This was cutting edge tech… I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs…
The only thing this meme is missing are the Wendy’s napkins in the glovebox of my 1991 Pontiac Sunbird that I give my ex-girlfriend to blot her eyes after this latest mix cd is finally the one to blow her fucking mind
Naw. I’m this fucking old:
I wonder how many will realize it’s not just a cassette tape to listen to music…
The TI/99 also had cassettes
Wooo, look at hoity toity FancyPants over here with their screwdriver. All we could afford to fix our cassette tapes was a pencil. And a blunt pencil at that. And it was probably stolen from school!! Screwdrivers indeed!
The screwdriver is not for the tape. It’s for adjusting the audio head so it can pick up the data on the tape.
When someone gave you a tape with some nice games on it there was a near 100% chance you needed to adjust your datasette to read them.
Exactly. On the long run, we settled down on what we called a common calibration, a setting that allowed all of us locals to exchange tapes without constant tweaking.
For real? My tweaking days ended when floppy came out for the C64.
Maybe the C64 datasette never got the upgrade?
Boy, that was before I could afford a C64 with the money I made with my first computer.
The tape drive has a hole on the top for adjusting the azimuth, but one of my friends basically just removed the top cover entirely for easier access to the screw. I did that too for some particularly tricky tapes.
Another of my friends had basically an unearthly knack of adjusting this stuff. Dude would just walk up to the tape drive, masterfully tweak the screw for a second, and it’d work. Which makes no sense.
This was all a kind of mysterious part of the Commodore 64 culture to me. Because I had a floppy drive and that’s what I obviously preferred to use.
Dude would just walk up to the tape drive, masterfully tweak the screw for a second, and it’d work.
Me too! For some reason I was the only guy in school who could do that. Fun times. 😊
Because I had a floppy drive and that’s what I obviously preferred to use.
In the beginning these were not available. Also I remember them costing the same as the C64 itself. As soon as I could afford one I got one obviously.
I just another item that could a generational riddle: the hole-punch that made your one-sided floppy two-sided.
In the beginning these were not available. Also I remember them costing the same as the C64 itself. As soon as I could afford one I got one obviously.
I guess I was lucky. My parents got me my first Commodore 64 C second hand, and it included the floppy drive. Guess it was affordable that way.
I just another item that could a generational riddle: the hole-punch that made your one-sided floppy two-sided.
Ooh, I didn’t have one of those fancy pieces of gear! I lived in a small town. Used to see disk notchers at the book/stationery store, which had the reputation of being slightly pricy place but was the only store in town that had computer stuff at the time.
Instead, I figured out a way to cleanly cut the notch using scissors. Two horizontal cuts, then two cross cuts, then carefully cut out the remainder.
Don’t you use a flathead for that?
A flathead is still a screwdriver, is it not?
It was a Philips screw IIRC. You can also use a flathead screwdriver on them but you shouldn’t IMHO.
Then I misunderstood and was thinking of a different adjustment of the head. The one I was thinking about us when you wedge the screwdriver behind the head and bend it otwards a little for better contact. For that you need a flat tool.
I’m old enough to know why people used pencils for cassettes. It wasn’t coincidence. Count the number of teeth in the casette, then look at the number of facets on a standard pencil.
You used a screwdriver to store 73 kB?
It’s a sonic screwdriver.
2001, Dre’s album drops, nobody has it yet. In walks the kid who has a T1 line and a 5 disc CD copier with a spindle of discs. He sits down in homeroom, puts the spindle on his desk and says Dre’s new album five bucks right here.
He sold out before the end of the day, made a good amount of cash, and was racking it in for months getting people albums that they requested because none of us could get it work with our slow connection. Of course when the two competing ISPs upgraded their networks later that year, he lost the majority of his business, but for a few months he was our pirate savior.
Everytime I see limewire I feel left out.
Where are my Kaaza hommies at??
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?
Where are my eMule fuckers at?
Emule/Edonkey
Yup
That donkey was the goat.
No SoulSeek fans here?
That’s the modern napster IMO.
Just a shame it’s hard to automate.
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.
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.
Because it’s pretty much under the radar of the industry and you can find all kind of music there. Is nice.
I’m old enough to remember when that was the fancy new thing the kids were doing.
Me too, either old enough or poor enough. I had nothing but tapes and records until I seen a kid with a Discman at school and I HAD TO HAVE ONE. My mom got me one for Christmas finally and I had already traded up for every Nirvana CD, just had them there waiting.
I jumped to burning CDs as quickly as I could because I always wanted to be one step ahead with tech.
It’s crazy how far behind I am now. I always buy used phones, haven’t updated anything in my pc since 2014ish, still rocking a 2009 Mac Pro for music production.
I have, eh, how do you say? Got old? :(
Technology has really slowed down a lot since that time. There is less public investment and corporations sure as shit aren’t going to finance all their own R&D. So why bother?
There’s no virtue in needlessly cycling through new devices all the time just to satisfy one’s own emotions.
I’m this old:
A question for people who have never used a cassette. What do you think the pencil is for?
To mark the spot on the tape where your favorite song starts.
Hehe
The pencil fits in the hole. You can use that to move the tape. If it’s too loose, the tape player can draw it out and you have a mess to fix. To clean that mess up you also need the pencil to wind the tape from outside the cassette back into it.
I mean, they are half right. The music industry is eating itself. Back catalog is outperforming new releases year after year because new music is dead.
Hi! I’m a musician with new music that is not dead! Check it out: www.thassodar.com
Bonus: 99% of them are instrumental, and the ones that aren’t don’t have any actual lyrics and are only on SoundCloud.
New music is doing fantastic, it’s record companies that are dying. Most artists just self-publish these days.
New music is thriving. There is more music of almost every style and genre imaginable being released today than ever before. What’s dead is traditional music distribution channels and marketing avenues like radio, and the popular means of promoting music now reward the most dogshit meme-able content. But if you seek out music yourself, the modern era is a paradise of incredible music; don’t blame music itself for the failures of the industry to reward good within it.
New music is surviving. Of course it will survive. Music is an expression of our humanity.
Thriving? I think not. When was the last time you went to a bar and people just starting singing and playing folk music? When was the last time you even heard of that happening? Once it wasn’t weird, it was normal.
Music is dead because it has been elevated to something that is performed by the few and consumed by the many, instead of something that we all live together.
“Haute cuisine is dead! When was the last time you walked into a restaurant and saw aspic on the menu? When was the last time you heard of somebody serving aspic? Once aspics weren’t weird, they were the hottest fashion!”
^ That’s you.
Trying to define the relevancy and lifeline of music as a whole based on the popularity of pub folk music is crazy.
More people are making music today than ever before, as barriers monetary, technological, and knowledge-based only continue to lower with time. I have no idea how you’ve managed to draw the opposite conclusion.
I had those at home when I was a kid.
I was born around the 2000s
It’s not really that old lol
Granted, I was in a developing country, so the timeline of technological development is not quite the same (People’s Republic of China).
Do people in the west still have Cassettes in the 2000s?
Those of us who can remember used those to save programs. It could take an hour or more if you had a large enough tape save a single file.
A lot of people did: home, portable, car. But a lot of people had also left them behind for ordinary CDs, CDs full of MP3s and dedicated MP3 players like Rios and iPods.
Me as well Some of the things I first downloaded went onto cassette tape.
I recorded songs off the radio to cassette
I remember feeling like such a badass when I got a CD player that could read MP3 files burned to a disc. I’d have an entire band’s discography burned to a single disc and felt like some sort of musical library with my binder full of MP3 CDs.
Mp3 were a revolution. There was also the format wars with wmv on the table.
My first mix tapes were cassettes recorded from the radio.
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.
I’m monochrome cga screen old. Commodore VIC 20, Philips MSX, Video 2000 old.
Limewire? How about DC++ and eMule?
Don’t forget soulseek.
Soulseek is still going believe it or not. Fantastic service.
Even worse: how about M.U.L.E.?
Love it, except when my M.U.L.E. goes haywire.
Napster, Kazaa and Morpheus to add a few names to the hat.
Ah, I forget about Kazaa and Kazaa Lite.
Bearshare gang, represent!
Yep, Napster was the first I remember. It got sued too, by Lars Ulrich of Metallica. I also remember Limp Bizkit and some others doing a Napster tour to give a middle finger to the artists making a big deal about piracy.
I still feel the pain of downloading something and the connection breaking at 90% because the other person logged off. There also wasn’t any way to resume.
Living the golden age. Fuck yeah. Kazaa was the life. Personally I was a heavy eMule user.
Going from a radio shack trs-80 model 3 to those desktops was great.
Except mine didn’t have floppy drives. I only had a cassette player for storage.
That is what we had in computer science when I was in high school. The guy teaching it was really sharp. He also taught physics. He used to get mad at me for porting video games from those magazines that came with programs printed out in them. It would always be programs for c64 or some other home computer. By the end of my first year there were copies of my ported games floating around everywhere. I was the only person up til that time that every had more than a hundred percent in one of his classes. So much so he took the bonus questions off his test. It was really nice to be the best at something for once.
My hot take: kids should have to learn computers on a TRS-80 now.
But, copying games onto it from magazines was the way back then. It’s how we learned.
Remember how when you would burn a CD you couldn’t use your computer lest the write buffer dropped too low and the burn world fail?
I remember buying a stack of CDs only to find out they were +R, not -R, and this utterly useless (or something like that, can’t specifically recall whether ±R/RW).
I remember this being a DVD thing. By the time I got a dvd burner though mine supported both.
The RW issue with CDs was that a lot of older players couldn’t read them.
I damaged the laser on a PS2 by using a DVD-RW. They’re harder to read than a normal disc apparently, so it wore the laser down pretty quick
Can you believe my original ps1 is still rocking hard with zero adjustments?
My ps2 is currently dead, but it was because I used thicker wire than necessary when modding it a thousand years ago and I need to just heat up the solder a bit.
That console is a nightmare to disassemble/reassemble though and it’s been down for around 15 years. I’ll fix it one day.
I have an NES that just needs a simple fix. I keep saying that I’m going to get to it too.
And just saying, if it’s the 72 pin connector, you don’t need a new one. Just pop yours out and bend the pins back out. It’s very very easy, honest to God there’s no reason to get a new one. I have new ones in my closet, probably 20 of them, but I’ve never really needed to use any of them.
If you don’t want to fool with that PM me your address and I’ll send you one.
Oh man they’re so so so easy to fix.
My childhood NES had a capacitor go out recently and the color was off. It still worked it was just ugly.
I have like 10 of them so I just swapped my case, but for some silly reason it’s like I don’t feel connected to the “spirit” of the machine because of it.
I’m going to have to order new capacitors and you just reminded me.
Get that thing fixed. It’s so so easy.
There were no CD+Rs
My recollection is very hazy, it was such a technological blip.
Or trying to re-burn a cdrw but it was originally not burnt with the same soft as yours 😓
🗑️💿🚮💔
I remember the funny lines on the back when I accidentally bumped into the tower or had the subwoofer on as it was burning.
Also holding down on the close-pin on a discman (so it would keep spinning the disc) and differently coloured sharpies were a great way to colourize your collection.
Commodore64 gang represent!
I remember watching my mom sit and type code for games from magazines. If she made a mistake you’d know it. “MOTHERFUCKER!!!” rang through the entire place.
where’s your cassette drive
Floppy drive. Fancy.
Hey, hey, you gotta tag that as NSFW. So sexy
That monitor was really underrated. I used it for decades for game consoles, VCRs, etc. after the C64 went obsolete.
I grew up with these.
Quit bragging.
More like dating myself.
Really. I guess you really are young. My turn
Play any Alpiner?
My turn:
wait, are these older than 1984(my first computer)?!???
Not exactly this one, but I remember the old PC had 5.25 and 3.5", and the power was a big red switch, felt like you were juicing up the grid.
Ya the switch to the right back. Like house breaker when you switched it on
![[crumbles into dust]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/034f3400-6813-4e8c-b28a-18c23de1ee7d.jpeg){kind=link}
