Normal amount

Y’all remember the computer room? Like that guest bedroom or whatever that wasn’t really used for anything other than housing The Computer?

That was pretty normal when I was 10. I was born in the 80s. It was novel like TV in the 1950s or radio in the 1920s.

In the mid-90s my dad bought a Compaq Presario and the LucasArts games multi-pack. X-Wing, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, and Indiana Jones. Amazing. I was like a God.

I also remember playing a game called The Neverhood, which was a claymation liminal space game. Gave me nightmares of being trapped there, but it was still one of my favorites.

I'm guessing the OOP was born early to mid 80s.

I remember sharing porn on floppy disks in highschool. I didn't have Internet yet so a few of my friends were gods among men.

Click here if you're over 18?

Not much has changed there. Unless you live in a nanny state of "small government" and "save the children". Bitch you turned out fine! Let em rub one out in peace.

No I can't relate to that memory because nobody had internet when I was 10 🥲

We actually went to a local department store (Karstadt), where they had a few computers lined up for people to play around with. It was all really expensive and very very beige, as was the style at the time. So we went there to "try out" the computers until the store clerks would approach us, eyebrow raised, asking if we were intending to buy one. Yes Mister, I am 10, and I would like to buy this computer that is about 5000 times my weekly allowance! I used to visit a neighbour who lived in the same house who actually had a computer that was hooked up to a TV. He was developing a game for it, and I was his alpha tester. It was way cool. It was so long ago that I forgot what the game was really about, but I loved going there and playing it everytime he finished a new part of it. Later, my mother would buy an Atari Mega ST 1 with an SM124 screen and one of those break-your-wrist mouses they had at the time. She had to chase me away from that to get any work done. It wasn't until 1993 that I would get my first own PC that I could use as much and as long as I wanted. Internet I got when I got a 14.4k modem. Dialed in to a BBS first, which only gave me usenet. Then later, the first internet provider opened in our town, and so I had 'real' internet. But damnit, did that shit cost money. Not the internet access itself, but the fees for the phone line, because we had to pay per minute even for local calls.

I'd say good times, but then I remember things like having to edit your startup files every time you wanted to play a different game, and how slow and horrible and expensive (not to mention beige) everything was.

I remember when digital audio first became available and downloading a supercut (which we didn't have a word for then) of Homer Simpson saying "d'oh". We probably had to wait at least half an hour, and then we didn't have a program on the computer that could play audio files (or at least not one we could find) so we had to search around and wait even longer to download some shareware program (Goldwave)

Some did this because it was a long time ago and the internet was new and only a few people had it.

Some people did this because the internet wasn't new, and the parents knew what kind of trouble giving a 10 year old unmonitored access to the internet could lead to - which meant that they would have to travel to that one friend's house whose parents didn't give a damn.

Then there are those that grew up after the age of smart phones and can't understand how two people could read from the same phone screen at the same time.

The internet? At those prices?

We had to go to each others houses to look at CD-ROMs!

That's just what we did until like... Jeez... 2006?

My mother would tell us that she especially loved visiting her grandparent's house because they had color tv

I would go to my friends house to play RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 she bought for 60$, i would spent the day playing with her on a single computer taking turns and discovering the game and then walk 45 minutes back home. 🥰

One of my buddies had a AOL birthday party where we got the internet for "30 days free" and we just spent the time taking turns chatting with people in chatrooms.

Old enough to have had a Commodore 64 and Atari 2600.

Remember when nobody had internet service for the most part and you had only a little window of time to use Freenet?

Sure I memba!! I also memba getting yelled at for tying up the only phone line 😭

I’d say the window of overlap for “look at the computer” and “information superhighway” was actually pretty small for most people.

Maybe 1996-2001?

So then you factor in how old people would have been during that period who would have done this. Being generous, I’d say 9-18. At different ages in that range “going to my friend’s place to look at the computer” would have been a euphemism for different things.

But the range there would be from 1977-1992, which is actually pretty impressive for a cultural moment. Essentially, most millennials.

I still call the internet the information superhighway sometimes

I remember my friend showing a BBS that his uncle had got him set up on and being blown away. Also, I guess my parents were impressed by Spokesdude Bronson Pinchot (The Bronster), because they got us a US Videotel console for almost a year.

The information superhighway? You mean the cassette tape?

I think this was probably still a common thing for people in their 30s now, it wasn't that long ago

I remember my friends would be cramming around our buddy's computer watching him play Sim Ant. Ran on DOS I think.

I built my first website without access to internet. Just locally for me and my friends.