Limewire.
I miss old PC Games from the early 90’s.
I’ve reinstalled all that I remember and they sucked, but back then, they didn’t.Check out the remake of C&C!
Also Commandos still rock IMO!
I played through it recently. It is one of the few EA titles where I will concede that they did a good job and that I feel I got my moneys worth.
NHL Hockey 95 was really good!
Some of them got open sourced btw:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2229890/view/502818210084553731?l=english
Try age of empires too!
Police Quest.
Oh god, those old adventure games.
Where doing things in the wrong order (which was explained nowhere) would lead to permadeath, or worse, getting stuck with no way to progress and no hint what you missed in a previous area you can’t return to.
All I remember from police quest is getting killed or fired for missing a step at a routine traffic stop, or forgetting to check the tire pressure every time you start driving.
In Leisure Suit Larry 1 you straight up get killed without warning if you step onto a street (run over by a car) or into a back alley (mugged and clubbed to death), or take a cab with wine in your inventory (cab driver takes it, drinks it and crashes).
Fun times!
Worms!
Although I just looked that one up and they have been making new versions of it continuously so I don’t know if it really counts as an old 90s game anymore.
It counts as a 90s game, but not an early 90s game.
Games really started to get much, MUCH better in '94 and '95.
One of my friends found his old Gamecube with a copy of 007! So of course we had to have all the boys over to have a little tournament complete with 2 liter sodas and chips and cheap pizza.
Man I forgot how rough around the edges those earlier FPS games really were. They were super bare bones, with janky at best controls, and mediocre hit registration. At least the maps were still good.
I don’t know about early 90’s, but games from mid and late 90’s are bangers.
From early 90’s it’s probably just Wolfenstein 3D and Doom that were very good.
The best game of the early 90s was “Das Schwarze Auge: Die Schicksalsklinge” (later translated and re-released with dumbed-down mechanics as “Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny”), and I’m willing to die on that hill.
Doom was '95
It was released in late '93.
Ah ok my mistake, thanks, must have been thinking of Rise of the Triad
Life before cellphones and internet.
Did you know in 1990 only .25% of the world’s population (12.5 million) had cellphones and only .05% (2.8 million) had internet?
It feels like we sacrificed local community and connection for global information overload and disconnection sometimes.
GenX, here. You are so very, very wrong. Phones and internet have made anxiety disorders endemic. We’re constantly bombarded with information, alerts, opinions, information and misinformation…
Young people have never experienced what it’s like to have privacy. To leave the house and be totally unreachable. To get answering machine messages that you had no obligation to immediately respond to.
I’m in big tech and helped develop all this shit. We made it addictive on purpose. I’d love to go back to how things were in the 90s, and I’m not waxing nostalgic. Things were objectively better before all this crap.
I’m a millennial who’s old enough to remember those days. It’s an absolutely huge difference, though at least if you’re expecting a phone call, you don’t have to scuttle your whole day sitting by the landline.
Maybe I am, but I don’t think so. I’m a Xennial and also workin tech. You and I feel the same but I don’t think we’re in the majority. It might not be 90% but I think we are the ever shrinking minority that feels this way.
Heh. I read the title of this post backwards. You and I are saying the same thing!
I am a Zillenial and also think this way, lol.
Been talking about this a lot lately. Older millennial here. I loved that brief little slice of time I got to experience, when DSL / cable was around and no longer “pay by the minute” and someone answering a phone wouldn’t kick you off.
Web pages loaded fast enough. They were fine. Downloads? Just be patient. No problem. WoW and friends, Unreal Tournament, Battlefield 2142, all ran just fine.
But mostly…
I miss when the Internet was a place you went all its own, it wasn’t everywhere, it wasn’t inside of literally everything. You had to “visit” it. Logging on meant you could also log off. It didn’t follow your every move.
Handheld game consoles were still airgapped, the main ones had it optional.
People had blogs for fun, they used the web to express themselves and share ideas and stupid subcultures and memes. It didn’t “matter.”
It wasn’t “the commercial internet.” It was just The Web. It was somewhere else.
Everything wasn’t built on inescapable addiction algorithms that follow you everywhere, and have already your shadow identity shared to innumerable servers because someone knows someone who used one of those services and you were in a group picture once.
For the younger kids, there was a time when your entire life from birth wasn’t shared without your consent for the world to see. (How many people really understood privacy settings anyway?)
Disconnecting now feels more impossible than ever, it takes a huge effort not unlike fasting, and mental overload is the norm.
So much of it is just corporatized, weaponized, and predatory.
meh. yeah it’s been bad for mental health but… what did you read while shitting, the back of the shampoo bottle?
Sometimes yeah, or your bathroom had a magazine rack
I don’t think you understand what anxiety is if you think being totally unreachable as a solution to modern anxiety…
I’m gonna venture he means being totally unreachable…
… by your boss on your day off.
Nah. “Young people have never experienced what it’s like to have privacy. To leave the house and be totally unreachable…”
That is explicitly what OP said. To be totally unreachable in the literal sense can easily be a source of anxiety on its own.
Ah I see, yeah you’re right!
That is something that occurs to me too. It’s weird to me now, imagining couples separating to go to work or whatever, and you just gotta believe everything is gonna be fine, and if there were an emergency, someone has to be near the right landline.
Although I grew up with earlier cellphones and pagers, I got my first cell way later than a lot of highschool kids.
But yes, definitely, If me and my wife couldn’t reach each other during the day, that’d be a ton of anxiety! The world’s too insane these days to not have rapid communication on hand.
I only wish technology evolved as a tool for the user and the people, rather than primarily as content consumption and surveillance devices.
Then it would be more normal to have a setup like we do: We chat on Signal and can send our location voluntarily and it stays between us, without a dozen third parties quietly listening in, analyzing, and selling that information.
I do however, think there would also be a certain serene peace in being unreachable by undesirable contacts but not by loved ones.
For example, it’s dystopian how non-emergency jobs evolved to expect that they can just zip a message to you whenever they feel like, and you’re almost coerced to receive it and respond, and setting boundaries against that can be risky. It brings an unwanted cop or nanny into our personal lives.
Oh we killed local community before that
Suburbs and freeways, man. :(
In 1990 my father negotiated a new contract for himself, with IBM. He’s a computer programmer consultant that can program in 72 languages including Cobol and Lisp.
The one thing he absolutely insisted upon was that he wouldn’t have to carry a pager. He still refuses to carry a cell phone.
The one thing he absolutely insisted upon was that he wouldn’t have to carry a pager. He still refuses to carry a cell phone.
I’ve recently started a new job, and it’s the first I was unable to negotiate no pager, but I was a ‘motivated applicant’.
Wow, does it suck. This is also the LAST job I will have with an expectation of interrupted sleep and never-fucking-ending weekend bullshit. I will frame it as a reliability/change-control question that if after-hours changes are required, then the customer has a broken H.A set-up.
The more people know about tech, the more they want to avoid it.
deleted by creator
in 1990… only .05% (2.8 million) had internet?
In 1990, the World Wide Web wasn’t even available outside of CERN/university usage yet. That didn’t become widely available to the public until 1993, and the first ISP would have only been established a year prior, in 1989.
This, to me, is like saying originally that only Edison had light bulbs in January of 1880.
Internet is the interconnected networks and WWW is the open system of interconnected pages that can be accessed through internet.
Before WWW you had online portals and BBS.
Its is more like saying that cars existed and were used before of the production of the Ford Model T.
We got broadband super early for the UK, I think around late 2000, as my dad was part of the 21CN team at BT.
It was surreal how fast that seemed back then and being an 11 year old kid with that instant access to a whole web that seemed almost exclusively populated by adults if not late teens at that moment.
The smell of leaded gasoline.
The smell of a fine cigar: I quit smoking 14 years ago but I miss that.And I’m 200% sure they were awful.
That 5 minutes of smoking where you don’t do anything but think and enjoy a pieceful smoke… I miss that as well. I quit smoking 4 years ago.
You’re making me feel like I miss it but I haven’t even started yet 💀
Don’t.
Because what he left out is that for those 5 minutes of peaceful enjoyable smoking, you have to endure the rest of the day craving, smelling like dog shit, getting an earful from your supervisor at work because you’re constantly out for a smoke, spending your life’s savings at the tobacconist, and driving 20 miles in the middle of the night to find a pack of smokes in a convenience store in the middle of the night when all the other stores are closed. Not to mention long term health issues of course.
That’s an expensive 5 minutes of enjoyment, trust me on that one.
Also, you get the exact same effect of 5 minutes relaxation, just by stepping outside, concentrating on your breathing and being in the moment.
You don’t. If it was as simple, no one would smoke. If tobacco didn’t give you something extra, your body wouldn’t crave it.
Cigarettes is like forcing yourself not going to the toilet, so that when you do, it’s “so nice”. All the rest of the time you just crave shitting/smoking.
The only thing it’s giving you is a craving until the next smoke. That’s it. Those five minutes of “peace” are just a few moments of relief from withdrawal, and 20 minutes later the cycle starts all over again.
Eh, no, maybe read what nicotine does to your body and go beyond the negatives?
Why would people even start doing it if it didn’t do anything for them?
My body hated it when I started, but peer pressure was too strong. Then the addiction took over.
Or browsing lemmy on your phone.
Totally. You’re stressed out if you can smoke at your destination, so you smoke more at home, then one before you get going, one when you arrive, and one before you know if you can smoke there, one again after you realize that there’s a smoking area.
And while it is scientifically proven, that smoking lowers anxiety and stress, the anxiety and stress the abundance of being able to smoke, or even not smoking for some time, causes, is waaaay worse than not smoking in the first place.
Sitting on the porch with my morning coffee and first smoke of the day during the summer was always a wonderful experience. Doing the same in 30F in the winter, not so much.
leaded gasoline
Few memories trigger a nostalgic response in me than this. Ahhh, I’m in heaven
smell is the sense most strongly linked to memory
Are you sure you’re not just thinking of the smell of carburetor engines? I think I know the smell you’re thinking of and its the exhaust of a vintage carburetor engine.
Was there really a different smell for leaded gasoline?
No, it’s the smell at the pump. Nothing to do with how the engine feeds itself. Yeah, leaded gasoline smelled different. “Sweeter” or something. Maybe it wasn’t the lead, and maybe whatever replaced the lead inside modern gasoline is what smells different, but it definitely isn’t the same.
It’s not like gasoline smelled better, it’s just that I remember smelling that smell when the entire family went on summer holidays and we kids were allowed to stretch our legs while our dad gassed up the car. Good times and good memories!
this might shock you, but I have never smelled leaded gasoline. I’m too young, it got banned before I was born.
what did it smell like?
Windows XP.
A security nightmare, had more unfinished backends than a plexiglass gloryhole… But goddamn could that machine run
People remember Service Pack 2 as the definitive version. Base and Service Pack 1 XP was awful.
Service Pack 3 refined it a bit better.
I had the Student XP cracked version. That baby was smoooth
Windows ME too. Or maybe it was just playing Red Alert 2 on it.
That was my first Windows and it was unstable as hell. Barely had anything installed on that PC and yet it had random blue screens and crap like that. Really scared me as a PC beginner.
Fucking red alert, man. Our computer couldn’t handle it, so it would take 20 minutes to build a single refinery as the individual frames t. i. c. k. e. d. b. y. Meanwhile, our parents’ rule was we had to switch who was using the computer every 30 minutes. That fucking sucked.
Early 90s…I think you mean windows 3.1, bro.
I was an 80’s kid, and we had the best Saturday morning cartoons.
Transformers, GI Joe, Scooby Doo, Thundar the Barbarian, Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, Superfriends, Hurculoids, etc.I loved Saturday morning cartoons! I used to get up at 630 to watch them all. It made me so happy 😊
Connecting to dialup and listening to computers scream at each other over the phone line.
Yes that was bad. And it was always so loud for some reason. But I’d argue better than waiting in silence.
I’d agree. I kind of developed a Pavlovian response of excitement to the noise. Back then though, the Internet was nothing like it is now though. There was a time when we didn’t even have websites, we had stuff like Internet Relay Chat (still around actually), Usenet, and subscription services like America Online. There was Gopher, but it really wasn’t the same as the web.
Funny enough, Usenet is still around too, it’s used as an alternative to BitTorrent for sharing pirated stuff.
So is Gopher
The “you got mail” was also part of that response for me since it indicated a connection.
Good old AOL…
Trusting the government
Ha. Very true. The people that were clued in knew you couldn’t trust the gov’t, but the lack of easy information meant most people had no idea.
1990s internet. Yeah it had to start somewhere and a lot of them were butt-ugly for design. Now 2000s internet up until roughly 2009, that’s the shit.
I always thought whatever generation comes next will have it so good, because the i ternet is fast and well developed and shit. But no, the internet actually peaked in 2000. With all the ads now, it’s barely usable anymore. Does anyone remember when you would go to a website and not immediately click it away because it’s just a clickbait ad filled minefield?
I remember websites having links to other websites that weren’t really affiliated and that being as effective as an searches. You clicked through the internet like it was a file folder system managed by thousands of html authors playing the telephone game.
Ooh! Remember what was the original premise of Google’s PageRank? A site was classified as more valuable if other sites linked to it. …I have no idea exactly what they do nowadays, because clearly search engines have every reason to be suspicious of people linking to other sites.
Haha ahhh pre-enshitified internet was so good. Anonymity through obscurity ig.
Not sure i’m particularly concerned what most search provides consider “suspicious” these days.
All my homies were part of a webring.
There’s a split opinion on when exactly the internet peaked at. You’ll have some people say 2007, others will say 2009 and then there’s those who’ll even say mid-2000s like 2005. My personal opinion is that I think it peaked at 2007. Social Media was fairly at its infancy with Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace all a few years old each by that point. Cell phone technology was still primarily 3G. The Messenger Era was at its peak but was also starting to steadily go downhill.
2009 was actually when the internet started to corrode and it began with Facebook acquiring FriendFeed and that cracked open the idea that corporations could take control of the open web, which they eventually try and do as the years followed.
Walter Jon Williams “This Is Not A Game.” 2009 novel where an American stranded in a South Asian revolution uses “reddit” to connect with a way out. Fun novel totally ruined by the reality.
There’s this seach engine called Wiby that only displays old websites. I’ve used a virtual version of Windows XP to browse random pages through Wiby just to re live the feeling of the web feeling more like a library and less like a night market.
A buddy of mine owned a video game store that I worked at for a bit. The pay was crappy and the hours were unstable and random, but I do miss working there.
As a teen, I worked at a restaurant as a cook. The pay was terrible, the hours were unforgiving, the amount of cuts, bruises, and burns I got deserved hazard pay, and my coworkers were overly dramatic backstabbers. Liked the cooking and getting through a huge rush of customers, loved that when I left for the day my responsibilities and thoughts about work were behind me.
I worked at a fast food joint in the early 90s where often I was the only person running the kitchen during lunch rush because we were understaffed. It was hectic and utterly batshit and the pay was minimum wage, but those times when we were super busy I felt like a goddamned superhero because I would just get into the zone and be the eye of the hurricane managing the chaos with grace and elegance. It felt so damned good during but especially after. It was a shit job and I was glad to move on to something better, but it had its moments.
Right?! I totally understand that. The place I worked at was a diner, and weekend breakfast rush was always insane. Would go through hundreds of eggs in a single shift to the point the grill would actually cool off if we went through them too fast. We’d always get a few stacks out and ready for whoever was on the grill, because that was the one position that you had no time to do anything except attend to what’s in front of you. But if we went to fast, we’d be using eggs that came straight from the fridge. I loved being on egg grill duty because I had only one job, no other responsibilities, people brought things to you, and I was damn good at it.
Yeah, I also see the appeal of just having one job and being able to focus utterly on that. In my case I was running the grill and making the sandwiches too, so I had to switch between them regularly without messing up orders or letting the meat cook too long and with frequent interruptions to run to the opposite end of the store to grab a new box of burgers from the freezer, and it was kind of the combination of doing multiple different things that kind of coalesced into the idea of being the calm amidst the chaos and somehow getting all of it right.
Yeah, I can see this. My analogy was working in a campus dining hall. Everyone else hated working dish room but I loved it. So satisfying to keep up with a lunch rush, feed the machine as fast as people got done eating.
The floor was always covered with slime and water, but once I learned to walk on it, I could walk on anything without slipping for years after. It was noisy and hectic and rushed, but we could skate in with a huge cart of dishes and gave the satisfaction of turning into clean dishes and going back out almost as fast. Speed was paramount so even if you dumped a cart of hundreds of dishes, that’s just teasing, clean it up and work even faster to catch up again. FOOD FIGHTS! Every day someone would start a food fight in the dishroom, but since we were all covered in mess anyway no one cared. I remember it as a fun break from studying, with side effects for great balance and handling slippery floors. I imagine my roommate remembers a lot more stench on me and my clothes than I ever noticed, and I’m sure it would have been a horrible job if it lasted longer or if I had to work more hours.
I worked at a dial-up ISP in the late 1990s and it was the most enjoyable job I’ve ever had (it also helped considerably that we could smoke inside). Sadly it paid really poorly and they weren’t willing to make me full-time because of budgetary concerns, so I was ultimately forced to take a job that paid double and had great benefits but that I hated.
I do miss stores like that. We had so many random stores like video games, comic book stores, record stores and things like that. Even then, they wouldn’t get rich there, but they at least seemed passionate about what they sold and their store was also kind of a hangout spot. Now rent has gone up like crazy and they got replaced by apple stores and other garbage shops.
If I could have any job from my youth it’d be the go kart track.
It was actually a ton of physical work, people were just as shitty back then as they are now, I got paid less than minimum wage ($5/hr in cash compared to $7.something in taxable income so it wasn’t too bad) and the owners were this crazy white-trash couple who screamed and yelled at everyone including customers.
But damn man that job was so much fun. I miss running tournaments and hanging out with the regulars and fixing karts and getting almost unlimited free track time.
Like many others have said, the old, lost internet was really something special. Every website was crude and janky, poorly formatted for some specific resolution that you weren’t using, and both animated clipart and midis were exciting to collect. There were websites dedicated to them. My brother and I used to fill folders on our desktop with sparkling or flaming banners, signs that read “Under Construction” and more. Same with midis. I’ll never forget the first time I discovered Sublime’s Santaria in midi form. It may have been my first favorite song.
I wish I could properly articulate what that all felt like. It was a similar feeling to collecting Pokémon cards as a kid. Everything was just a neat spectacle on the mid-90s internet. Then over time, as everything modernized and monetized, it lost that weird magic and became what it is today. I can’t remember the last time I gave a shit about exploring a website. I no longer come across spooky animated images of a skeleton peering out of murky water and excitedly tuck it away for future viewing pleasure. The entire thing sucks now, but it probably sucked then, too.
🎁🫶
the internet before advertising, before it became a utility, before it became ubiquitous and essential… When it was just that weird thing that nerds toyed around with…
Gods those were the days.
No search engines, Had to find websites on the internet yellow pages, via a web ring, or because someone gave you a slip of paper with an address, that was always written out to include the http://… and visitor counters and guest books… people always filled out the guest book, and it wasnt spam, viruses, or bullshit. actual, legitimate comments from the majority of visitors.
all at the blazing speed of 28.8k
and now I am unbearably depressed and sad.
My alcohol addiction
Especially in our current timeline. My alcoholic tendencies are at an all time high. Sigh.
But damn it feels better than being sober and seeing the idiotic timeline come to pass.
I felt this one in my bones.
It makes your personal timeline worse, unfortunately. I know it’s hard to believe, but sobriety can make life significantly more tolerable. The problems are still very much there, but most of the underlying anxiety is caused by the alcohol, not treated by it.
It’s like cigarettes - it only feels so good because first it made you feel worse. It’s not even just withdrawal, it’s craving. When you believe you have a “make everything better” button, it is really hard not to push it.
If you’re drinking you’re spending time and money that could be used for better purposes.
DM me if you want help.
This stupid timeline doesn’t deserve the benefit of sobriety.
No, you deserve the benefits of sobriety.
Sorry bub, but I do not exist in isolation from reality.
So, you’re saying that the money you could be sending to refugee kids is better spent buying you booze?
don’t listen to this guy, dm me your drinking money, that’ll take care of it.
promise to uh steward that resource ahem responsibly hic
well with my tendencies, i’ve found that alcohol doesn’t help anymore with the current timeline….
there’s just too much awful shit and being drunk is just frustrating because then i’m dumb and still in this stupid timeline….
i used to be able to make problems disappear (for a minute), but now they’re still right there, alcohol just makes me feel more stuck
Reddit.
My first vehicles as an adult in the mid to late 90s. Objectively cheap used jalopies that I bought for a few hundred dollars but were loved because they were mine.
My first car was a 1981 Dodge Aries K-Car. The front bumper got ripped off by a guy running with no headlights while I was delivering pizzas and I literally just threw the bumper on the back seat and continued on with my deliveries, then went to my local pick-a-part and took a replacement off a different one and bolted it on myself. You just couldn’t kill it.
I eventually replaced it with an 1984 Sentra that I bought at auction. I called it the “relationship killer” because the passenger door didn’t open from the outside so there was no way to “open the door for your date to get in first”, and half the time it didn’t go into reverse, so since my dates didn’t know how to drive standard transmissions, they were the one that had to push us out of parking spaces. It honked when turning left for some reason.
My point being, when things were wrong with them, they were cheap enough that you could just go to the local pick-a-part and get replacement parts. If it wasn’t starting for some reason, you could stick a screw driver in the carburetor valve to give it more air. You could “own” and “tinker” on those things in ways that doing so in a new car would terrify us.
Man I had my handful of these end of the line vehicles, loved them. I had one car so beaten up by me and my buddies, when it finally died one day I just left it on the side of the road and never saw it again - couldn’t afford to tow it and fix it and would have cost more than it was worth. I pour out a cold one for you, old ride. That one’s name was Blue Goose.
Those old beaters contain the best memories. Vehicles today are just kind of soulless. (IMO)
A while back I looked down a long street and didn’t see one red car; in fact all the cars were some ‘no color’ neutral shade that wouldn’t offend the next buyer.
My first car was my Dad’s old Chevette: we’d occasionally go on drives with a family of 6 plus dog. 6 people learned to drive a stick on that little car. My brothers and I started learning how to work on cars by installing an eight track player. At one point I replaced the springs and didn’t need a spring compresser. My little brother who got more into fixing cars said it’s great to work on because “it’s the only car I can pull the transmission and hold it one handed while still working on it”.
Even at the time, we all knew it was a crappy car, but we all learned to drive on it, all learned to fix cars on it, and we kept it on the road far longer than it deserved, with far more miles.
Those square pizzas in the school lunchroom.
I raise you the hexagonal “Mexican” pizza’s
I remember choking those babies down. Definitely not my fave, but I made it work.
They don’t sell Totinos Party Pizza in your area?
Biggest false equivalence ever. :D
Come to think of it, I miss school and I miss the military. They were both godawful, but I was young.
You miss consistent structure
Nah. I just miss my youth.
That’s a midlife crisis
You can miss something without being in a crisis lol
I’m way past that point.
Missing your youth first hits you when you start having small health issues you didn’t have before. And then it gradually gets worse. There’s no crisis about it.
There’s a reason it’s called the dirty thirties
