627
Old magic
(thelemmy.club)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
627 points (98.3% liked)
Witches VS Patriarchy
1209 readers
169 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Most kids back then probably didn't either, because they would've hooked the tape recorder up to the line out port on their computer if they wanted to do that.
i don't remember what my exact pc setup was, but i had one of those dinosaur tech devices called a "stereo," a gift i got from dad for finally getting good grades for once. it had a 20 or 30 CD changer as well as 2 cassette decks for making tapes. i don't remember if it had a line in, and if it did, i was too unaware at the time to think about recording from the pc to the tapes
My friend, no one had a laptop in the 90s. They didn't become cheap enough for that until the early 2000s.
I had a laptop in 98.
Ran DOS, not even Windows. B&W screen, if you wanted color, you could press on the screen and get a glorious rainbow. There was no mouse integrated into the laptop. Instead there was a serial trackball mouse. It weighed probably 19 pounds and had an impressive 45 minute battery life.
It also may have fallen off the back of a truck. Computers were way less trackable back then.
I didn't say laptop, I said "computer." You dragged the entire desktop PC, including the 50 lb CRT monitor, across the house to the hi-fi system (or vice-versa), and you liked it!
(Edit: you do realize I'm talking about using the computer to record to a cassette tape and then playing the tape in the car, not hooking a laptop up directly to your car stereo, right?)
Across the house? I used to put mine on a wagon and drag it across town for lan parties. Lots of blankets to minimize bouncing and it was fine.
I had the little CD to cassette tape adapter, I also drove around with a laptop in the passenger seat plugged into the aux port, which quickly turned into a cheap mp3 player.
I was an early adopter of the portable "MP3-CD" player (and a late adopter of the portable CD player in general, because that's the first I ever owned). That, the radio, and commercially-bought cassettes were the only ways I played music in my car as a teenager.
The point is, though, I was responding to the previous comment about "the hassle of burning a cd of mp3s and then recording the cd onto a cassette tape." I know there were other ways to do it, but I wasn't discussing them.
Does no one remember LAN parties!?
My uncle used to work for Microsoft back in the day and so he had one of the earliest commercial laptops. I think the laptop weighed more than he did.
It had the worst screen in the world it had a viewing angle of about 4° but everyone wanted to see it.