Jfc i feel old but just realized: if you’re younger than like 35-40 you basically have zero memory of life without the worldwide web (or what some people call “the internet”) because in 93/94 you were only 5-10 years old. Even scarier, if you’re younger than 25-30 you don’t remember a Googleless world. And holy shit: an ad-free web. It was about 98 when the first ads started appearing, IIRC. STUFF is REALLY NEW, people. And it can CHANGE. IT DOESNT HAVE TO BE THE WAY it is now.

@detritus
TFW you have to explain the concepts of carbon paper, only three television stations, and not being able to binge watch anything...
@Tweetfiction

@detritus I'm 35 but we didn't really get internet access until the early 2000's when we had upgraded from dial up to DSL. And even then it was fairly limited.

My oldest brother gave me his old pc when I was a senior In high school and that's when I got hooked on computers

@DelilahTech @detritus @Tweetfiction I mean you could binge-watch stuff, technically, by recording it on VHS and waiting for a while 😁

@tso
VHS? What is that? Next you’ll be talking about CDs and MTVs
@detritus @Tweetfiction

@DelilahTech @detritus @Tweetfiction CD's? What about good old audio cassettes? Or floppy disc? You younglings with your newfangled stuff...

@tso
Because those are words, and the younglings can't understand them...
@detritus @Tweetfiction

@detritus 98 for ads in search engines but I remember banner ads in 1996.

@detritus Rotary phones...

@krypt3ia sliced bread…

@detritus Computer punch cards.

@krypt3ia fire

@detritus banging rocks together in front of the obelisk

@tso @DelilahTech @detritus @Tweetfiction did anyone listen to music on floppy? o.O

(well i suppose you'd have midis and cmfs and mods but you know what i mean)

@apophis
Good question. There were .wav files back then, but they weren't compressed, so any .wav of appreciable length would take up a lot of space.

.mp3 files were the most well-known (followed by Microsoft's .wma) format with a minute of audio taking up approximately 1mb of storage.

A 3.5" floppy holds about 1.4mb

The .mp3 standard didn't come out until 1991, nearly a decade after the Compact Disc (1982) and the CD-ROM (1985) for computers.

The Zip Disk came out in 1995, and could hold 100mb in it's original incarnation (later, it would get to 250mb). It was a rigid media disc and doesn't really count as a floppy, though it was only marginally larger than the 3.5" floppy (which wasn't really floppy itself, that was the 5.25" and 8").

So, not really, no. I had a few Zip discs with favorite songs on them, but CD-RW discs were available from 1996, giving one 700mb of music storage (about ten or eleven traditional albums worth of .mp3 files).

@tso @Tweetfiction @detritus

@DelilahTech @tso @Tweetfiction @detritus i was thinking more in terms of actually spinning it to get music like you would a record or a CD

@apophis
Hrm. The disc part is too thin to impress with grooves for playing off a record player (if you want an interesting rabbit-hole, look up x-ray records).

Otherwise, there are a few people who use arrays of floppy drives as musical instruments, but that concept didn't take off until the early teens.
@tso @Tweetfiction @detritus

@DelilahTech @tso @Tweetfiction @detritus as far as just stuff on files goes, there were a couple years when i was in my tweens and my allowance was too skimpy to justify buying CDs, so most of my listening collection actually was a bunch of MIDIs and low-def tracker modules

the MIDIs basically continued until i had high-speed internet and WinMX because the CD store usually didn't have the thing i wanted and ordering online was just too much of a hassle

@apophis
In my youth, I recorded songs off the radio on a shitty tape recorder.

It wasn't until I was in high school that I managed to get a Walkman and wear out a couple tapes I found in a second-hand store: Dreamboat Annie by Heart, a Devo double album, and Queen's Greatest Hits...

@tso @Tweetfiction @detritus

@DelilahTech @tso @detritus @Tweetfiction my step dad’s car had an 8-track

@lifewithryan
1970's model?
@tso @detritus @Tweetfiction

@DelilahTech @tso @detritus @Tweetfiction it was a big read chevy…that’s all I remember. The thing was absolutely massive.

@lifewithryan
Ford started installing 8-track players in certain models in 1965. They were often upgrades to vehicles through the 70s until the cassette tape started replacing them in the mid-70s or so.

If it was a very large Chevy, then that suggests late 60s or early 70s model years. Cars started getting smaller in the late seventies when OPEC started oil embargoes to drive prices up.
@tso @detritus @Tweetfiction

@DelilahTech @tso @detritus @Tweetfiction my sister says it was a caprice classic…dunno the year. I do remember the box that held the 8-tracks. It’s where I first heard Kenny Rogers.

@lifewithryan
Okay, that means 1973 or later. That was a monster, to be sure...

My grandparents had a huge collection of country music on 8-track, including Kenny Rogers.

@tso @detritus @Tweetfiction

@DelilahTech @detritus @Tweetfiction one of those three stations broadcast all night, so you could "binge watch" four movies, all of which had plots featuring "a singing cowboy"

@NewNordicNormal
Ah, good old UHF... It's a shame cable came in and ruined the moment for Al Yankovic. That was exactly how the independent stations were like.
@detritus @Tweetfiction

@apophis @tso @Tweetfiction @DelilahTech @detritus most computers could not play music. They could make a single beep sound, using a piezoelectric speaker on the motherboard. Beyond that, you had to buy an expensive Soundblaster card.

I also don't recall any compressed audio until MP3. So the music would not have fit on a 5 inch 170kbyte C64 1541 drive, or 720kb or 1440kb IBM 3.5" drive.

Multi-write CDs and ZIP disks arrived before compressed audio went mainstream.

Bootleg mixtapes kind-of jumped from "dubbing decks" of the 1980s straight to "ripping CDs" in mid '90s

@NewNordicNormal
OMG yes, and ripping CDs was an absolute mess, in the beginning...

Imagine having a 1x CD-RW drive. Burning a traditional CD took a little bit longer than listening to it would.

And, even though you could theoretically multitask, doing so was very likely to cause an issue during the burn, and you'd have to start over.

And when blank discs cost several dollars a pop...
@apophis @tso @Tweetfiction @detritus

@DelilahTech @NewNordicNormal @apophis @tso @Tweetfiction @detritus
It was technically better than praying to any god that was listening that *this time* the DJ wouldn't talk over the intro or outro of the song and you could get a good copy on tape...but it never happened.

@apophis @Tweetfiction @DelilahTech @detritus Not usually, I don't think so, but you did have programs on CD Roms

@tso @apophis @Tweetfiction @DelilahTech @detritus And OMG, being able to install an app from a CD was amazing. The youngins will never understand the fun of installing giant programs (at the time, cause now, our phone apps are bigger) with 27 floppy discs.

@raddude12
Hah! Yeah, Windows was that bad. Office was like three or four CDs for a while...
@tso @apophis @Tweetfiction @detritus

@NewNordicNormal @apophis @tso @Tweetfiction @DelilahTech @detritus

"Most computers"

: Commodore and Atari have entered the chat :

@venya
I said nothing wrong, and besides, that was all midi stuff.
@NewNordicNormal @apophis @tso @Tweetfiction @detritus

@raddude12 @tso @apophis @Tweetfiction @DelilahTech @detritus Thanks for the traumatic flashback to the first time I installed Red Hat Linux (pre-RHEL)

@josephholsten
LOL, sorry, mate!
@raddude12 @tso @apophis @Tweetfiction @detritus

@detritus There was a time when every single web site was someone's hobby project.

And then business decided they needed to set up shop. And so design agencies were created to meet this need.

Because I had actually created a real web site (in notepad and a pirate copy of Photoshop) I was hired by one of the first.

I'm so sorry. I was young and all I knew was that I could move to San Francisco and get paid well for doing something super easy. I had no idea where it was going.

@tsturm @detritus Then again, my rent in San Francisco in 1996 was $400, so we're to blame for a *lot* of stuff, really.