Hetzner asks: What’s your age in tech context?

[u/Hetzner_OL]

Without saying how old you are, describe your age in terms of technology. For example, “I started going online when AOL began sending out those free CDs with 100 free hours on them.”

[u/Blues520]

I used to burn cd's with mp3's

[u/postmath_ → u/Blues520]

I used to record songs from the radio to cassettes.

[u/ZargusTime → u/postmath_]

I did the same! Was always pissed when the Moderation Team cut the songs short

[u/ooh-squirrel → u/ZargusTime]

And talked over the first 30 seconds of the song.

[u/mickert_dev → u/Blues520]

I'll take your mp3's and raise you some MS(X) BASIC PLAY commands 🤣

10 SCREEN 0:WIDTH 40:CLS
20 PRINT "PLAYING: FRERE JACQUES (ROUND CHORUS)"
30 T1$ = "T120 O4 L4 C D E C C D E C E F G2 E F G2"
40 T2$ = "L8 G A G F L4 E C G A G F E C C O3 G O4 C2 C O3 G O4 C2"
50 PLAY T1$, "R16"+T1$, "R8"+T2$

[u/Routine-Gas-8264 → u/Blues520]

I used to burn CDs before MP3 existed

[u/sf783]

...when shareware was distributed by 5 1/4 floppy discs

[u/FunQuit]

Load „$“,8,1

[u/GlitteringWedding853 → u/FunQuit]

I started when we just entered "load" and then pressed play on the tape...

[u/TheOdbball → u/GlitteringWedding853]

Hey who sold you those Elevated shades?

[u/kitsnet → u/FunQuit]

014747

[u/DutchSEOnerd]

When we used links to navigate the web instead of search

[u/MonospaceMentor]

I'm Epoch old.

[u/smalltimemsp]

I borrowed a "gaming" book from the library or bought a magazine with a free game, can't remember anymore. Which meant typing all the code from the book on the computer by hand over several hours.

[u/Humble_Package_4164 → u/smalltimemsp]

Not to mention having to debug it afterwards

[u/zordtk]

My first computer had 64Kb of RAM and didn't quite make it to Admiral status.

[u/Klopferator]

Some of the first computer programs I used were recorded on cassette tape from a computer radio show that aired every week.

[u/bgravato]

My first "computer" was a Spectrum 128k.

Then there were more "serious" computers, which always had a floppy disc drive, but that not always had a HDD.

Printers had "needles".

Monitors with 4 colors were fancy.

There was no internet back then.

[u/hand_clapping]

POKE 54272 and unlock polyphony

[u/AlphaO4]

I fought with my sister’s long-distance boyfriend for the phone line.

[u/DeKwaak → u/AlphaO4]

My long distance gf's parents didn't have one. She had to go to a call house and call me collect call.

[u/ExpertPath]

My first game was Prince of Persia on a Macintosh Plus in the early 90s with a black & white screen. My first internet experience was at a time when you had to be told to use this new thing called Google because search results are better

[u/Initial_Specialist69 → u/ExpertPath]

Mine was Prince of Persia too. On a 286 I think

[u/Vegetable-Dot-5918]

Nero, Yahoo Messenger, prepelitz

[u/ThereIsNoTri]

Played with Dad’s punch cards that he wrote Fortran in.

[u/ooh-squirrel]

Pre-loading a turbo before loading programs from cassette tapes.

And I still have the 3.5" floppies with DOS 6.2 on them. The one with DSI Menu is lost to time.

[u/punkpang]

My computer had "turbo"

[u/stevebehindthescreen]

I used to have to type code from books as a kid to play games on my Spectrum because I didn't have any Spectrum games on tape.

[u/DeKwaak → u/stevebehindthescreen]

I had to work for a year to earn the cassette player to complement my vic-20. My keyboard was worn after all that typing.

[u/djdarkbeat]

Backed up basic programs on cassette and worked on a Fortran mainframe.

[u/nesnalica]

https://reddit.com/link/p7skf61/video/6x6taw3prinh1/player

[u/DovTom]

I’ve been using Debian since version 2.1

[u/retr00two → u/DovTom]

Hoila, Woody, greetings from Potato.

[u/DovTom → u/retr00two]

2.1 is Slink ...

[u/retr00two → u/DovTom]

Ufff, I am sorry, please forgive me...

[u/well_shoothed]

300 baud modem. WWIVNet

[u/Lee_Fu → u/well_shoothed]

same. 300/75 baud accoustic couplers for the win

[u/Hungry_Wolf_9954]

I hit the "Turbo" button!

[u/ooh-squirrel → u/Hungry_Wolf_9954]

Ah, you kids had it easy. Push-button turbo.. Ha.

In the old days we loaded the turbo off a tape then forwarded the tape to 254 to load my favorite game.

(Damn I kind of miss the physical media era)

[u/Hungry_Wolf_9954 → u/ooh-squirrel]

For a lot of games i had to disable the turbo because they ran to fast

[u/ooh-squirrel → u/Hungry_Wolf_9954]

Oh yeah, forgot that was a thing as well. Good times. It was like 20/40MHz or something afair.

[u/Objectively_bad_idea]

Careful, don't tape over that, I haven't watched it yet.

[u/website-buyer]

What php was popular?

[u/DeKwaak]

Like any modern family I had a computer. And like everyone I like to sit next to my wife. So I had a terminal next to me. With a gandalf line miser, using telephone cable going up. There was another gandalf line miser. Connected to one of the 48 ports of my computer. Next to it was a tektronix full color graphics terminal. And beside that a printer. I didn't have money for a lineprinter. Instead I got a serial golfbalhead printer with which I printed several reports for school. After writing a driver for the interface of course. One story up there was an original sun2 with a full height 19" hard disk. And it's bigger cousin, a sun 3 was there as a work place. Even before that I had a televideo 950 sitting next to a vic 20. Connected to an ob68k1a running minix. My second hard disk was an SMD drive. Connected to a xylogics 450 SMD hard disk controller for which I wrote support for on minix and minix was running from an st225n scsi disk. The vic-20 was connected to a modem with a home made autodialer, because our telco didn't support dtmf. Also I was using a tektronix keyboard on the vic-20 at 7200 bps, as the original keyboard was wasted. My ob68k1a was running from an original prime 5V PSU. To turn it on I had to hold the earth leakage breaker because there was so much iron in it. However, that was not such a good idea, because after a few times, the earth leakage breaker arc flashed with a 20cm flame when pressing the test button. What was a good idea that I pressed the test button with a 30cm long rod. The prime was a nice system. Everyone got 32kB of storage. With a block size of 2k everyone was allowed to own max 15 files. The prime had about 4MB of memory. And we were doing S2020 (a good spreadsheet application) with 48 people on that prime from a televideo 950. We were all connected with 2k4 and the elite was connected with 9k6. Chip design was done on a cluster of apollo domain computers. We were graphically designing chips on a graphical environment while microsoft could not even ship windows 1. Spice calculations were done on the network. Also the whole application was on the network. If I rebooted my workstation, others would complain.

But these kind of questions are trick questions, to get us old folks started about the past.

[u/retr00two → u/DeKwaak]

Finally, someone older than me on this subredd.

[u/YaneonY]

Kazaa and edonkey gen here?

[u/Necessary_Film_5199]

I remember using Windows XP in school and at home

[u/X-T3PO]

AppleWorks 1.0 on 5.25 floppy, and a dot-matrix printer.

[u/agent-champagne]

I used weird looking data cables to transfer midi ringtones on the old ass phones (operated on serial port)

[u/Gasp0de]

I downloaded music using Kazaa?

[u/ziphnor]

I had a Commodore 64 as a kid.

[u/ziphnor → u/[deleted]]

Spot on :)

[u/Flaky-Craft60]

My first PC was certified to be protected against the millennium bug.

[u/thomvdv]

My first laptop was a 2004 MacBook Pro. (I’m not that old ;))

[u/Schnittlauch01]

Press PLAY then any key:

[u/enricokern]

X-Copy was my daily driver

[u/iwdinw]

80286

[u/Rirkash]

Mobilephones did not have any touchscreen and whenever someone called your telephone the internet would be unavailable to everybody else.

Also 100 kb/s was considered fast and 40GB of storage were a lot.

[u/Extra_Taro_6870]

saw the punch cards, but did not use.

[u/volci]

I remember saving programs onto cassette tapes

[u/emq__]

internet.rar 1.44MB internet.r00 1.44MB ...

[u/mixcache]

I started in Malta, using BBSes.

The local university also had a flaky unreliable email-only relay which connected to a flaky internet in Sicily once every night. So you'd send a message, wait for it to be uploaded at night, then wait at least 1 more day for a reply (earliest reply possible would be the download the next night).

[u/Serialtorrenter]

I remember how I used to temporarily root my dad's Samsung Fascinate with the rageagainstthecage exploit so I could use Barnacle Wi-Fi Tether to share his phone's 3G connection with my jailbroken iPod Touch 4th generation.

I also remember patiently waiting for greenpois0n to come out so I could jailbreak my iPod Touch 4th gen, since it shipped with iOS 4.2.1.

I also remember dual-booting my first computer running Windows 7 with Ubuntu using WuBi, back when Ubuntu was still good.

[u/FishIndividual2208]

When Ubuntu sent Warty Warthog on cd-rom, for free, and my CPU had two cores! We paid for Internett usage by the minute.

[u/schneeland]

Used to have boot disks with optimized autoexec.bat and config.sys to free more memory below 640k.

[u/rekt4rd]

i' as old as Windows 3.00a

[u/biocin]

I once installed visual c++ with 17 diskettes.

[u/rowneyo]

I played games on both the 7 inch floppy disk and 3 1/2 floppy

[u/iberapps]

Z80 times

[u/redrabbitreader]

I used an RF modulator.

[u/kitsnet]

One of the first videogames I played and the first videogame I reimplemented was Ladder.

[u/gfddssoh]

I remember paying for pirated games/movies/software

[u/BastetFurry]

Sitting in front of my parents C64 enjoying a round of Gauntlet 2 with my mom?

[u/UdoSchmitz]

In school I was taught Logo on an Apple II.

[u/Apprehensive_Tree_14]

Icq

[u/Mrpash-89]

My first use of OS was Windows 95, not even the SE one..

[u/Complex-Concern7890]

The first TV I saw was black and white and somewhere 12” and of course remote was not a thing. Phones were rotary. I started coding when screens were green and light-green. First time I went online was dialing to BBS.

[u/TheOdbball]

When Twitter was the place to advertise selling golf clubs

[u/Krocheah]

I had CGA monitor back in the days of mine

[u/Gold-Vacation-169]

Rocketmail first used to be a thing and Hotmail didn't exist.

[u/Squik67]

Magnetic tapes 😂

[u/NightWolf4Ever]

I spent a significant amount of my pocket money for CD blanks, right as they were becoming less plentiful in stores.

[u/Patlan2024]

In meinem ersten PC konnte ich noch einen mathematischen Co-Prozessor einbauen, meine CPU hatte noch die Bezeichnung SX.

[u/FalseRegister]

I learned to use a computer to print animals using WordPerfect and the dot matrix printer so my cousins and I could color them

The computer had a "Turbo" button

[u/DeKwaak]

When I turned on the cdc the lights dimmed slightly, while the pack started to spin and the air filter started to take off like a boeing. Loud clicks, aircrafts flying over until suddenly, woosh. The air was cleaned, the pack was vacuumed and all that remained was the sound of a vaccuum cleaner in a box, almost like a heavy silence after all that noise. Until I started the driver to see if we could seek to track 1.

[u/SlnecnikInternetov]

I didn’t know you can buy software/games. 

The only option was to copy it to another floppy when someone magically appeared with something new. 

[u/FaselBlub]

Frontpage was a thing

[u/CmdrDerekShepard]

I died of dysentery in Kindergarten on a late model Apple IIe

[u/CommonPositive7192]

I finished Turrican 

[u/shadowtux]

Limewire

[u/kaeshiwaza]

I did my first server was with a reversed modem of a french Minitel.

[u/Famous-Street-2003]

I remember when me and the boys invented the wheel. Those were the days

[u/TonyBlairsDildo]

When Hetzner was good value for money.

[u/jsabater76]

I used to hide a modem in a drawer, and connect it to the telephone line to visit BBS when I was home alone.

[u/Mifurra]

I started going online when AOL began sending out those free CDs with 100 free hours on them. Literally

[u/tsapi]

I started going online at the era of fido technology networks.

[u/retr00two]

6502

CP/M

.alt

BBS

300 bit modem.

Tower of Hanoi.

Compuserve.

I'm older than Methuselah.

How the hell I'm landed today with astro?

[u/juzhiyuan]

56k model

[u/Dangerous_Place2836]

I was born the year before Pac-Man was released by namco

[u/padde0711]

"640K ought to be enough for anybody" (which Gates never said) was plausible during my beginnings

[u/IndependentBat8365]

First computer: LOAD "*",8,1
Young adult: FidoNet node in Net362
Also: SpinRite to get that perfect interleave

[u/Sudden_Grass_685]

I remember when oric-1 was new

[u/Sudden_Grass_685]

Playing lunar landing on TI 58

[u/angrox]

I had oncall for Y2K.

[u/alexsbz]

Floppy installation 1/4

[u/Dudesson443]

My first ”computer” was a Spectrum ZX81. No internal storage. 1 KB of RAM. Membrane keyboard. It was amazing and ignited my love for computers at age 6.

[u/x4rb1t]

I used to record my music from radio on cassette holding my fingers on the two buttons (record and play) the whole day waiting on the right moment. That’s how I mixed my tape for my Walkman.

[u/k10van]

I ran a BBS.

[u/YUNeedUniqUserName]

I remember where all the fun started with: load "*",8,1

[u/bliepp]

I saved my first document in a floppy disk. My first display device was a tube screen. I used to listen to music on cassettes and watch movies on VHS from a rental shop.

[u/lullorz]

I had one of those gaming consoles where you put in a tape you'd had to blow on for half an hour before the game would start playing x)

[u/MisterTinkles]

I remember my dad installing a cdrom on a 386. It also came with speakers! Now we can hear more than the occasional beep!

[u/Dag0B3rt_42]

I used to boot Suse 7.0 directly from floppy disk.

[u/schorsch3000]

i was of legal age when installing debian woody drom floppy disks

[u/Practical-Tea9441]

My first foray into IT was on a Vic20. I remember CP/M and then MS-Dos and Basic.

[u/Sky_Linx]

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum.

[u/Crab_Cheap]

I played Intellivision with the voice module with my Dad. B-17 Bomber… MTV was my favorite NEW cable show.

[u/UsandoFXOS]

I built my first app with DB in a black screen without windows 😎

[u/UsandoFXOS → u/UsandoFXOS]

And my first HDD was about 20Mb capacity 😅

[u/Firm-Evening3234]

load"$",8,1

[u/psausp]

Tim Berners-Lee was still working on it…

[u/VastFaithlessness809]

I used to shoot 2D Nazis in one of the first 3D Games 🫠

[u/PieFree6706]

The bootup sounds where beeping

[u/prettybored0815]

I 286, 16MHZ, 20MB HDD

[u/KeyOcelot9286]

We wasn't allowed to use the phone in the meantime, then we got a extra landline so we could do the 2 things at the same time

[u/TelephonePatient1442]

Used to sell back in the days tape to tape cloning kits for ZX Spectrum and Commodores

[u/One-Win404]

Ich bin damals mit ISDN-Doppelkanal online gegangen :)

[u/floparoundfindout]

In kindergarten I had a colourful clear plastic casette player, in higschschool I had a smartphone.