To continue installing a game you had to type in the 7th word found on page 16, paragraph 3 on line 4.
Huh? What does this mean?
Old anti piracy measure.
Games were on floppies and could be copied trivially. Games also came with a printed instruction manual. If you bought it, you’d have the manual. If you’re just playing a copy you wouldn’t. So type one word from a specific page so we know you own the game.
Insects. At night there would be plenty of insects under every singe street lamp. The windscreen would be full of yellow goo after driving in summer.
Snow. It used to last the whole winter and not just 2 days here and there.
This is so sad.
You could only watch cartoons after school or on Saturday mornings.
Games used to come with books to read, and their anti-piracy measure was to give you a page number and tell you to enter the first word on the page to activate the software.
Of course, you’d copy that floppy and write the code word on the label for your friends.
Lol I had one like that - I made a copy for a friend, but it wasn’t just one code word, it could be any one of about a hundred - but he was dedicated, he figured it out somehow over the course of a few weeks.
IIRC, it was Greg Norman’s Shark Attack that had a thing where it would give you a small pixel art picture of the top-down view of a golf course, and you had to go through the game manual and enter in what page that golf course picture appeared on… so we just got a photocopy version of the manual
You could copy the manual on a xerox machine. Of course some publishers were smart and printed the manual in such a way it any copies came out as an illegibly dark mess.
So naturally you took a legitimate manual, manually transcribed it, and made copies of the copy.
I think I see boobs!
And then, every so often, when the moon was in the right phase and the stars aligned, it would come in perfectly clearly for a few glorious seconds.
IRQ 5, DMA 1
BLESSED THE DAY PLUG AND PLAY WAS INVENTED
This station now concludes its broadcast day.
That’s right. At a certain time of night, TV stations would just stop showing things until morning.
Using two VCRs to edit a video project for English class.
Hit the coin return button on everything and randomly get lucky once in a while.
Tamagotchi and a Walkman with skip protection
It is now safe to turn off your computerOh man, I still remember when Windows finally powered your computer off when you shut down. My poor Nana spent half an hour trying to turn off my uncle’s computer because she kept hitting the power button just after that showed up (as was tradition) but after the computer transitioned to power off, so it just kept turning on.
I edited the file to change ‘now’ to ‘not’ just for grins.
Also:
And then there was the worst sight in the world…
Oh no! I wonder what the numbers mean. Looks like a hex dump of a 32-bit integer, probably an error code given that the number is so small.
It means “your Mac is dead. Buy a new computer.”
Glad you didn’t embed the worst site in the world.
“Scars from Ogrish run deep“, the kids wouldn’t know
Once a person left the house, you couldn’t reach them unless you know where they will be and called that place.
there was a time without cell phones? no way!
And you only had to dial 7 numbers (at least in the US)
when I was wee we only needed to use 5 digits for many years. The system would assume the first digit you dialed was the final digit of the initial group. When they switched us to the full 7 digits people acted SO annoyed: who’s got that kind of time when you’re using a rotary phone?
I never really thought of it this way before, but we really shifted from calling places to calling people.
Dire Straits were Calling Elvis in 1991 tho.
My speakers used to be able to let me know I was about to receive a call on my cell phone.
Can you elaborate? What would happen?
You’d hear a distinct repetitive buzzing sound in the speakers right before the phone rang.
Hmmm that’s interesting. What’s the physics behind that?
Everything is an antenna.
When you call someone it was normal for someone else to answer and you had to be careful because they could be listening to your call.
Party lines! You’d share your phone line with one or more other households. When the phone rang they all rang with alternating short-long rings to identify which house on the line the caller intended to call. So if someone calls you at 2am, several of your neighbors know about it because their phones rang too. Even better, being a snot nosed kid I knew how to take a set of headphones and clip them onto the line. You’d hear both sides of the conversation of any house on the party line without dropping the call voltage too much and getting caught. That meant no one talked about anything private on the phone, everyone else could be listening.
- Receiving junk mail Internet CDs
- Waiting patiently to record a song you liked
- Setting the clock and a timer to record something on your VCR
- The planet Pluto
- Wax lips and candy cigarettes
- Tang
- Translucent electronics
- Cheat Code books
- 1(800) COLLECT & “00 it’s magic!”
