Who did this 😂😂😂

Heh, the days when the six 3.5" floppies of Wing Commander was a huge install and often required a hard disk clean out.

"." ,8,1

...we had the 4016 2001N with an external tape drive: not quite as much geek-cred as the original 2001, but still respectable...

Well if this is a competition for who can find old computer images im im

Mine was a TI 99/4a. Texas Instruments 'computer' of the same generation. Tape drive squealed like a modem. But nobody remembers modems now ...

Green Screen!

I had my computer plugged into a power bar and we'd turn off the power bar to turn off the computer so that we wouldn't wear out the switch on the computer.

People actually thought you'd have a computer long enough to wear out its power switch.

I knew far, far too many people in HS that just hit the power button without actually shutting it down.

Huh, never ever seen that. We always used the rule "you can shutdown the computer when you can see the C:.

What does park do? Put the HDD arm into a parked position? Never needed that for ours, but we also had a blazingly fast 486 with a massive 250 MB hdd.

I'm right there with ya. Don't forget to make sure you set the interleaving correctly on your Winchester drive!

Yup. Thankfully that “feature” went away real quick and it became automatic.

Into what did you type that? Wouldn't something already have to have booted first in order to type it?

95/98 and ME/XP to a far lesser extent but it was 98 for me lol

Any Windows machine that does not support ACPI or has it disabled. IIRC Windows has required ACPI since Vista.

you take that back

Fuck I'm old.

About half a decade younger than that, just picked up pc gaming as a hobby at a young age.

But yes, I know that there are many significantly older gamer folks / tech dorks here on lemmy... but there are also now a lot of Gen Z folks, and even some Gen A... who just actually did not ever experience the 'pre-internet' era at all.

It gets difficult for me to manage my age perception whiplash at times.

I apparently look young enough that people irl, only 10 years older than me (or less) still refer to me as 'a bright young man with my whole future ahead of me', as if I'm in my early 20s... while people 10 years younger than me refer to me as an ancient elder gamer online, and irl, once I tell them my actual age, oh now I'm an uncle, I'm an old man.

??? confused millenial noises ???

Ok so... hear me out.

You know how the common aphorism for dog years is that 1 dog year is 7 human years?

BF 1942 came out in 2002.

60 year difference.

...

I hereby propose a 'Gamer Age' formula:

(Real Age - Youngest Age you first put over 50 hours into a single game) * 6

...

So if you are now 40, and you mainlined Starcraft when it came out in 1998, your gamer age is 78... pretty old, seen a lot of shit in your time.

If you are 20, and broke 50 hours into Fortnite at age 14 (when Fortnite first released), your gamer age is 36... middle aged, been around the block a few times.

If you are 16, and broke 50 hours in Fortnite when you were 14... your gamer age is 12 (lol), you are still a little nooblet in terms of gaming experience.

If you are 60, and put 50 hours into a Pacman cabinet when it came out in 1980... gamer age is 240, true elder, arcane wizard status.

If you are Lord British (Richard Garriot), and you use the release date of the first game he developed (Akalabeth) as the 50hr game...

He works out to a minimum of 276, which is almost certainly a low estimate... by my reckoning, he could potentially be as old as 330...

...few know such things precisely, such is the nature of a truly ancient one, hahaha.

...

If I run this for myself... first game I put more than 50 hours into would have been... Sonic 3 / Sonic & Knuckles, think I broke the 50 hour mark in '96...

So... my gamer age works out to 174.

Unnaturally old, by no means the eldest of the wizened ones, but considerably more experienced than most would guess by my physical form, rofl.

...

Now, this isn't a perfect metric, as ... you could argue the 50 hour threshold should be some other number... and that it doesn't account for people who have played a whole lot of games, but only a single playthrough... so it is kind of biased toward 'hardcore' gamers...

But it does seem roughly in line with the way online lingo and vocabulary and memes seem to work.

And also, non 'hardcore' gamers are probably not going to care about any kind of 'gamer age' metric.

...

Thoughts? Suggestions? Critiques?

... You go to the GameFAQ board to ask for help, rofl.

EDIT:

Blam, you timewarp 25 years into the future and realize.... holy shit, Blizzard could have built Battle.net into Steam before Valve did, but they completely went all in with WoW instead.

EDIT 2:

You warp back to the late 90s, and are extremely confused as to why the 'replay' of your last Starcraft game diverges into a whole ass alternate reality after about the 3 minute mark of a 90ish minute match.

1: You a veteran?

2: Yes. No. I don't wanna talk about it.

Camera zooms in on 2, fades to montage:

MiG 21 thundering overhead at tree top levels, while blasting 'Hush', which is being comically raised in pitch to squeaking chipmunk levels as it approaches, and then instantly downshifts by two octaves into quaalude voice after it passes overhead... it is being pursued by an f4 phantom who fires off all of his seeking missiles in a quick burst, all of which guide themselves into your convoy of m113s, as well as a nearby mortar emplacement

squad is slowly advancing through Hue with no resistance thus far... and then suddenly, from 3 different directions, VC on mopeds, blasting 'Surfin Bird' and headbanging maniacally, rapidly approach the unit... 2 are shot, but one makes it through, moped detonates with the force of 4 bundles of TNT

... rocket pod armed mi8s and hueys pieroutting around each other in the night sky, throwing unguided rockets everywhere, taking out ground bound friend and foe alike, both ultimately running out if ammo and then crashing into the ground sideways and upside down...

Camera pops back to 2, slowly zooms out.

2: ... I don't ... don't wanna talk about it.

Oh man, I found chip's challenge again a few years back (it took forever because I couldn't remember the name) but I totally forgot about rodent's revenge!

Oh man! I had no clue what the program was called. We used it way back in my kindergarten/1st grade days, so I'd long forgotten the specifics. Thank you! This is exactly it.

I'm an elder Millennial, and I remember when we got old enough to use the 386 machines at school. Before that we were using DOS.

Our first home computer was bought second hand and didn't even have a hard drive, just two 5.25" floppy drives, and also ran DOS. We'd have kids from the entire neighborhood visit to play games on it, because although it was second hand it was also very rare to have one.

I was 12 when Windows 95 came out. All this stuff looks waay newer than that. I'd say this draws the line for old at the older part of Gen Z. Millennials aren't even on the scale.

Same, but then you severely undersold how old you are. Like, where's the Space Cadet, at least?

if they saw the depraved smut I was cranking to I can guarantee my ass would be a paraplegic from the whoopin I would have got.

they didn't know. they'll never know.

We had multiple games on our floppies. All pirated and with miles of paper printouts showing which games were on which floppy.

I think we had two legitimately bought games.

Haha! Now USB ports are sort of cartridge ports. Although I haven't see a lot of software distributed on USB, there are some products.

I don't think I ever knew that.

It's on my old netbook, it will never leave.

That thing is nearing 20 now I think!

Because it really whips the llama's ass!

Unironically, 7zip is the best. It's widely available, open source, and.... Multithreaded. Really helps when I need to compress a few hundred gigs of experimental data at the 24 core workstation.

I use that too, on a different computer.

That damn yeti was scary af. Every game was pure anxiety.

I would have too :( It was purged in a major clean while I had it stored at a familys place.

Mine were always hooked up to our PC. A lot of Age of Empires 2 played through those things.

It is so deadpan and serious it transcends comedy and just becomes iconic.

Perfection, lol.

Sounds like a very sane choice!