Ask Lemmy

Yes, but because it was completely pre-enshitification internet, with so much hope and promise to be something good for everyone.

I miss not being exposed to every low IQ chode's trashcan opinions on social media. And I really miss not watching those low IQ chode's trashcan opinions influencing large numbers of other low IQ chodes into doing things like making a felon rapist pedophile our leader.

I used to write the software to refresh and update student labs like that. There's nothing quite as satisfying as seeing the entire lab reboot simultaneously .. and nothing quite as frustrating as seeing all of them fail at the same point in the boot process .. thanks to Microsoft.

Proof: https://www.itmaze.com.au/articles/zen

The tech has evolved a lot. Especially in the FOSS area! And I am thankful for the progress. But along the way, the average culture is what I miss the most. Do I miss the very convoluted, fragile, non-standardized, and hard to configure hardware? Heehee naw.

This image is nostalgic because it recalls when personal computers were conceptually personal, even when they were public. New tech was fun and exciting.

Some of my fondest memories were easy LAN parties and collabing on XP-era machines in my 3D Studio MAX class. Also, computers didn't feel near-useless without an Internet connection.

It's been said before but bears repeating: "The Internet was a place." It didn't follow you everywhere, spy on you, sell you out. You weren't supposed to divulge your whole life to strangers, but somehow you still made new friends.

People logged in to hang out. Heck, know what I miss most? People seemed to have TIME to log in and hang out. Even busy people. These days I feel hurried to smash out a text message while in motion.

People made personal, expressive, whimsical websites for fun, and not just as a hopeful web-dev portfolio. The Internet was only about making money for tie-wearing squares; everyone else just did things for the fun of it.

I think that's what we miss. People were learning and using these miraculous machines that were capable of anything.

Now the machines are consumption-first appliances primarily aimed to drain your wallet and personal information, and the people have gotten so dumb. Computer literacy dropped with all the rest of kinds of literacy, and I long to find a way to push against that tide...

Yes and no.

Computers and computer systems weren’t so much enshittified back in those days.

But the bulk CRT screens, I don’t miss those…

By the way, at those times almost every screen had one of those stupid placebo ‘glare filters’ . I don’t miss those either.

I miss computer time being something special.

I don't know if I miss this or if I miss being young but yes.

Maybe I just miss using a computer without ads all over the place.

I miss most of all when the internet was the domain of nerds only. Us nerds are nicer than other people on average.

I miss youth and the sort of reckless abandon and constant sense of wonder. The easy friendships and stuff. The discovery of learning tech. The tech was cool and new and dramatic but our tech is def cooler now.

Things are pretty cool now too if you look for it. Sure there are problems but there have always been problems. I look for things to trigger my sense of wonder and it still feels amazing. Just harder to find cus I'm more experienced and well traveled or whatever.

I dunno I was a goofball kid working at tech then and I'm a goofball kid in a old body oggling tech now too :D

The computers were always slow. SSDs are a wonderful thing as are multicore processors.

But I miss when I had a positive view of tech.

Playing Unreal Tournament and Duke Nuken 3D with everyone else in the lab.

Yes, comprehensible systems? Just enough to be very exciting? Positive energy? My youth? The music?

Uh, yes?

lel

As someone who had to maintain school computers I will say with certainty that I don't miss those old ball mice.

I miss who I was in those days. Or more to the point, I miss not worrying about bills, the state of the world, the health and well-being of my family. I miss that my biggest concerns were around school exams and girls.

And yeah, I do miss the culture of the time, and the general attitude of hopefulness that seemed to pervade. But times change, life moves on, and as they say, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Computers were still exciting. And hadn't been enshitified.

Yes, computers were fun and exciting. Now they just suck.

Unless Linux. But even then it takes an effort to disable all the bloat and spyware bs in the bios.

Yes. Although, more than the technology or the culture, I probably miss being a kid with a bright future ahead of him...

What do you mean, old enough?

Those are fairly modern computers. They don't even have 5.25-inch floppy drives!

I'll be honest I don't really miss a lab full of win95 shit boxes further crippled by net nanny. It was just a partial escape from the other abuses of middle and high school.

Going to university in the late 90s/early 00s, when not everyone had home computers and especially not laptops. We had the computer lab in the basement where were could go to print out essays, do research, etc.

There was the library as well with a few computers on each floor, but those were always taken, and lab access came with our tuition anyway.

Other than that and a rather simple cellphone, we were device free. We still took notes by hand, copiously highlighted lines in ridiculously overpriced text books, met with friends at the coffee shop to study, and essentially kept technology compartmentalised.

Do I miss it? Oh hell yes.

No. Not one bit.

Between the 50Hz fluorescent tubes that were common at the time and the cheap shit monitors running at 60Hz, also common at the time, I had migraines 3-4 times a week.

I categorically do not miss those days.

Computer class in high school back then for me was treating them as glorified typewriters. I fooled around with some VBScript as that’s all we had available (I was very fortunate my grade school teacher taught us LOGO) and I managed to script kiddy my way into admin access for the internet filter for my friends so we could play stuff on Newgrounds. My career advisor told me to get a science degree because there was no future in computers, haha.

Computer lab day!

I miss having enough friends that we could have a full 5v5 in CS without needing bots or the server open to the internet. Especislly true of high school, where I had CS and a few other games installed on the network (we had a networking class and our teacher was also the IT manager for the district and the 5 people in the class were given admin access for something and it was never revoked) so literally every PC on the network had access to it and you could be playing a game in any class, any period.

Hell no

I can smell this picture

I miss the freedom. We would sneak out of class, play games, smoke weed, fuck. Sneak out of the house at 1am, cause hell, be back in bed for school. No ring cams, no cell phones. I didnt have all the bullshit of the world shoved in my face daily. Just hop on my bike, be back before night. I dont miss my circumstances though, my childhood was ruined by adults and social workers. I still remember the era fondly though. Life was good. I had friends and loves who I cared so deeply about. I didnt feel so strongly about anyone until I had kids. I dont think I ever will again.

I miss the community of it. As with a lot of things having it at home seems easier and better but so much more lonely.

I see your nostalgia and raise you this:

Yeah and would go back.

I used to be excited about the future. Now Im excited about the past.

Yeah, I want my toasters back

Sweet summer child. We learned FORTRAN on punch cards that we would send off to the regional office for them to run. Our punch cards would get returned to us with a fanfold printout of errors/output. I'm not sure I ever saw a program work correctly. Mostly because the bad kids would slip fucked up cards into other people's programs, and comment cards remarking on the teacher and her physical unattractiveness. It was a major relief when they put in a micro-lab stocked with these.

Yeah but not because of the computers.

Mid 90s. Our school built its first computer lab. The guy they hired to teach students how to use computers was probably in his mid-20s. He installed Doom on a few PCs, and the few of us who figured out there were games hung around near the end of the school day to see if he would allow us to play. He eventually let us when he was convinced we won't tell anyone.

The mouse was the rolly ball kind, and you hoped that you were assigned a computer where it still worked properly, or you could arrive in time to grab one where the mouse still worked. Or, if your lunch period coincided with the lab class lunch period, you came in to swap mouses with the bully in the senior class.

Yeah, you could do the thing where you remove the ball and try to clean it, but that only works so much, and for so many times