• lugal@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    There was a program call “Nero burning ROM”. A pun I understood much later

  • GaMEChld@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    You make it sound like all older people knew. I work in IT and most users, regardless of age, do not know anything about computers. They don’t know how to navigate file systems, they don’t know where they saved anything, they don’t even know what the recycle bin is sometimes.

    I once had a user plug a power strip into itself and then didn’t understand why there was no power.

    Hell, they don’t even know how to read. I lost track of how many times I had this conversation:

    “There’s an error message on my screen.”

    “What does it say?”

    “I don’t know.”

    • AccountMaker@slrpnk.net
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      11 months ago

      “There’s an error message on my screen.”

      “What does it say?”

      “I don’t know.”

      This was painful to read. I’m a developer and have colleagues who can’t read. “It failed! It says that I need to clear all changes before I can branch, how can I fix this?” “Well clear the changes and then branch”. It’s just learnes helplessness, people want to sit back and let someone else do the thinking.

      • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an error message that just says “an error has occurred” and you’re left to figure out what error.

        For example, I have a smart air purifier that absolutely refuses to connect to my WiFi for some reason. You have to do the stupid ad-hoc/direct connection from your phone’s app to the device, then the device connects to WiFi. I follow all the steps on the app, it fails and then just says " an error has occurred, please try again.", it worked fine on my parents WiFi though!

        I have a Canon printer that is WiFi enabled (also has USB) and it’s the same thing. I tried using their damn app on Android, OS X, Linux, and Windows and it would just be like “An error has occurred”.

        • RichieAdler 🇦🇷@lemmy.myserv.one
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          11 months ago

          I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an error message that just says “an error has occurred” and you’re left to figure out what error.

          If the error message is that stupid, I’m 100% with you. I suspect that’s the result of a direct instruction to developers to dumb down the messages to avoid creating distress in users, which is idiotic.

          However, final users in a corporate environment should be taught that if they get a message with a lot of information, and they don’t understand that information, it’s not for them, and they need to leave it alone or take precise notes of what the message says, so somebody from IT who does understand it can act on it. But most users act like the error message is radioactive or they’re participating in a competition of who can dismiss the message faster: when support asks about the error, they say hey don’t know because they have dismissed it.

          • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Almost every finished product I’ve seen has a generic error message like that which makes it extremely frustrating when you’re technical and actually want to attempt to fix the problem. I had the same issue with a WiFi connected Canon printer. As a dev myself, I know how difficult it can be to write a useful error message for every edge case, but it’s not that difficult to be a bit helpful lol

            Regarding users hatred of error messages: when I worked in my University’s computer lab about 15 years ago a student complained that she couldn’t download a file. I went with her to see what the issue was and had her show me what she was doing. She’d attempt to download the file, quickly dismiss a pop-up, and then angrily say “see?! It’s not working!!”. I told her to do it again, but not dismiss the pop-up so quickly so I could see what it said. Of course, it was asking for permission to save the file to the HDD and she kept clicking “no” 🤦‍♂️

            • GaMEChld@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              I told her to do it again, but not dismiss the pop-up so quickly so I could see what it said.

              I shit you not, I’ve had a user do worse.

              I’ve done the same exact scenario as you with one difference. I told her the same thing you did. And then. She closed the message again. While I was pointing at it, and asking her to read it out loud.

              I.

              Pointed. At the screen. And said read this out loud.

              She moved her mouse to my finger.

              And closed the message.

              I.

              Can’t.

              • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Hahaha for some people it’s just a habit I guess.

                Or for some, like my mom, it’s learned helplessness. She always misplaces her phone and keys (not because of dementia or something like that, just lack of attention) so my brother bought her one the Bluetooth tracking tags (air tags, but for Android). Since I work in tech, I’m always the one to set everything up. She said “Set it up for me, I don’t wanna know how to use it…” as if it required zero user input after I had set it up 🤦‍♂️ I just looked at her and said "… if you lose you keys and need to track them down, how do you expect to find them?!”

                • RichieAdler 🇦🇷@lemmy.myserv.one
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                  11 months ago

                  She said “Set it up for me, I don’t wanna know how to use it…”

                  The only proper answer to this is Then I won’t do it. We’re done. Don’t ask me again.

              • RichieAdler 🇦🇷@lemmy.myserv.one
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                11 months ago

                In that case I think the only thing to do is something like this.

                I asked you to read the message out loud to me.

                Instead of following my instructions, you closed the message.

                If you want me to help you with this issue, I’ll need that you explain to me why you did that instead of following my instructions. I won’t move forward until you do. I’ll wait.

                • GaMEChld@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  Oh I did. Almost verbatim. Basically the excuse was they became flustered and misunderstood. Which is understandable, but still, damn… How do you pretend to be that helpless and earn a degree that qualifies you to save lives? Basic problem solving involves at least the attempt at a solution. Mindlessly repeating the task that is failing without changing any variables is bad scientific method, which we learned in like 6th grade.

          • GaMEChld@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            However, final users in a corporate environment should be taught that if they get a message with a lot of information, and they don’t understand that information, it’s not for them,

            THIS! THIS SO MUCH! And that’s why I took over training all new employees. I teach them how to think. And every time I’ve fixed a problem, I explain to users what happened. As a result, my overall number of tickets has decreased and my users are now better equipped to solve their own issues.

        • joejoe87577@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Quck note on that, many smart devices have trouble with wifi if the 2,4 ghz and 5 ghz have the same name. Rename the one of the two and it mostly works.

          • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Yep, thanks. I’ve split the AP into 2.4 and 5 GHz because a lot of devices will tell you that outright tell you that(it’s ridiculous that they don’t put 5 GHz radios in them instead of leaving it up to the consumer. My $2500 LG OLED TV from 2018 has a 10/100 NIC on it, they couldn’t even be bothered to put a 1g NIC in it!)

            Still didn’t help. I’m using Unifiy APs and it’s something about them the devices hate 🤷‍♂️

            • GaMEChld@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              I literally just had a conversation with an IT friend who knows more networking than me (I’m more of a generalist), and he basically told me that Wifi is basically impossible to make as bulletproof as wired. I got so fed up with wifi periodically just crapping out.

              I’m like, "so… It’s like printers all over again? Nobody can make one that just is bulletproof? "

              He’s like… “Well, nothings as bad as printers, let’s not go crazy here. But yeah, you can’t make wireless as reliable as wired.”

              • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Absolutely, you can’t shield a wireless connection from interference like you can with a wired connection, that’s why I prefer to use them, but everything wants to be WiFi only now!

    • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I work in IT, at my second full-time job at a small financial firm in Manhattan I would get at least 2-4 tickets a day that said “my computer doesn’t work, please take a look” and 90% of the time it was one of two issues:

      • The tower was off but the monitors were on

      • The tower was on but the monitors were off

      • Occasionally it was the Display Port to HDMI dongle became dislodged or bent which stopped the PC from POSTing (of course I didn’t blame them for this one)

      These people were in their 40s and didn’t know how to press a fucking power button even though they had been using the same computer for years. Some would even say “I know the monitors are on because I see the yellow lights on it, but when I move the mouse nothing happens!”. After about a month of this I would just say “Hi”, press the power button, and then walk away shaking my head. This was in like 2016.


      My dad was an electrician by trade and he would always tell me a story about how he was working at a nuclear power plant that was being built in the early 90s and the engineers didn’t know how to turn on the PCs they worked on every day and he would have to show them.

      • Asafum@feddit.nl
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        11 months ago

        Not PC related, but I was a service technician for a company that sold ice cream machines and I had this one call that I’ll never forget… This woman has a store built for her, we just came come to train her on how to use the machines (the important bit for this being a switch: day mode and night mode.) When you leave for the day you switch to night mode and when you come back you set it to day mode so it freezes. She calls us saying all the ice cream is too soft and almost liquid. She never switched from night to day… Like it’s one step. Only one step. You come in and flip the switch from night to day lol

        I felt terrible about having to charge her for it but I had no control over that.

    • Emerald@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      They don’t know how to navigate file systems

      that’s a thing we see with gen z especially nowadays, because of the advent of tag-based file management in iOS.

      • RGB3x3@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        tag-based file management in iOS.

        Could you clarify what this means? I’ve never used an iPhone, so I’m not familiar with how they handle files.

        Do they not use folders?

        • Smoogs@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          It sounds similar to what google does where it uses a tag for categorizing instead of physical movement of a file into a folder system. Handy for exclusive use if everything exists for one purpose on the one os that uses it. An absolute pain in the ass when you need to conveniently back stuff up or require compatibility.

        • powermaker450@discuss.tchncs.de
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          11 months ago

          file management up until very recently was very basic and even now is very limited. there is no access to any files that apps use besides downloads from Chrome and whatnot.

          there isn’t really a downloads folder per se, only a downloads section. besides that, files can be tagged to help find them and folders are just something deemed unnecessary. everything is just saved into a “space”. there is no implication that there is a root directory of sorts, only a space where files are and you let the phone search for it.

          when you save pictures from a website, there is an option to save as image, but in the photo gallery, there is an option to save it into the files app, implying that files and photos are different things. you can’t access photos from the files app, you HAVE to access them from the photos app. this one really frustrates me.

          I have only used iOS in the days where the iPhone 6S was relavant and never went back, so do correct me if anything I said was wrong.

        • Emerald@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          They do use folders but I haven’t known anyone except older people to really utilize them. Most people just search for them. It’s flash memory and relatively few files so searching is faster then clicking through folders.

        • GaMEChld@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Well, my computer knowledge extends back to some form of MS-DOS when I was 4 years old. Back then, you either knew how to operate a command line interface or you didn’t know how to actually use a computer to do anything on your own.

          Now the entire world uses computers for almost every single job. And yet, we live in a time where people are not proficient with the tools they are using to live and work.

          If your mechanic said, “I’m not much of a wrench person” you’d take your car elsewhere.

          If your typical office worker said, “I’m not much of a computer person” , 90% of their colleagues would nod, grin, and say “I know right! Computers are so dumb! So hard to use!”

    • Smoogs@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I’m glad to hear you say ‘regardless of age’ as it really isn’t a generation thing. I’ve met people younger than myself and I’ve had to help them navigate some basic computer stuff. it doesn’t make it easier when they get very frustrated and transfer all their anger of computers at me like I alone have created computers everywhere to annoy everyone. “WHY ARE THESE LIKE THIS.??”

      It feels like we just got past teaching the population that gender doesn’t matter when it comes to using computers and it’s like we have to go through all of it again to teach the population age doesn’t matter either.

      You will find people of your own generation who really hate technology. they exist everywhere and you really see it when you’re in a support role. Maybe you didn’t meet them today but it doesn’t mean they aren’t out there bugging the heck out of someone else right now what with refusing to read some super basic error message or not remembering their own password.

      • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Back in the early 2010s I was helping a girl at my University’s computer lab that I worked at that didn’t know how to print from Microsoft Office. Granted it was like a year or so after they hid everything behind that stupid button in the upper right hand corner, but still…

      • Kittenstix@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Hell, i run Linux on everything and I hate technology, there are just so many helpful guides and everything is so easy to fix, until it isn’t…

        So funny story I recently remembed a situation in my early years of running Ubuntu 8.04(I miss the old gnome days), I spent MONTHS trying to get an ir remote to do various things on the computer(play/pause vlc, run apt-get, whatever random shit I thought of at the time) only for the whole thing to never pan out, the recent realization that I had tried to do such a useless thing(it was a laptop) and spent too many night frustrated in tears made me laugh.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      “There’s an error message on my screen.”

      “What does it say?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “I just clicked it off. But I need this to work, I’m late on my project. Can’t you just fix it without asking me all this technical stuff?”

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      You’re in the same boat I am. I’m doing IT support and one user couldn’t navigate their file system to save their life. They almost exclusively used “file open” dialogs to get to their files. They seemed to have zero understanding that using word’s open file dialog to open a PDF file with Adobe, was strange.

      It broke my brain for a minute watching it all unfold. So much so that I didn’t even try to correct their methods. I was just like, “okay”, and moved on.

      It’s not like the person was new, or a temp worker or anything. They were middle aged, and had used that exact system for years in this manner, and saw nothing wrong with how they did things… Look, if it gets the job done, okay, and that’s probably the main reason I shut up about it, but the way they were doing it was so backwards and slow… They definitely were not stupid, they at least had some level of university and they were working in a legal field. They just did not “get” that there’s a much better way to accomplish the tasks they were doing and had no interest in figuring it out more than they already had.

      Definitely one of the more painful moments of my career, but certainly not the only demonstration of how people are willfully ignorant when it comes to computers and technology.

      I hate hearing “I don’t know computers” or “I’m not very good with technology” … You use it every day. There’s some fundamental that you should have picked up by now. Being “bad” with technology is not an excuse. An infant is bad at walking, then they learn and figure it out, which is more than I can say about you Janice.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      11 months ago

      We have an error message in our software. Basically telling the user that the device they’re connecting to isn’t there.

      Over time, I can see all the additions that the developer has been told to make. Check the USB cable, check the power cable, make sure the device itself hasn’t got an error message on it, to restart it, etc.

      Not one of these additions has reduced the number of support calls, because nobody reads anything. And in fact adding more lines to the message probably makes it even less likely they will do so.

  • chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Look at all these rich people in the comments with their car stereos that could play CD-RW. Some of us were lucky to have one that would play CD-R 80% of the time, and it was completely brand agnostic.

      • M500@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        MP3 cds blew my mind and that’s what made me understand the difference between analog and digital in regard to files and music.

        How can there be 100 songs on some cds and only 12 on others? Well that’s why.

    • Emerald@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I got a Sony CDP once that wouldn’t play burned CDs. Not sure if it was a hardware issue with that one CDP, or if it affected the model itself. I returned it and got a different one and it works with burned CDs. To this day it’s a mystery

      • Fermion@feddit.nl
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        11 months ago

        Sony did a lot to develop drm for disc’s. I bet not playing burned disc’s was an intentional design decision.

    • smeg@feddit.uk
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      11 months ago

      Alright Scrooge McDuck driving your Rolls-Royce with a CD player, any car I could afford to drive still had a tape deck even by the time I had a phone to plug into it via an adapter!

    • psud@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Back then we could pull the factory radio out, and replace it with a new one. And it was easy.

      I duplicated CDs for a while for the car, then bought a new car stereo that could play MP3s and condensed my collection onto 3 discs. I left the discs in the car when I sold it

      • chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I never had the luxury of an easy replacement, I always had to deal with jank mounts that had to be cut to fit the car and stereo, and then there was the mess of wires to hook up. That’s what I get for trying to jam 1990s technology in to 70s and 80s cars…

        • psud@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Mine were a corolla and a commodore. The first had a standard rectangular 1 unit space; the second had a standard 2 unit space

          It made it super easy. I wish all followed that standard. Stock audio sucked

    • clearleaf@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I only ever made like 2 CDs that worked in my life. And I NEVER burned a DVD that worked.

    • Crashumbc@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      They went that expensive at least by 2000, I put one in my 99’ Neon for like 200$. It actually could play MP3 discs! I had one disc with a shit load of songs that was my default disc in the player.

  • sparr@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    To be fair, CD/DVD burning peaked and declined extremely quickly in comparison to most other media technology. We went from nobody having a CD burner to most people ditching DVDs for blu ray and/or streaming in what, 15 years?

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      The time between CD burners being uncommon nerd shit, and the iPod becoming ubiquitous, was a single digit number of years. I had a fairly early CD mp3 player (it could play red book audio discs and data discs with mp3s on them) plus I had a CD player in my truck, so I actually did burn a few discs in my day, but a lot of people went straight from buying albums on disc or tape to dragging and dropping files onto a hard drive or flash based mp3 player.

    • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      I had a fancy CD/DVD burner in my first laptop circa 2015 and used it very very sparingly. It also had a fancy feature where you could buy special disks that the burner could burn a cover imagine onto. It was crap.

    • Jarix@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The IPod killed CDs i think is pretty established

      There were other attempts, like the Diamond Rio

      But because of iTunes, the ipod made actually getting songs onto your device as easy as clicking a button and apple got into bed with the recording industry so they didnt get shut down hard like everyone else that came before them and you didnt have to be labelled a dirty pirate.

      mp3s were quite disruptive and contentious ahh Napster

        • Jarix@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          What mp3 player had any success compared to the ipod?!

          In 1998, the first portable solid-state digital audio player MPMan, developed by SaeHan Information Systems, which is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, was released and the Rio PMP300 was sold afterward in 1998, despite legal suppression efforts by the RIAA.

          There really werent any clear mp3 players standouts available to the public because of letigious RIAA

          But there were many portable cd players that could play mp3 discs when the ipod came out.

          Sonys minidisc player was cool, but an absolute flop from success standpoint, we wanted reusable media, burning cds was often a frustrating process.

          Ill say it again the RIAA was absolutely (litigiously) against any device they couldnt get their fingers into and apple was happy to work out a deal with them with itunes. The next best thing was napster from a user standpoint(though scourexchange was better imo but lasted about a minute)

          Cds were the main way artists released music because rhe RIAA didnt support mp3 anywhere they didnt have to, it took years for people to really switch over to itunes, but they did and streaming took over from there eventually

          Not sure why im getting downvotes, but please correct anything you disagree with

          • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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            11 months ago

            What mp3 player had any success compared to the ipod?!

            A whole 128MB of storage.

          • Cryan24@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            It wasn’t 1 company that dominated ,many had mp3 players out. Some of the bigger name brand ones would have been the likes of Sony (after they gave up on the mini disk) and Creative, but there were many others in the early 2000’s.

            • Jarix@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              I fully accept that there were others, but they were not superfluous(not sure if that is the correct word to use but it feels right)

              I guess maybe the point was trying to make is that for portable music the cd player was hands down still the best thing until the ipod took over.

              Much like the (and credit to Sony here) walkman before it, the discman is still the device that people used for digital music, specifically mp3s, until the ipod came out.

              So yeah im saying it took 1 company, apple in this case, to kill the cd. Not because other people werent in the fight, but because of itunes and apples ease of use development

    • Kit Sorens@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 months ago

      I’ll never forget the chant:

      “See-Dee Rahm, See-Dee Aye, See-Dee Are Plus, See-Dee Are Minus, Are Double-yew.”

        • ɔiƚoxɘup@infosec.pub
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          11 months ago

          And if you got a real good one, you’ll have a couple of extra vrrrrmmmmmmmms after that, if the disk was well balanced enough

  • stoly@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    In fairness to this post, I’m old enough to have asked this same question on the other end lol.

    • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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      11 months ago

      I legit never reused a CD in my life. With how cheap CD-R was, I’d just buy a spindle and burner go brrrrrrrr.

      • 0110010001100010@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Yeah I didn’t either, seemed silly. Re-writing was so much slower too than just straight burning on a CD-R. I still have a bunch in my basement that I may never use up from my last purchase probably nearly a decade ago, lol. I have DVD-R’s down there too that I KNOW will never see the light of day, should probably find a new home for them.

        • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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          11 months ago

          They’re still useful, someone local may want them for a free pickup. I still keep a spindle of both, for when I’m restoring older laptops and PCs. For drivers and software.

          • 0110010001100010@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            I should drop them for free somewhere probably and see if someone does. When working with computers I just keep a stash of cheap flash drives around. Much easier than burning a CD anyways since new laptops don’t usually have CD drives anymore (mine doesn’t though I have a USB one around here somewhere).

          • st3ph3n@midwest.social
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            11 months ago

            Yep, I rebuilt an old Pentium III laptop a few weeks ago. The only way to get data onto it was via the 24x CD-ROM drive it has, or by taking the hard drive out of it and mounting it in another computer. I had some CD-Rs and a USB cd burner laying around, so I dusted it off and burned a copy of Windows 98 SE and used it to install the OS on that machine.

      • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Rewritable DVDs, though? Burn a movie you didn’t care about, watch it, know you never want to see it again, burn another movie as if the previous abomination had ever burdened your media…

        The little DVD burner <> DVD player pipeline these youths know of not.

      • aulin@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Oh, I wanted one of those so badly! Digital, yet with an analog “cassette-y” feel, just like the minidisc.

        • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          It must be the plastic housing that did it. I once saw a CD drive which needed the CDs to be in a plastic shell as well - it looked something like a normal CD case but with a floppy-like sliding cover on the top. Immediately made CDs feel 5x more cool

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    11 months ago

    We took a magnifying glass and very carefully burned in the 0s and 1s by hand. /s

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    11 months ago

    When I was a kid I had two radios.

    One with a cassette player in it that had a mic built in for recording. I found it in the trash.

    The other was a small FM/AM alarm clock that was dangerously hot at all times and had a noise as it was an analog clock with the little cards that flipped and the such. My opa gave it to me when he said it got too hot for his liking.

    It was not long before I had figured out that if I played the radio really loud on the clock, the cassette mic would record the songs onto whatever tape you had. Be it blank, or with tape over the security gaps on the top, any tape will do.

    Hardest part was the timing to start and stop the tape. And making sure you were in as close to total silence as possible as the mic picked everything up.

    Even if the hot buzz of the alarm clock motor fighting to flip into the next set of minutes would make it on the tape, the recording/welfare piracy continued. It was the sneezing/siblings walking in/parents making ugly sounds that were the worst as you’d have to stop the tape, rewind to the part of the tape you were using, and wait for the radio station to play the song again, so you might be able to try and tape it again.

    • Mango@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I had one radio that did all of this but if I didn’t hold a fake adapter into the headphone port at exactly the right angle, nothing worked. I put so much effort into being very still to record songs.

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      11 months ago

      I’m sure many of us did that. I would use a plug in microphone and put it up to the TV to record cartoon theme songs. I wish i still had that tape.

    • ɔiƚoxɘup@infosec.pub
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      11 months ago

      I can hear that clock! Omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm

      I had one till the flippers broke.

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    11 months ago

    The back half of millennials might not have burned CDs either.

    The iPod came out in 2001, my first car I played music with a cassette-tape to aux converter and a first or second Gen iPod, my second through a USB stick plugged into an aftermarket deck I bought from Walmart. Music downloaded from Limewire.

    • MirthfulAlembic@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The cassette to aux converter felt like black magic back then. I left mine in so long that it made a creaking and snapping sound when I finally took it out when getting rid of the car.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I went minidisc of iPod, then a Zune.

      I still think both were the best decisions of the time, but apparently no one else did.

      But I think it was only like 4-5 minidiscs to get the same capacity as the first iPods.

      Removable storage will always be a plus

    • Kit Sorens@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 months ago

      '95 here. I not only burned disks, but we had one of them fancy schmancy monochrome label burner disk drives. So many MS Word font effects were burned that I’m sure I lost 20 IQ points from the plastic fumes.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I’m barely a millennial and I burned a few CDs. But yeah it was only a few and before I got a tape to aux connector for my car

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      11 months ago

      I had a 64 MB Samsung Yepp mp3 player super early. Didn’t stop me from burning CDs at all, considering the player could only store about one CD anyway.

    • Sombyr@lemmy.zip
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      11 months ago

      Not sure whether I’m gen Z or millennial, but I definitely burned a lot of CDs. And successfully burned about 20% of them. If even the floor creaked the CD would skip and basically be destroyed.

      I may not be the average experience for somebody my age though, considering when I was like 8 I remember using a tape recorder to record my favorite songs from the radio onto a cassette.

      • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Millennial:

        Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years, with the generation typically being defined as people born from 1981 to 1996.

        Gen Z:

        ~1995~2013

        Researchers and popular media use the mid-to-late 1990s as starting birth years and the early 2010s as ending birth years.

        Now don’t forget it, culture wars are important!

        • Sombyr@lemmy.zip
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          11 months ago

          I was born in 98, it’s just that some people are insistent millennial ends at the year 2000, while others insist on 1996.

          I’ve also heard whether or not you remember 9/11 as the benchmark, and I do, but only barely because I didn’t know what was actually happening.

          There’s also some who say it’s whether or not you remember the turn of the millennium, which I don’t because I was 2.

          The generation borders are just so fuzzy that I’m often tempted to just go with “zillennial,” but for some reason people think that’s offensive because it “alienates gen Z” or something.

      • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        Same lmao. '02 here. I was handed the family tape player and I once used it to record a song from a YouTube video because I couldn’t make the computer record itself. I was 12.

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      11 months ago

      I remember once Limewire became popular it was almost a magic trick to get a clean install of it. Most people I knew had a copy that came with all the toolbars and malware.

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    11 months ago

    I just saw a post on Reddit two days ago that said “During the 80s, did kids really just go outside and run wild for hours or is that just in the movies/TV?” and the same feeling hit haha

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    11 months ago

    I remember many years ago when I was going through a box of my burned CDs and games and realized I could just download any of them whenever I wanted. Plus my computer didn’t even have a CD/DVD drive any more. End of an era.

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      11 months ago

      I’ve got a nearly 20 year old cdrom drive that just keeps getting transfered from build to build because you never know. I don’t think I’ve opened in like 3 years… I’m gonna see if it still does real quick.

      Ok it does but there was a driver cd for a motherboard I don’t own anymore in it.

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      11 months ago

      I keep a Blu ray/DVD burner in a portable enclosure stored away just in case I want to play some of my older games. (I have a smallish retro game collection at this point in a CD rack in my bookshelf, as well as a few boxes copies. if anything it’s cool to look at)

      Or I need to burn something on the off chance I need to get data off of a really old computer that my grandparents own or something.

      I even keep a cd album of turned recovery disk’s for various operating systems. I have DVDs for reinstalling windows XP, Vista, 7, 8.1 and 10, as well as a bunch of Linux live DVDs/CDs just in case. I always try the USB options first, but if they don’t work I can always fall back on the CD/DVD. The portable drive guarantees I can use it even on a PC that doesn’t have a drive (provided it’s not too old - I don’t own floppys because I don’t have a FD drive)