This was cutting edge tech… I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs…

  • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    22 days ago

    I remember the moment I realised my fancy new Walkman could read data CD-Rs and I could fit all my mp3s into one 700mb disc. I felt insane, majestic, limitless.

    • not_woody_shaw@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      22 days ago

      Then you’d get a copy protected disc that wouldn’t play at all in the disc man, but you could copy it to a CD-R and that’d play just fine. To disable the copy protection you just hold shift while the cd tray closes.

    • devfuuu@lemmy.world
      2·
      22 days ago

      I ended up even buying some rewritable mini discs because they were so much smaller and still good enough space for some mp3 files.

  • voodooattack@lemmy.world
    8·
    21 days ago

    Old enough to remember using a 3½” floppy disk to boot my first PC and mess around with GW/Q-BASIC and play DOS games.

    The disks were strongly perfumed (I guess the guy I bought my pirated games from liked to do that for some reason), and I still remember that aroma.

  • over_clox@lemmy.world
    7·
    22 days ago

    I’m old enough to remember when computers didn’t even require a hard drive, they could just boot right into Basic from ROM.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    7·
    21 days ago

    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.

  • SuperApples@lemmy.world
    5·
    21 days ago

    Pre-home internet I remember running a line-in to my soundblaster card from a clock radio and recording Tool’s Sober to my HDD.

    The wav file took up a good chunk of the HDD. After a good amount of funking around with encoding it was barely comprehensible and still took up too much room. Was exciting and felt like a glimpse of the future.

    • ZeffSyde@lemmy.world
      3·
      21 days ago

      I think there will soon be a nostalgic wave of people degrading recordings to sound like mp3s that have been compressed to hell.

      I can hear the jingle bell high hats already.

    • theangryseal@lemmy.world
      1·
      22 days ago

      With a boombox sitting across from a radio?

      I have no idea how I tolerated that with my cheap Koss portable cassette player. I was just happy to have the songs though haha.

  • ansiz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    21 days ago

    It was great to go to college at a time when Napster and IRC rooms were in prime time, combined with a T1 fiber connection and University IT was too primitive to do anything to monitor or stop the behavior.

  • Emerald@lemmy.world
    5·
    21 days ago

    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.