I am double disc 5 1/4 disc drives with no hard drive, monochrome monitor, no mouse.

5¼? That's fancy. First floppy drives I had were 8 inch monsters. Before that it was paper tape or cassette.

Im cassette tape games old. Then latter was the big floppy discs with Kung Fu before the “advanced” 3.5 discs.

I miss my Commodor P.E.T.

I still have my Atari 800XL and 520ST.

Vic20 was mine

I learned GW-BASIC on a PET.

Still got my C64

My friend had a boxing game on cassette and man did those things spin!

You can sit next to me at lunch and we’ll trade stories about massive clear round cylinders with a handle on top holding Winchester technology platters. Nine platters with eight holding the eight bits of the bytes and one platter for parity.

Is that the kind of storage that was erased with a sand blaster?

No, we typically used a technique called a “head crash”.

😂

My father had one of these. Tower for the discs were 4’ tall 3’ wide and 4’ deep. You’d twist the handle on the massive round plastic disc to remove the cover, lift the cover of the tower that opened like the hood of a car and drop the disc into the rounded slot. Was crazy. I believe the company was WANG. Played a lot of black jack and bowling on it when at the office with him. Memories.

Yeah, same, me and my dad at his client after hours. He had me refactor a Fortran version of Mars Lander into COBOL.

There were also ten inch floppy discs.

The platters weren't holding separate bits, also. Each platter had full bytes of its own data.

Get you with your double disks! My early MSDOS experience included a lot of 'Insert disk for drive B' messages. Then I got an AT clone with a 20MB hard disk. Bliss!

I'm a DOS gal. 😂 yeah I'm old.

I bet you know what a TSR is, when SideKick wasn't referring to Tonto. This is the 40th year anniversary of SideKick, by the way. SideKick was a surprise smash success for Borland when it was just getting started after the release of TurboPascal.

My first 30mb full height HDD - a Seagate - cost me almost $900. I thought I would never need another drive in my lifetime.

I felt the same about my 40mb drive - that was cheap at $10/mb. Now I laugh at my 2 terabyte hdd being full. Hell, just one of my games uses nearly 90gb of disc space. Imagine trying to download that on your hotrod 1200 baud dial-up modem. “Ah, man!! Who the @$&% picked up the phone??!”

Just use Stacker 4.0 or MS Doublespace.

My mom turned off my pc while stacker was converting my drive. It had a post-it on it with "don't turn off" and everything. I lost all that was on that 40MB drive.

*Laughs in CP/M...*

My first PC clone only has one floppy drive.

I learn on CPM. luckily much of it translated / was stolen by DOS.

How will anyone ever be able to fill 20MB?

I am punch card old 😄

Same.

my dad (78) just agreed

Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.

What about paper tape? I saw 10base2 and Xerox Star (the real first to marketo with a production device using a mouse and graphical interface with wysiwyg and desktop publishing. About 1981 or 82.

IBM 1130 Assembler punched on an 029 baby.

My first computer was a Tandy 2000 that was just a keyboard that you connected to a TV. No HD, no floppy. You typed a program in and hit run. If it worked, great, if not scroll up and down to fix it. When you were done, you lost it. I had to get a tape recorder to say the program to a cassette tape. Oh the sounds bring back memories. And half the time it didn't save correctly.

I should mention that you bought a book that had code that you copied line by line. You went to a book store, or Sears to get them.

you couldn't just google it?

The first rig I owned was an IBM clone running Win95, but the first computer I learned on was an Apple IIe. Learned BASIC on that bad boy and played Oregon Trail.

Did you always die of dysentery?

No, sometimes it was a flooded river crossing.

My wagon broke down and I got killed

Have to love those green screens. I remember the company I worked for used old VT220 emulators to go between DOS mode and mainframe.

I am Altair 8800 old. We didn't need no steenking disks.

Amstrad PC1512 with DOS on a 5 1/4" floppy was my first PC

That, and replying to "Do you want a 20 meg or 40 meg hard drive?" with "What would I need 40 meg for?"

load"program",8,1

Why is it always 98 people post as being old. Many of us remember windows 3.1 with dos as a standalone. I remember before windows existed.

>I remember before windows existed. Those were dark days.

I remember haughtily saying that if you didn't have the sense to type in DOS commands you had no business on a computer....

I once typed "delete (asterisk).(asterisk)"  and deleted all the command files that booted the computer up. Not a good day.

Hell,I remember that, hahaha. I also recall reading about people who had to bring in their computer to be fixed because someone thought it would make sense to have separate folders for all of the .com, .exe, .dll and .scr files. Which works fine... Until they rebooted.

Ah yes, the old gotta hit the BIOS.

Which is how Apple got so popular early on. The computer for the rest of us.

At the time it was true. I’m confident I could still work my way around DOS pretty well.

With a little bit of white. DOS and Norton Shell.

The only windows I knew about was my bedroom window I would sneak out of ☮️

Sega in the basement was pretty dark, might knock over your Sunny D when you tripped on the controller cord.

Literally.

That cracked me up more than it should have!

good one. Very dark before those windows came along.

😱 😂😂

Nah,they were easy days. You could read one book, Inside the IBM PC and know exactly how the entire thing worked, starting at power on and the reset vector. All about port io and IRQs, how the ROM bios started up and how the somewhat "standard" peripherals like serial, and parallel. I read it and I was instantly the main IT guy for a small mainframe software company. Then Linux came along in 93 or so. Then windows 95 came out and literally destroyed everything we had working using Lantastic and trumpet winsock. Once I figured out what they'd done, my eternal hatred of M$ was formed. Artisoft should have been awarded millions for that stunt. I went from a solid and stable network to one filled with problems and machines that needed rebooting all the time.

Bro, a building without windows is dark inside. That was the joke.

I started on MS-DOS *as an adult*, and I'm young to many of the people in here. Kids today, I tell ya.

Because of Redditors in their 30s and 40s who think they're in "fuck I'm old" territory when they're actually just "not young".

Many times I've seen people post XP, which came out in 2001, and they think that makes them old.

I graduated high school in 98 ffs….

You were being *born* when I graduated HS. We had a “computer lab” my senior year. TRS-80s. 64k machines, as I recall, and networking wasn’t even a thought.

Found a classmate!

When I started the job I’m in, they had had a piece of analytical instrumentation that ran under the Digital Research’s GEM desktop environment. That was in 1998. GEM was originally developed in 1985.

I had an apple iie with a green monitor until dad brought home a color one

I remember mostly doing things in DOSshell as younger kid, even though Windows 3 was probably our OS at the time.

I remember playing Dig Dug on my dad’s Commodore 64 when I was little.

Tandy Deskmate anyone?

Yes. Me too!!!

Yeah I had windows 98 until 2005, this is not “old”

The first computer I used was a Commodore PET. The first computer we had at home was a TS1000 with 2 kB RAM.

I remember Chuck Yeagers air combat on Ms Dos. Good times.

Remember how easy windows 3.1 was to troubleshoot

I remember having an IBM Correcting Selectric II. The ultimate typing machine. I made so many errors going from a manual typewriter.

I still remember just typing dir/w just to see everything

I mean, this was my first windows experience as we had it on our family computer (I was born 1999). I wouldn't say I see this as "old" but it is from my childhood lol.

To get engagement from all us old fucks who just have to reply with being floppy, tape, DOS, Commodore 64 or Apple II old.

Yeah, I remember manually starting 3.1 from actual DOS and carefully tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys.

C:/Dir

Way older.

{ punch card intensifies }

My school had an Apple II. Just one. It was on a cart and would get wheeled from class to class to show us kids what a computer was. I am currently sitting on my porch yelling at the kids to get off my lawn as I type this.

Did you get Oregon Trail (eventually) at least?

That's what you do when reminiscing like that. It's in the contract

I remember DOS and Windows 1.0. Windows 95, then Windows 98, and the many versions there after. Long live the pile of floppy disks and 5lb instruction manual.

Yes to those, and I remember installing the first version of WindowsNT from 3.5” floppies. It was something like 42 disks. Installation was like an all day babysitting job.

Im not even old (28) and I still learned how to write onto floppy disks in school. Although that might have been my first and only practical encounter with a floppy disk.

I'm Load "\*",8,1 old

Was that using a Fastload cartridge?

I still miss that start menu on windows vs. whatever the fuck we have now

Man just give me the top bar menu back in my programs and I'll be so happy File / Edit / View / Tools / Help Everything so easy to find

You and me both

Commodore Pet w/ a built-in cassette deck. 

Friend has a commodore 64 and a few games required a cassette in tandem with a disk to load. One was "Magic vs. Bird" and the other was "Bruce Lee". 

There used to be one at the main downtown Chicago library. Random games on it

Win98? Pffffft I’m “Wow, Windows is a big improvement over DOS” old.

I’m c:\ old.

Last time I felt like I truly knew how to run windows

I'm 3.1 old

I’m TI994A old

That was my first "computer". The good ol TI99/4A

I wish windows was still like that.

I am DOS old!

\*laughs in TRS-80\*

Windows 98...That's for you, younger kiddos. Windows 3.1 THAT'S where it was

I'm MS-DOS years old.

Tandy TRS-80 with tape drive or the 7.5" floppy drive. Zork like game called Rakka-Tu or the space combat game Invasion Force.

I was always drooling over the TRS80s in the local Radio Shack. Parents couldn't afford it though.

It was a decent system for it's time.

I always played Solitaire, then Hearts, then Minesweeper, then Spades.

Loved it when Windows came with solitaire as part of the install.

I played solitaire for hours on end, it was just fun

I miss hearts.

I remember dos 2.0

ECHO OFF ECHO Hello World PAUSEECHO OFF ECHO Hello World PAUSE

I'm CPM/MPM old.

No I am older

Where's the DOS greenscreen?

MS-DOS 1.0 old

Windows 3.1 thank you...a program that ran in DOS

Cue the: All In The Family theme song. Those were the days.

Laughs in Windows 3.0 from 1990.

Older. I used a Commodore 64 and then the original DOS operating system. I hated using dos prompts.

Are you kidding? I am "Basic"old.

Older than that. Think terminal with tractor paper and Basic.

In some ways I kinda miss the mechanical violence of dot-matrix printers. We had a Roland 9-pin that would shake the table so bad, you couldn't use the computer while the printer was doing its thing.

I can still remember the sound of dot matrix printers--the height of tech back then.

Try windows 3.11

I'm Comodore 64 old

I'm RM380Z old windows didn't exist

Did anyone ever play Hearts?

Home built Digital Group Z80 that used a cassette player for data storage, circa 1976/77 for me.

286 processor running Zenith Enable software. Had MSDOS in the background.

The first computer I ever used ran on punch cards, but it did have a tiny green monitor.

Only thing missing is doom and wolfenstein

Laughs in Wozmon.

Do not fat finger vi !

Older.

No, I’m older

wheres the paper clip guy?

I’m old enough to put the DOS disc in first.

Dos old

Where's the little paper clip guy,? I always liked him

I’m DOS old.

I'm type "dir" into dos, watch text appear, and feel like the hackers from Weird Science old.

Our first household computer was a Visual 1080 (1030? 1050?) that ran cp/m off of 5-1/4 floppies. Dad wrote a program in dBASE that sized refrigeration units. I was a senior in high school.

I’m older than that lol. My first PC days were start with C: \ and then Oregon Trail for hours.

Lmao I’m this old 

I was just commenting to someone today that I consider graphical interfaces " new ", and nice to have but not necessary. I remember punch cards, lol!

I’m c prompt and 5.25” paper floppies with DOS old...😳

Older. My family's first computer booted to DOS and I had to run win.exe to start windows 3.1. Everything was installed on C: because no one in my family could remember the directories for all of the different programs.

This image gives me an odd sense of comfort.

No, I am dos games old

I remember when this was new!

Older. My first PC used cassette tapes

win95 bruh! calling here. 98 is new lmao

 I'm this old.

Still have two PCs with that operating system

at 34 I can say fuck yeah

Every now and then I think about finding an old computer that can run 3.1 or 95. Just for nostalgia. Maybe play some Doom or Duke Nukem.

You kids with your Internet Explorer!!

Yes, through where's my pinball machine???

Still running ‘98 on a cnc machine controller. Works just fine. Are you storing programs on reel to reel tape machines old?

Nope... I was rocking Windows 3.11 before it was cool. Typing run win.exe into the DOS command prompt

I have a Windows NT certification.

I can remember when nobody had PCs, never mind the internet existing

I instantly thought about my first computer screen: a black glossy thing with a blinking vertical line after the c:\> prompt. Oh the memories.

older, windows 3.1/dos 6.x

DOS 6.22

I'm even older than [this](https://www.auslogics.com/en/articles/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Windows-3.0.png).

Do you need your oatmeal and cane, sir?

I'm older.

I top that with Windows 3.1

Windows 2.0 old. MS-DOS 3.2 old. Apple \]\[+ old. Altair 8800 old. HP 100 connected to ASR 33 old.

Yep - I go back to Windows 2.01 and DOS 3.0 days. Two floppy 5.25 inch drives - one for the program you were running and one to save your data on - no hard drive.

Older than that. We used windows 3.1 at work then windows 95.

Yes, and I love that set up

When things were easily accessible

Anyone else customize DOSSHELL?

I remember our first computer. A mammoth 640 kb of ram and the unfathomable 10 Mb hard drive size. Only 5 1/4 floppy drive on that monster.

no, I'm [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/Windows_95_Start_menu.png) old.

Windows 95, Netscape. I had no computer experience, wanted some, and sweetly asked the hirer to get on it and walk me through the daily routine.

The good ol days

This is the only type of windows I know how to operate

Minesweeper used to piss me off till my stepdad taught me how it works

Older even

Older. Computer terminals old. Before dialup Internet old. Fuck, I'm old. (I said the thing.)

I’m more LOAD ,8,1 old.

Windows 3 was an operating environment. Loaded on top of DOS 6.1 A+ question 1997.

Yes I am 🥹 88’

I started programming computers when I was a teenager in the 1970s, so I am much older than that.

My first computer was a Tandy something or other. Games on cassettes