memes

My first pirated copy of windows was 3.1.

I'm this old.

Old enough to have a 286 as a first PC. But more on topic, I remember a time before Limewire and Bearshare. A time before Napster. MP3s were downloaded from IRC or from websites found with AltaVista or WebCrawler.

To play those MP3s? Winamp wasn't out yet. Fraunhofer Winplay3 was your only option. It had to be cracked and pirated as well. Want to multitask while playing an MP3? How about your music cutting out instead?

Ah lime wire, get a song and three random viruses for free

I remember my first written CD. You put the CD into a transfer case and slide it into a large box. Shortly after, the empty transfer case comes back out. You have already prepared your CD image, not as a project or file, no, you had to prepare it as an image on its own partition, on a disk that did not host anything else.

Then you shutdown your computer, and reboot it basically into the burn program, which then tries to move the data fast enough from the disk partition to the CD burner. The speed, of course, was 1x, so this write operation could last an hour and a quarter.

Then, your computer reboots back into the OS. You put the empty transfer case into the writer, and after some time, it comes back out with the media. And now you can finally put in into a reader and read it and compare it to the data on that partition. Knock on wood, or whatever. Because about half the writes failed, and the media cost a fortune.

Going from a radio shack trs-80 model 3 to those desktops was great.

Except mine didn't have floppy drives. I only had a cassette player for storage.

Wrong Dell.

Zip drive!🙋‍♂️

I'm old enough to remember when that was the fancy new thing the kids were doing.

So, shortly after checking aboard the first fast-attack submarine I served on, in April 1991, the boat was locked down one evening, when the engineer couldn't find his Zenith SuperSport 286e computer. Suspecting someone stole it, the boat was locked down and searched - for 3 hours. Everyone was really angry... It's 2025 and I remember it well.

Anyway, after 3 hours or so, at the Captains insistence, the ENG, doing paperwork in his stateroom, let someone else in, to look for his computer. There it was, sitting plain as day, on his bunk, where his pillow should have been. The ENG said he didn't notice it, as he thought it was his pillow...gross, considering everyone else's pillowcase was white.

The Captain immediately lifted the lockdown, and all the off-duty people went home. The anger lingered though, and the Engineer seemed to have a dark cloud over his head. He was fired a few months later, and I've always wondered if it had something to do with that computer - I was just too new to know anything about the guy, and I didn't work in engineering.

The only thing this meme is missing are the Wendy's napkins in the glovebox of my 1991 Pontiac Sunbird that I give my ex-girlfriend to blot her eyes after this latest mix cd is finally the one to blow her fucking mind

People need to relax. This isn't even old. What's wrong with getting older anyway?

People in the thread are talking about limewire, but I think they are missing the bigger reference here.

Downloading games, burning them onto CD-Rs and then using a Sharpie to make the inner tracks of the disc unreadable as they contained the copy protection.

My only confusion is that I swear it was Playstation and not PC that worked like this.

Lime wire?

Try newsgroups

Dusty old bones. Frog Bog, Las Vegas Poker and Blackjack, Truckin and B-17 Bomber

Don't talk about age... My back hurts and I remember booting dos to run win.com if you wanted windows. Most of the stuff ran fine directly from dos without the added shell.

No, because my country was pretty much too small and poor to have brand-name sharpies, we just had felt pens with other names. Carioca I believe was the most prominent brand back then.

Record off the radio to cassette and an active market for pirated live shows because we lived past nowhere and it was all we had access to.

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EVEN OLDER!

Where are the speakers, that warned you about incoming calls?

I had so many burned CDs with games and music... This was back when ADSL internet was the hot new thing with incredible download speeds of 30kb/s

I had a portable hard drive. I think I still have it somewhere.

How else was I going to play pirated music in my car?

8088 era is in da house.

Older, I used to rip CDs onto tapes using a cassette deck