiscated by a teacher; I got it back at the end of the day.
It was such a paradigm change in gaming (Yes, I know the original GB or even Sega GameGear existed, but I knew few people who had one and they were bulky as all hell).
My brother collected these. I think he still has some of them somewhere. Like the original boxes for Diablo and Starcraft.
I collected some too, but I think I eventually got rid of mine. I was into the various Maxis Sim games, so I had tons of the boxes. SimCity, SimTower, SimPark, SimIsle...
The best manual was probably Ultima Online, an MMO. I read and studied the shit out of that thing. Used to bring it to school to learn all the spells and stuff. Also came with a good sized, folded-up map of the world on special paper.
My family got a hand-me-down Tandy from one of our relatives. It would've been somewhere between 1992-1994, which was when I was like age 5-7. Looking at photos online, I'm thinking it was a Tandy 1000 SL. They gave us some games with it, but I really don't even remember them. I know my mom bought some educational software for me. I "broke" this one by trying to install one of the games to it, instead of just running it from the floppy disk. It just wouldn't properly boot to the OS (don't even know what OS it was) afterwards. My dad was/is an IT guy but went to school for CS. Using BASIC, he'd program little graphics things for me. Like he did one thing looked like colored laser beams shooting across the screen. Another looked like bubbles floating up.
Our first brand new family PC was purchased in like 1995 (I would've been about 8). It was a Packard Bell. It looked like this. We got Internet (AOL) not long afterwards, which blew my mind, even as a kid. I've basically had Internet access ever since. I once again "broke" this one, again trying to install some software to it that I found online. It stopped booting to Windows. So I didn't touch it for months. My dad is a mainframe and servers guy, so he wasn't much help (even today, he's not great with desktops) But I eventually found the Windows 95 CD that came with the PC and reinstalled Windows myself. In many ways, that was my first step into my current IT career.
My first computer, as in not the family PC, but my own, was in 2005. A high school graduation/going to college present was an HP Pavilion DV4000 series laptop. I specced it somewhat towards gaming, without breaking the bank, even though it was not a gaming laptop by any means. Was good enough that I could play Final Fantasy XI and WoW on it from campus or Starbucks or wherever. Priorities, am I right?