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How do!

A geek thread of older Dakkanauts. In which we make ourselves feel even olderer by realising just how far tech has come in our lifetime. And, just perhaps, we find solace at having at least ridden the crest of the wave of that particular revolution.

Me? I was born in 1980. So whilst far from young, I appreciate I’m not the oldest Dakkanaut. But I did grow up in certain glory days of tech. That odd period where things predicted by early sci-fi (50’s to 80’s) were attempted, but were ultimately quite crap at the end of the day.

We did of course have good tech (the home PC, home gaming consoles, all started within my lifetime, Spesh post-crash), but certain things we now take for granted, like portable TV’s just weren’t much cop. I mean, sure. Battery powered TVs existed, but weighed a lot, offered an awful picture, and devoured batteries.

I remember my brother got a combination portable TV, Tape Deck and Radio in….1991/1992. Oh how we marvelled. But now? Yeah my phone does that. Well, it doesn’t play cassettes, but it does the same thing digitally.

Self driving cars are really bloody nearly real nowadays, but still in their relative infancy. But the car I inherited from Mah Paw has automatic parking, and that has blown my tiny middle aged mind all the same - even if I still need to the pedals and shift the gears. It’s still better at parallel parking than I ever was.

But I still feel lucky that it’s happened within my lifetime. And for the most part (the early part), at a pace I could keep up with.

In fact, the main thing I struggle to properly comprehend? A Nintendo console….having a SEGA emulator, built in.

I just watched an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation from 1987. I was seven when the episode premiered.

Radio rentals to afford a TV/VCR...

But really I like one commentators observation - we are the generation that has to explain tech to older and younger people. For all the talk of young people being digital natives, they have a bizarre (to me) blank when it comes to how anything works. If it doesn't flicker on perfectly a good proportion of the older and younger generations are baffled.

There is a big gap in Sci Fi imaginations currently. All that early stuff from the late 19th/20th centuries has kind of came about or been dismissed, the next waves of visionary tech and cultures doesn't seem to be emerging in the same way.

The thing is many of us grew up in an age where tech didn't do it all for you. You had to make it do stuff.

Now depending how old you are and how deep you got this might just be as simple as navigating a windows user interface and such; or could be full on console commands. Even if you're only in the former group chances are you are aware of what the latter does, you just don't know how to do it to be familiar with its operation, but you know its there.


Younger generations grew up with tech that's very much like iPods and such - by its very design and interface it REALLY restricts what they can or can't do with it and openly discourages them going into the "back end" of things to do stuff.

Of course some of it is just really slick automation, but it creates a layer that means not only are they not encouraged to delve deeper; the system tries to block them out as much as possible.




Interface and software wise we've very much gone from a generation of "Software made for the customer" to "Software made for the company".

Heck soon we'll be going "you know in my day you could save your work on your local PC and that was the default." To generations who only know how to save to cloud because that's all the system gives you unless you go through a bunch of backdoors and stuff.












Also I'm not surprised a Switch has a SEGA emulator. I'm more surprised it doesn't have almost the entire game library from every former generation of console Nintendo made (and yes you can do the DS on it I'm sure - you just have to make a side-holding cradle that lets you put the screen on its side - top andbottom screens then appear that way and the joycons are on the side).

But yeah its kinda amazing to me today that you can play a game like Witcher 3 on a handheld console

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
.In fact, the main thing I struggle to properly comprehend? A Nintendo console….having a SEGA emulator, built in.

I was born in 1972 (just turned 53, ugh!). Our first video game console was the short-lived ColecoVision (1982-1985 according to Wikipedia). It had a port of the front that took an adapter that allowed you to play Atari 2600 cartridges on the system.

Anyone else remember the joy of swapping diskettes when you were loading a game (X-wing or TIE Fighter, for instance) onto a PC?

Insert disk C

Loading....

Insert disk D

Loading....

Insert Disk A

Huh?

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Anyone else remember the joy of swapping diskettes when you were loading a game (X-wing or TIE Fighter, for instance) onto a PC?

Insert disk C

Loading....

Insert disk D

Loading....

Insert Disk A

Huh?

Disks? DISKS? In my house we had cassettes...or better yet, you bought the book with the BASIC code in to write a text adventure game yourself... which inevitably didn't work...

 Skinflint Games wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Anyone else remember the joy of swapping diskettes when you were loading a game (X-wing or TIE Fighter, for instance) onto a PC?

Insert disk C

Loading....

Insert disk D

Loading....

Insert Disk A

Huh?

Disks? DISKS? In my house we had cassettes...or better yet, you bought the book with the BASIC code in to write a text adventure game yourself... which inevitably didn't work...

We also had a cassette drive for our Commodore 64. It was fun playing one of the cassettes on a tape player and listening to it screech

I had a Commodore 16 with tapes, and an Amstrad CPC 464 with 3" floppies...

I was in the loft with my Dad a while back, and he showed me his perfectly stacked and arranged punch card boxes he used for his thesis research

1970s tech hacks - After arranging your punch cards, draw a thick diagonal line across the whole set so if they get dropped you've got half a chance of getting them back in the right order

Getting free games for your Spectrum or Amstrad on the front of magazines. Or for the more advanced, from code published in the magazine you entered yourself.

On the latter, I wonder how many modern day programmers cut their teeth that way?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, still kinda bonkers, given how ubiquitous it is in the modern day, that I completed my education without the Internet.

We had computers, yes. But not the Internet. If we needed to look something up, we had to hope the library had it. Heck. We didn’t even have a home PC until after I’d started work.

Definitely one of those things which feels like yesterday, but also a million years ago at the same time.

We were quite fortunate on that front. We had a home PC from when I was about 10ish I think, and my dad was insistent that it was a 'proper' PC - IBM-compatible as it was termed at the time. Rather than a C64 or whatnot. So it was an IBM 286 processor, with 640KB of RAM and a 30MB hard disk. Quite something at the time!

But it scratched an itch I didn't know I had. The 286 was upgraded to a 486, then I bought a Pentium II to take to university, then at the end of university I built my first computer using the new at the time Athlon processor.

Then I got a job in IT support, entirely from the knowledge I'd built up from having PCs at home and trying to get games to run on them. It wasn't so easy back then. Kids today don't know they're born - having to modify your autoexec.bat and config.sys files to balance base memory, upper memory, extended memory and expanded memory according to game requirements... Even getting a joystick to work, or getting sound out of a sound card, was an effort.

And I've been in IT support ever since... Still love it.

Speaking of tech from yesteryear... remember Reel-to-Reel movie players?

Or better yet, watching movies on film projectors in school?

I told this to someone the other day, and if I had said that I used to watch the Tyrannosaurus at the zoo, I believe I would've gotten the same reaction.

My grandparents had a reel to reel. I think it once belonged to my eldest Uncle. Cinecam, I think?

I’ll tell you one tech advance I’ll wholeheartedly embrace? Dash Cams for cars.

My time in motor insurance was just before they became widespread, but the amount of fraudulent claims exposed by them even then was worth the investment. Not necessarily “this accident never happened” fraud. More “yes, happens I had 23 members of my family in the car and they’ve [i]all[/i[ got whiplash lotsofcashmoniessettlementpls” fraud.

This is all the more important thanks to the advent of “fundamental dishonesty” enabling entire claims, not just the fraud parts, to be declined.

Really must get some fitted to my wheels. Definitely a “have it and hopefully never need it” bit of tech. And one that seems incredibly futuristic to me still.

On other “I’m old” stuff? I remember as a kid, our local Butchers had saw dust on the floor, and pig carcasses hanging customer side of the counter. Now my world then was as small as I was, so I dunno if that was a widespread practice.

Movie night with friends, and we're currently going through the Jurassic franchise, because the Lego game was cheap on the Switch a little while back - normally we put on an episode of Lower Decks or something until it's time for their kids to go to bed so we can watch House of the Dragon or whatever, but dinosaurs are fine so they get to watch the first half-hour, then catch up with the rest during the week. They don't have Jurassic World on any of their various streaming services at the moment, but luckily I'm the one in the friend group who likes physical media so I bring over the dvd - and it's got the copyright warnings and trailers before we get to the menu. "Why isn't the movie starting? Oh my gooood it's so booooring! What is this?!?" (The kids are six and four, so they're at that Natural Drama Student age.) I don't think they even believed us when we told them you used to have to rewind movies before you could watch them.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
My grandparents had a reel to reel. I think it once belonged to my eldest Uncle. Cinecam, I think?

On other “I’m old” stuff? I remember as a kid, our local Butchers had saw dust on the floor, and pig carcasses hanging customer side of the counter. Now my world then was as small as I was, so I dunno if that was a widespread practice.

I remember that, not all of them but the most traditional ones still did,

but we didn't tend to use the butcher, we used the incredibly new fangled tech innovation The Chest Freezer to buy half a pig or sheep (or a quarter of a cow) cut up direct from the local abattoir and froze the lot for future use.... except the heads, that would have been a food adventure too far

Since I just moved a CRT television today, I was reminded of how much the glass in old TVs weighs.

I will say one thing about now versus then. Everything (except the people) weighs less in today's world.

Earliest console I recall having was a K-Mart brand Pong system. After that we had a TI-99 so obliviously got a bunch of Hunt the Wumpus in as a kid. Of the mainstream systems the first I had was a Sega Genesis, or Mega Drive in PAL region, at launch.

I think this was my first gaming device...

https://www.retrogamesnow.co.uk/grandstand-scramble-handheld/

I didn't have tech where I lived as a general thing for quite a while. My first electronic was the NES from the SEARS catalog that definitely got me started on figuring out things like how cable signals works and removing the blinking 12 on the VCR.

First computer was a hand me down IBM PC Jr. that definitely was a high effort, low return device that I was always kind of proud to make anything work on, but mostly just had me wanting something top of the line like a DOS or Win 3.1 machine. At one point we even got to send messages over this internet thing, but the long distance phone charges were prohibitively expensive.

I will say, the "kids these days" element of this is kind of self selecting. Sure, I did this stuff as did a lot of my current friends who work in tech, but its not like its a generational thing. Most of my classmates didn't know a thing about computers back then and most of them haven't learned a whole lot more than they absolutely had to since. There are just always kids who need to know how stuff works and kids who just want things that work. There are absolutely still kids tinkering with their phone or making their own apps or know settings 14 menus deep that carry the torch just fine.

A colleague in his early thirties was complaining about the two to three day delay in his Amazon delivery.

So myself and the other middle-aged man in the office explained going to the post office to get a postal order and then waiting Up To Twenty Eight Days For Delivery.

I teach high schoolers in a private school and most of them don't know what a URL is, what a browser is, or what it means to save a file locally - they have no idea about the file system in their operating system (or for that matter, what an operating system is).

We recently had to get them to download a file, move it onto a USB stick, and then remove the stick. The vast majority had never seen a USB stick before and had no idea how it worked.

They can all turn their phones into a wi fi hotspot though, and get around content blockers and all that.

Anyway, my first video game was the little caveman game where you stole eggs from a sleeping dinosaur and sometimes a volcano erupted.
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/BXFJNC/toys-tomy-caveman-electronic-toy-by-tomy-micro-computer-game-japan-BXFJNC.jpg

I thought it was the best thing ever.

Almost forgot we had one of these two Pong systems


I know it was one of the two as those controllers made a stand-in for a starfighter...

 Da Boss wrote:
I teach high schoolers in a private school and most of them don't know what a URL is, what a browser is, or what it means to save a file locally - they have no idea about the file system in their operating system (or for that matter, what an operating system is).

We recently had to get them to download a file, move it onto a USB stick, and then remove the stick. The vast majority had never seen a USB stick before and had no idea how it worked.

They can all turn their phones into a wi fi hotspot though, and get around content blockers and all that.
....

Yeah, that's a huge problem right there. That whole 'digital natives' stuff just doesn't happen. One of the effects of leaving the internet to tech companies and of course of replacing actual computers with cellphones.

Honestly I'm still amazed at how many people now don't use a laptop or home PC. Granted they were never cheap items, but phones and consoles are around aplenty and are not cheap either.

I very much get using phones on the go, but the idea of surfing the net and doing everything with a phone would drive me nuts. Just typing alone is slower and more fiddly and annoying, not to mention it takes forever to read or view anything on those tiny screens.

As an option/choice sure - but as their only means of accessing the net and computing it just baffles me.


Esp since when we went through school we learned most of those basic things in computing classes anyway. So I'm also left wondering if schools just gave up/never daught computing classes at all now

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Anyone else remember the joy of swapping diskettes when you were loading a game (X-wing or TIE Fighter, for instance) onto a PC?

Insert disk C

Loading....

Insert disk D

Loading....

Insert Disk A

Huh?

I only have two glaring memories of this. One was Legend of the Dragoon for PS1, which had 2 CD's and when you went far enough into the game, you had to put the second one in. The other was Baldur's Gate for the PC, where you had something like 8 cd's, and had to constantly switch them out as you travelled to different areas of the world.

Baldurs Gate 2 had I think 4 CDs (that might be 3 and then expansion?). A good few PC games though you often didn't have to swap disks when I got into gaming, you just had to swap them during the install process.

I do recall early Final Fantasy games coming on several disks and it being the big achievement to get to the next/new disk as you progressed.


Oh here's one - I recall when Unreal Tournament 2004 basically got a soft-relaunch and they actually gave you a discount if you mailed the original starter disk back to them.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Anyone else remember the joy of swapping diskettes when you were loading a game (X-wing or TIE Fighter, for instance) onto a PC?

Insert disk C

Loading....

Insert disk D

Loading....

Insert Disk A

Huh?

The first game I really remember doing this with was Riven (the sequel to Myst). Way back in 1996/97 or so. Still probably the best game in that series, although Myst 3 Exile was pretty good also.

On the "do they teach computing classes" bit, no, not in my school any more.

When I started here 10 years ago we had IT classes but they were phased out about 8 years ago as we were assured the kids were all digital natives now and knew more than us.

There was a maths teacher who was teaching them excel and stuff but he passed away and nobody really took it up. So kids are arriving to my physics classes having never used a spreadsheet before. Very annoying, I have to teach them the basics of data handling and transformation before we can do any experiments involving automatic sensors.

A lot of kids never paid much heed in IT anyway because it wasn't an exam subject, but they at least had seen a spreadsheet before.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Anyone else remember the joy of swapping diskettes when you were loading a game (X-wing or TIE Fighter, for instance) onto a PC?

Insert disk C

Loading....

Insert disk D

Loading....

Insert Disk A

Huh?

Legend of Crystalina on my Amiga, dang thing came on like 12 disks...

...And it had a bug so I never could get more than halfway through