• Rascabin@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    How about walking home with a VHS tape and nothing to hide it with. The “movie”: Debbie does Dallas.

    • bestusername@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      Timing your family leaving the house so you could watch a “movie” in the loungeroom.

      Kids today with their own portable devices in their bedrooms have no idea how risky it was for us.

      • SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I believe this explains why a lot of us have developed tinitis. Experts point to headphones and loud music as the cause but I theorise that out of shear survival instinct we had to develop super sensitive hearing and the ability to separate the smooth sounds of a saxophone and moaning with the distant sound of a car door or car tires pulling into a gravel driveway

    • DuffmanOfTheCosmos@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      There was a VHS passed around my high school, cleverly disguised with both the sleeve and sticker for the comedy classic “Airplane!” but was in fact Jenny McCarthys Playboy video. There’s enough in that previous sentence to sufficiently approximate my age haha

    • Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I’ll never forget the days of watching the image load line by line to reveal tittie

      Ah the days when being on the Internet was a deliberate act rather than a passive one

    • jpablo68@mujico.org
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      1 year ago

      “I’m downloading linux ISOs” was the perfect excuse to keep my computer on all night downloading “other” stuff

  • M500@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Burning cds!

    I was trying to burn a copy of a game from my friend. It failed over and over. Eventually it succeeded and I was able to play return to castle wolfeinstein.

    Not sure if it failed due to copy protection or whatever, but I played that game a bunch back in the day. In more recent years I just bought it for like $1

    • devfuuu@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There were lots of variables to ensure a good cd was burned correctly. Quality of the burner, the quality of cds (from having used hundreds of them, they really had varying qualities) and a big one was the speed of the burn. Lot’s of cds did not work for me when the burning speed was too high, for a good one to happen it had to be done in low speed. Also software to burn them sometimes fucked things up, I remember a time when Nero was destroying a bunch of my cds.

      And then the copy protections of some influenced many copies, some made it very difficult. But at least we had cracks and all the warez around. Good times.

      • ElectricTrombone@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I remember my brother and I having to set it to 1x speed and leave the room and pray the software didn’t hang. No one was allowed to use the computer for anything while it was burning a disc. Lol. So much anticipation!

      • veroxii@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        Early burners if you touched the desk even slightly that little bump would cause the burn to fail. Also you had to stop every other program from running. Screen saver kicked in … enjoy your new coaster… You just had a buffer underrun while trying to render some flying toasters.

    • decisivelyhoodnoises@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Burning disks was failing because of the PC’s inability to keep the bufferr full all the time in the rate that the disk was spinning. You were selecting write speed. Let’s say 24x. If you started doing something else on the PC and it prioritized that, it could reach to a point that it didn’t have available in the buffer memory the next set of data to be written. The disk writer couldn’t dynamically reduce the speed of spinning. So it ended up having nothing to write at said position. Then it could not resume. It all should happen in one go.

  • dan1101@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I got sent to the principals office for making a copy of an Apple II system diskette.

  • nevemsenki@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Ah, the good old times when I had to find and commission someone with a CD burner to copy Red Alert for me…

    • dan1101@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I was a bit before that, my group of friends liberally shared 5 1/4" floppies with C64 games on them. I also remember a demo being passed around where someone (not one of my friends) managed to encode about 10 scratchy seconds of “Why can’t this be love?” by Van Halen onto a 360K floppy disk and it was amazing at the time.

      • nevemsenki@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        As far as C64 goes, when I was young there were radio broadcasts with C64 games. You’d record them on tape and then put that in the comodore…

          • nevemsenki@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yup! But at least that tradition went on for a while. Just like a 3.5" disk failing… when your game was a single RAR file split over 15 of them.

            • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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              1 year ago

              Oh I remember bringing not one, not two but three pirated 5.25" disks home from the only other C64 person in the village! 3km in the cold on my crappy bicycle.

              Coming home the cold had made them all making read errors aaargh but then they thawed up and all worked perfectly well, I remember one was a sort of platformer where you had to walk on the different ingredients of burgers to make them fall down an well … make burgers.

              That was really a nice time to be alive.

      • Quill0@lemmy.digitalfall.net
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        1 year ago

        Damn. A friend asked me to recover his and his brother’s c64 floppy collection of like 200 disks. I got several including his porn collection

      • GFGJewbacca@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        My family had a zip drive growing up. Then again, my dad is a doctor, so our income might have had something to do with it.

        • Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I’ve got a handful of zip disks, but no drive. I asked on the town bulletin board and nobody else seems to have one I can borrow. It was a short-lived intermediate format, so I’m not surprised.

      • vivadanang@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        super popular at universities and schools where stuff wouldn’t fit on 1.44mb floppies.

        they died at astonishingly fast rates, often starting the click of death after a few weeks of read/writes. fucking iomega.

  • Gerula@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    612mb for homework in the 90s 😆

    … we used analog format for homework back then! Our tools were mare out of chopped procesed wood and coal! 😜😁

  • XpeeN@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Only 612MB? That’s a waste of free 4.1GB in a nice DVD disk. Let me fill it up for you