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Yo, what was your first computer? How old were you, where and how did you get it, what did you do with it, etc.
  • Are we talking first computer in your household, or first computer you ever bought yourself?

    Our first family PC was a hand me down from my uncle that we got when I was 12 or 13. 486DX2 66MHz processor, a couple MBs of RAM, 700-ish megabyte hard drive, Windows 3.1 and DOS. AOL install disks didn't work on it because they needed at least Windows 95, and I was still clueless on how to set up a modem connection in 3.1. So it was entirely for games installed via disc only. We ended up getting a Windows 98 machine a year or two down the line.

    First PC I bought for myself was a custom built machine from a computer shop that has long since gone out of business. I think I paid around $200 for it, so it was a fairly basic PC for 2004. Athlon 1.5 GHz CPU (with a loud as fuck cooler fan), 512 MB RAM, a video card that I forgot the make and model of, Windows XP. Lasted me about 3 years until I built one myself.

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    truly the power of innovation
  • That being said I don't have memories of everything being snappy 20 years ago - there were messy scripts and gigantic images that made Geocities and Angelfire sites near unusable back then as well.

    Pages with dozens of embedded JPEG files that are larger than your monitor's resolution and are compressed at highest quality. Easily a quarter to half of a megabyte each and take several minutes to load on dialup, then the webserver times out the connection because you're taking too long to download all these giant files at once.

    I don't miss those days. Not to say things are better now, but they necessarily weren't back then either.

    Oh, and RealPlayer. Fuck RealPlayer.

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    "If you tell a lie big enough and tell it frequently enough, people will eventually come to believe it". What is an example of this happening today?
  • "Owning a car = freedom"

    Unfortunately in a country where the infrastructure is so hostile to public transit or even pedestrian/biking amenities that it's nearly impossible to live, work or function without a car unless you're lucky enough to live in a dense urban community, I can see how people might believe this.

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    fair share?
  • I always use seconds as an allegory to dollars when I explain to people the difference between thousand, million and billion (I did the number crunching in my head and rushed it, so if I made any errors lemme know).

    1000 seconds = 17 minutes

    100,000 seconds = 27 hours

    1 million seconds = 11 days

    1 billion seconds = 31.70 years

    148 billion seconds (Bezos' net worth) = 4693 years

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    Can we please
  • Same with coconuts. They are associated with Hawaiian and Caribbean cultures when in fact they're native to South Asia and the Austronesian islands.

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    What are some commonly known facts that are too bizarre for you to believe to be true?
  • The fact that calcium is a metal is the reason why bones can be detected in X-rays.

    (I'm pulling this out of my ass and I'm too lazy to look it up to see if it's actually true.)

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    Touch grass
  • I think the earliest instance of "brain worms" I remember was from an episode of Invader Zim in 2001. Zim is offended at the concept of paying to ride a filthy, poorly maintained bus and shouts at the driver "Have you the brain worms?!"

    Edit: found the video https://youtu.be/BiqTTozWNhA?si=bxNeTnreb77vdd00

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    When engineering is done with your shit
  • Scotty also does this in Star Trek III...

    Scotty: "If you don't have eight weeks, I can do it for you in two."

    Kirk: "Mr. Scott, have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four?"

    Scotty: "Certainly, sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?"

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