Like the title says, thought it would be a funny/interesting topic. I’ll go first:
I remember when I was very very young and super newb in computers my childhood friend(who lived in the building just next to mine) brought his pc over to my place(on old Compaq thing that was still easier to transport then whatever crappy pc I had) so we could link them together through the printer port with a regular printer cable in order to play the Fifa game of the time in multiplayer.
Our method turned out to be so ghetto that it didn’t even work for most of the game(aka having a regular match against each other) but however many bits/s that connection ouputed was enough to “multi-play” the part of the game where it was just 2 characters on the screen and one would just try to score goals into the gate the other was defending!
And we had great fun with even just that, over and over and over again, hahahaha…
Hehe, nice, but no offence @UncleSpellbinder you missed a word in the title there, I said “old school” tech stories.
There I even added a - to be gramnatically correct according to the good old Cambridge dictionary, if anyone cares.
In the first days, before peripheral devices became common, we bought Commodore 64 magazines which had games in them. We would spend all day entering hexadecimal numbers into an environment. When we found all the mistyped entries (there was a checksumming procedure) and fixed them, we could run our entered program (usually several pages of packed hexadecimal with several columns on each page). Then we could play our game for a few hours, before turning the pc off and losing all our hours of work.
So very sad looking backwards…
Woooa wooa, wait a second, when you say “mistyped” I hope you mean the mistakes you guys made entering in the programs, right?
Cause I knew that was a thing, but I would have tought/hoped the magazines at least made super sure there were no misprints(I guess would be the correct word) on those parts, otherwise…
One of my favourite games in the 1980s was Barbarian: The ultimate warrior. It’s cover featured Wolf from gladiators in a lion cloth and glamour model Maria Whittaker in a chain mail bikini on the cover and in the advertising. This caused the Sun, a newspaper that regularly featured Maria Whittaker topless on page three to complain about the salaciousness of the marketing in a grandiose act of hypocrisy.
The games best move, the flying neck chop, if timed right allowed you to chop the head of your opponent with a spurt of blood but you could take a lot of damage if you timed it wrong. When one of the fighters was dead, a goblin wandered out and dragged the body off-screen. If one of you was beheaded, the goblin would punt the head off screen. This caused the game to be banned in Germany.
Well, this is both old-school tech story and old school tech story.
Back when I was in high-school equivalent we had these computer-science -classes where we were taught general computer skills (formatting diskettes, creating e-mail etc.). Computers were relatively old and some had these ATX power-supplies.
As you may guess not everyone was attending these classes because they wanted to learn computer-skills, instead they got there to get play games on LAN (Quake 2). This was of course after classes which they did quite negligently, but good enough to get through.
So after the assingments there was free time to play games and these guys were first to boot them up. Classes tend to end and so when teacher let us go, it was time to shutdown computers.
Oh boy.
Well these brainiacs had developed a fast way to shutdown computer; they simply switched power of from power supply. This of course was not a smart move considering life-span of poor desktops but it gets worse.
You see, sometimes when they were in a hurry they just smashed the backside of computer and were more than once able to hit that red thingy which as you probably know is big no no.
So more than once there were dead computers after the class and story doesn’t tell did these guys ever got to pay their damages.
1980 - Chatting up a girl on the Bsc Computer studies course to get her to do my programming homework (I studied Accountancy and the computer’s didn’t have screens then).
I once worked with punch cards. It was an old technique when i did, but it was still around in those days.
I also remember a radio programme which would transmit computer programmes over the air. I would place my recorder before the loudspeaker, press record at the right time, record the bleeps and squeaks, then put the cassette in my computer (commodore PET2001) en type ‘run’ to start the program.
That was state of the art, in those days…
Worked for a local PC tech company back in the mid 80s. I was building one of our first Windows NT systems when I spilled a full Pepsi into the open case (can’t remember if the system was running or not). I took the case outside, sprayed it down with water, and let it dry.
The next day I finished the build…and it actually worked! Always wondered who ended up buying that PC…
Even earlier that that, my high-school buddies and I were obsessed with the new Apple I. We used to pillage the local software store, using Locksmith to crack the floppy disk copy protection. All except for Gutenberg (first office software I ever tried).
