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Old magic
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this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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Witches VS Patriarchy
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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.