This was cutting edge tech… I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs…
This isn’t very old lol. That computer could be from 2010 and CD’s and Sharpies were used then. Also, LimeWire was functional until like late 2010.
I’m exactly that old.
Edit: The PC in the image is a bit anachronistic. This is the workhorse we’re all thinking of:
This was the first desktop I used with a big ol’ chunky CRT. I played around installing so many different windows XP themes
Wasn’t that called the optiplex, or something similar? Pretty sure I had one myself.
I had an Optipex from that era too. It was “horizontal” but could also stand vertically. It was the business model.
This one, but beige:
The image is the
PrecisionDimension model which was the consumer version of it.You’re real close to the “capacitor of death” models there. GX270s failed like a motherfucker.
We could swap those boards out and in like a fucking NASCAR pit crew.
Between the capacitor plague and the tin whiskers from the phaseout of lead, hardware from that era failed constantly.
We somehow avoided that, luckily.
I had the pleasure of getting sold a cheap power supply though. It was rather fascinating to learn that, indeed, even burning hardware can still provide sufficient power to play games (for a few seconds).
We use to flip the light gray flap all shift in computer lab in middle school. When we got bored with that, we figured out how to pop out the Dell logo and flip it upside down
We did this too lol.
The one in the pic says Dimension 2400 on it.
Yeah, I mean to say Dimension and typed Precision. My bad.
That or the ol’ tan cased dinosaurs.
The gray Dell helped me through many-a “100 Games!” disc…
Dell Dimension 2400. My family had the entry level model, and it still absolutely destroyed every prior computer we’d had performance-wise
I think we had that one.
I maintain dozens of the black & silver Optiplexes, they’re used in Raw Thrills arcade games like The Fast and the Furious, Big Buck Hunter Pro, Guitar Hero Arcade… They are workhorses; usually clean it and recap the power supply (which are kind of a bitch to disassemble) and they’re good for another few years.
I still run into the blue/grey ones like your picture, but not in use. Usually stored in the basement of a bar.
My personal collection includes a couple of first-generation Optiplexes, the beige GX1. Dell is a bigger part of my life than I ever imagined or hoped. 😅
Everytime I see limewire I feel left out.
Where are my Kaaza hommies at??
Napster!
What’s crazy is that none of the other P2P apps that came after ever had as nice of an interface as Napster. I guess that’s cause Napster compiled Mac and Windows native apps while most other P2P apps were Java jars.
Here!
Kazaa, Kazaa light, WinMX, DC++. I used them all.
Where are my eMule fuckers at?
No SoulSeek fans here?
That’s the modern napster IMO.
Just a shame it’s hard to automate.
That donkey was the goat.
Emule/Edonkey
Yup
How did the progression go? Napster, Morpheus, Kazaa, Limewire?
I mean sure, if you just want to skip Bearshare
And Audiogalaxy. And WinMX.
EDIT: And DCC bots on IRC.
gnutella, surely!!
I like how Justin Frankel created something to help you get stuff to really whip the llama’s ass with :)
Where did DC++ fit in?
My user name stands for KaZaA Lite User 9.
Slsk (Soulseek) was far superior. It was the best for getting full albums and leaked stuff. If you found someone with a fast connection and thick library it was like gold.
Shoutout to everyone that got Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead album with “Mike Jones” randomly played in the background.
Slsk is still around today and people swear by it.
Old enough to have a 286 as a first PC. But more on topic, I remember a time before Limewire and Bearshare. A time before Napster. MP3s were downloaded from IRC or from websites found with AltaVista or WebCrawler.
To play those MP3s? Winamp wasn’t out yet. Fraunhofer Winplay3 was your only option. It had to be cracked and pirated as well. Want to multitask while playing an MP3? How about your music cutting out instead?
I don’t even know what you are talking about. I am young, very young. I enjoy rizzing in the toilets and skibiding everyday bro. So fresh. 🤙
pls don’t leave me with the boomers…
No, the boomers had punch cards. That’s an entire other level.
Ah lime wire, get a song and three random viruses for free
People in the thread are talking about limewire, but I think they are missing the bigger reference here.
Downloading games, burning them onto CD-Rs and then using a Sharpie to make the inner tracks of the disc unreadable as they contained the copy protection.
My only confusion is that I swear it was Playstation and not PC that worked like this.
I remember my first written CD. You put the CD into a transfer case and slide it into a large box. Shortly after, the empty transfer case comes back out. You have already prepared your CD image, not as a project or file, no, you had to prepare it as an image on its own partition, on a disk that did not host anything else.
Then you shutdown your computer, and reboot it basically into the burn program, which then tries to move the data fast enough from the disk partition to the CD burner. The speed, of course, was 1x, so this write operation could last an hour and a quarter.
Then, your computer reboots back into the OS. You put the empty transfer case into the writer, and after some time, it comes back out with the media. And now you can finally put in into a reader and read it and compare it to the data on that partition. Knock on wood, or whatever. Because about half the writes failed, and the media cost a fortune.
I let you front runners play with 1x and got a 2x with support for CD-RW, and because of it’s buffer it only trashed the expensive CD-R’s like 1/4 of the time. And I could use the computer a little if I dared!
I actually remember albums. They were these physical discs that actually existed within our 3D world. Made entirely of vinyl, they played on a modular device designed entirely for their use and their use alone. In comparison, they were close to the same thickness, but considerably larger than even the ancient CD-ROMs were!
And they sounded SOOOOO much better than anything you’ve ever heard.
Lil’ bitch, I’m a 16KB expansion cartridge in my Vic-20 years old.
I started college with a 1.44 MB floppy disk in my pocket and graduated with a 1GB USB stick.
Those were pretty hard for floppies. Mine were 5.35" and cassette tape before that. But I was in high school at the time, so I probably need to respect my elder.
I had one of the biggest usb pen drives at the time with a huge 128MB of space. It was very small too, which was nice. At same time for college it was needed to have a floppy disk to save some homework.
I found this video interesting about how music doesn’t have the same value to Gen Z as it does to Millennials. I remember in high school, what kind music you listened to often determined your friends group. I was a new kid in the 10th grade sitting at a table by myself at lunch wearing a Korn shirt, and my soon to be friends group for my remaining years in high school invited me to their table based on my shirt. Not sure if Gen Z cares about music in the same way, since it has been highly commoditized now, and it seems that digital distribution at least contributed to this situation.
Yes, fuck you
Laughs in IRC.
Giggles in BBS.
Two day downloads because kermit was the only download protocol that working with the endpoint due to noise in the connection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_(protocol)
What was a I downloading? A bmp of a topless Samantha Fox.
Edit: I decided to take stroll down memory lane and have discovered that there were two Samantha foxes one was in pornos and the one I’m remembering was a page three girl in the UK. The page I found had them as the same person even though they look nothing alike.
I remember getting a ton of mp3 with kazaa which was shut down, replaced by limewire.
Then all my mp3 disappeared from my pentium replaced by a copyright rar file.
I hope they paid for winrar…
My go to:
Does nobody remember Bearshare?
Oh, aye. Bounced through all those programs.
Learned about computer viruses and protection the hard way.
Lol I forgot all about it till just now! I had an almost out of body trip into memory. Shitty living room, shitty weed, off brand cigarettes, one of those flat screen CRT monstrosities that was top of the line at the time. Downloading what we hoped was family guy 2kb a min. The good ol days.
Napster was there before Kazaa, it was just a string of services popping up after others got shut down. Good times!
![[crumbles into dust]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/034f3400-6813-4e8c-b28a-18c23de1ee7d.jpeg){kind=link}