Who did this 😂😂😂

"it's now safe to turn off your computer"
That's how old I am
....
....
Fuck
- And the power switch was like KA-JUNK when you pushed it, because it was a big ol' switch that actually physically connected and disconnected the power.
  "It's now safe to turn off your computer" went away after we moved to software power control, where the operating system could signal the power supply to turn off.
  
  I had my computer plugged into a power bar and we'd turn off the power bar to turn off the computer so that we wouldn't wear out the switch on the computer.
  People actually thought you'd have a computer long enough to wear out its power switch.
  
  I knew far, far too many people in HS that just hit the power button without actually shutting it down.
- I had to type "/win" to boot up Windows
  
  Into what did you type that? Wouldn't something already have to have booted first in order to type it?
- The one I remember best was having to use the DOS 'park' command before you shut down the PC. I guess I am that old.
  
  Huh, never ever seen that. We always used the rule "you can shutdown the computer when you can see the C:.
  What does park do? Put the HDD arm into a parked position? Never needed that for ours, but we also had a blazingly fast 486 with a massive 250 MB hdd.
  
  I'm right there with ya. Don't forget to make sure you set the interleaving correctly on your Winchester drive!
  
  Yup. Thankfully that “feature” went away real quick and it became automatic.
- I feel you man. Very nostalgic!
- Is that Windows 95?
  
  Any Windows machine that does not support ACPI or has it disabled. IIRC Windows has required ACPI since Vista.
  
  95/98 and ME/XP to a far lesser extent but it was 98 for me lol
- I had a friend who edited the .jpeg or whatever in the shutdown sequence to say “it is NOT safe to shut off your computer” and waited for his family to freak out.
- The ole AT power supply standard. Nice.

Win7 isn't that old.
- People born when Windows 7 was released can get a driver's license in many parts of the world
  
  Fuck I'm old.
  
  you take that back

- I was going to say!
  The OP was using the fancy new icons...
- Entertainment packs 1-4. Chips Challenge, SkiFree, Rodent's Revenge
  
  Oh man, I found chip's challenge again a few years back (it took forever because I couldn't remember the name) but I totally forgot about rodent's revenge!
- 1: You a veteran?
  2: Yes. No. I don't wanna talk about it.
  Camera zooms in on 2, fades to montage:
  MiG 21 thundering overhead at tree top levels, while blasting 'Hush', which is being comically raised in pitch to squeaking chipmunk levels as it approaches, and then instantly downshifts by two octaves into quaalude voice after it passes overhead... it is being pursued by an f4 phantom who fires off all of his seeking missiles in a quick burst, all of which guide themselves into your convoy of m113s, as well as a nearby mortar emplacement
  squad is slowly advancing through Hue with no resistance thus far... and then suddenly, from 3 different directions, VC on mopeds, blasting 'Surfin Bird' and headbanging maniacally, rapidly approach the unit... 2 are shot, but one makes it through, moped detonates with the force of 4 bundles of TNT
  ... rocket pod armed mi8s and hueys pieroutting around each other in the night sky, throwing unguided rockets everywhere, taking out ground bound friend and foe alike, both ultimately running out if ammo and then crashing into the ground sideways and upside down...
  Camera pops back to 2, slowly zooms out.
  2: ... I don't ... don't wanna talk about it.
- You can install and run v3.1 in DosBox. In case anyone wanted to keep using it.

- Random tangent, my dad edited the system file that contained that message to "It's not safe to turn off your computer" when I was like 5 and it kinda fucked me up for a bit.
- It's not safe to turn off your computer.
  There are enemies nearby.

I mean, I'm in my early 40s and I've started with ms-dos. According to this meme what am I? A fucking dinosaur? Am I that old?
- In my early 30's. Started with W95. But did dabble in dos sometimes
  
  Same, but then you severely undersold how old you are. Like, where's the Space Cadet, at least?
- Nah, old(er) people would boot directly to a BASIC editor.
- I remember playing a hotseat game with my friend and his brothers ( I think heroes of might and magic 2) and I accidentally big toed the power button, just like in this picture 😅
  Everyone was pretty gutted, although we then found out that autosave happened every turn, what a releif.
- I'm in my late 20s and started with ms-dos too. And even tried OS/2 to check I wasn't missing something before upgrading to 3.1 then XP 😂
- Gorillas.bas
  Nibbles.bas
- We were born in the 80s. But people around me that are younger like to say I was born in the 1900s to make me feel extra special

- Well if this is a competition for who can find old computer images im im
  
  ...we had the ~~4016~~ 2001N with an external tape drive: not quite as much geek-cred as the original 2001, but still respectable...
  
  Mine was a TI 99/4a. Texas Instruments 'computer' of the same generation. Tape drive squealed like a modem. But nobody remembers modems now ...
  
  "." ,8,1
- Ayyy childhood
  
  Green Screen!

mine
- I once knew a woman who used cut up punch cards as spacers when rolling joints.

I'm this old:
- LOAD"*",8,1 SEARCHING FOR * LOADING READY. RUN
  
  We had multiple games on our floppies. All pirated and with miles of paper printouts showing which games were on which floppy.
  I think we had two legitimately bought games.
- I still remember using Windows machine for the first time after only having a Commodore 64 and Nintendos. I specifically remember thinking it was dumb because it didn’t have a cartridge slot.
  
  Haha! Now USB ports are sort of cartridge ports. Although I haven't see a lot of software distributed on USB, there are some products.
- I am also this old. C64 for life
- I remember that game, Samantha Fox right?
- We actually had a C 128. But we always booted into C 64 mode because that had all the good games.
  The only 128 game we had was some super complicated stealth bomber flight simulator. The manual was cool though.
- Did anyone here use the L shift +O shorthand for load? I feel like I never see it mentioned anywhere
  
  I don't think I ever knew that.
- This taught me many lessons in life, but the one I carry in my heart to this day is piracy.

What's all this newfangled content being posted as old? My first computer had Windows 3.11 that you booted to from a command prompt. It was an amazing graphical upgrade from the command line computers. Now you could actually see what you were doing on the screen instead of typing commands and hoping a document would print with your data.
Before that, I used Apple IIe computers at school, with their solidly green command line interface. I remember being taught how to program instructions with those computers. You had a "turtle" (green triangle) that you needed to move to a specific spot on the screen, and you typed in commands to make him move.
Whatever content is in this meme, it all released long after I grew up and became an adult. You young whippersnappers.
- Millennials are now "old" by internet standards, so Gen X and older are positively ancient.
  
  I'm an elder Millennial, and I remember when we got old enough to use the 386 machines at school. Before that we were using DOS.
  Our first home computer was bought second hand and didn't even have a hard drive, just two 5.25" floppy drives, and also ran DOS. We'd have kids from the entire neighborhood visit to play games on it, because although it was second hand it was also very rare to have one.
  I was 12 when Windows 95 came out. All this stuff looks waay newer than that. I'd say this draws the line for old at the older part of Gen Z. Millennials aren't even on the scale.
- You had a “turtle” (green triangle) that you needed to move to a specific spot on the screen, and you typed in commands to make him move.
  Ah. LOGO.
  
  Oh man! I had no clue what the program was called. We used it way back in my kindergarten/1st grade days, so I'd long forgotten the specifics. Thank you! This is exactly it.
- Ok, boomer

- Images you can hear
- I loved the island guy and the bad dog ones. Loved After Dark

Shit, I'm old...
- If you stare at it long enough the clouds start to move a little
- God, same. I'm actually using that currently on my laptop.
  
  It's on my old netbook, it will never leave.
  That thing is nearing 20 now I think!

Man, I am even older than this.
Multiple times I was disconnected in the middle of a Starcraft match over our 56k modem... because my dad was getting a goddamned fax sent to him over the same line.
These are all fancy pants, high res ... XP, i think?... icons compared to Win 95 and 98.
Now excuse me while I teleport back in time and jack back in to the Matrix Online beta via an actual telephone line... we didn't even get DSL untill a year or two after it fully released.
Going fully angry old man mode:
You whippersnappers have absolutely no clue what pain is.
Pain is playing Battlefield 1942 on a 56k modem with literally zero servers you can connect to being under 150 ping, the vast majority of them being 200, 300+.
Those packets had to march across shitty rural phone lines uphill, both ways! And a storm would throw a tree onto them every 3 weeks!
Pain is your shitty eMachine being so underpowered that the only way you can actually play through HL2 is all settings at minimum, and then also when Alyx is getting teleported out of Kleiner's lab, you have to look at the ground, because the 8 or so particles with bloom that spin around her, + the flashing color negative post processing effect... is too fucking difficult for your moldy, sprouting potato of a pc to run without CTDing or even segfaulting.
- When your starcraft LAN matches keep lagging out on the default option IPX. You try the other option but it says not installed. So you have to figure out how to reconfigure your network adapter in windows 98 to use this new thing called TCP/IP. You're in middle school and youtube doesn't exist.
  
  ... You go to the GameFAQ board to ask for help, rofl.
  EDIT:
  Blam, you timewarp 25 years into the future and realize.... holy shit, Blizzard could have built Battle.net into Steam before Valve did, but they completely went all in with WoW instead.
  EDIT 2:
  You warp back to the late 90s, and are extremely confused as to why the 'replay' of your last Starcraft game diverges into a whole ass alternate reality after about the 3 minute mark of a 90ish minute match.
- you're like 40. There are people here who played Maze War.
  
  About half a decade younger than that, just picked up pc gaming as a hobby at a young age.
  But yes, I know that there are many significantly older gamer folks / tech dorks here on lemmy... but there are also now a lot of Gen Z folks, and even some Gen A... who just actually did not ever experience the 'pre-internet' era at all.
  It gets difficult for me to manage my age perception whiplash at times.
  I apparently look young enough that people irl, only 10 years older than me (or less) still refer to me as 'a bright young man with my whole future ahead of me', as if I'm in my early 20s... while people 10 years younger than me refer to me as an ancient elder gamer online, and irl, once I tell them my actual age, oh now I'm an uncle, I'm an old man.
  ??? confused millenial noises ???
- Battlefield 1942 because you played the game in 1942, eh?
  
  Ok so... hear me out.
  You know how the common aphorism for dog years is that 1 dog year is 7 human years?
  BF 1942 came out in 2002.
  60 year difference.
  ...
  I hereby propose a 'Gamer Age' formula:
  (Real Age - Youngest Age you first put over 50 hours into a single game) * 6
  ...
  So if you are now 40, and you mainlined Starcraft when it came out in 1998, your gamer age is 78... pretty old, seen a lot of shit in your time.
  If you are 20, and broke 50 hours into Fortnite at age 14 (when Fortnite first released), your gamer age is 36... middle aged, been around the block a few times.
  If you are 16, and broke 50 hours in Fortnite when you were 14... your gamer age is 12 (lol), you are still a little nooblet in terms of gaming experience.
  If you are 60, and put 50 hours into a Pacman cabinet when it came out in 1980... gamer age is 240, true elder, arcane wizard status.
  If you are Lord British (Richard Garriot), and you use the release date of the first game he developed (Akalabeth) as the 50hr game...
  He works out to a minimum of 276, which is almost certainly a low estimate... by my reckoning, he could potentially be as old as 330...
  ...few know such things precisely, such is the nature of a truly ancient one, hahaha.
  ...
  If I run this for myself... first game I put more than 50 hours into would have been... Sonic 3 / Sonic & Knuckles, think I broke the 50 hour mark in '96...
  So... my gamer age works out to 174.
  Unnaturally old, by no means the eldest of the wizened ones, but considerably more experienced than most would guess by my physical form, rofl.
  ...
  Now, this isn't a perfect metric, as ... you could argue the 50 hour threshold should be some other number... and that it doesn't account for people who have played a whole lot of games, but only a single playthrough... so it is kind of biased toward 'hardcore' gamers...
  But it does seem roughly in line with the way online lingo and vocabulary and memes seem to work.
  And also, non 'hardcore' gamers are probably not going to care about any kind of 'gamer age' metric.
  ...
  Thoughts? Suggestions? Critiques?

I continue to be this old.
- Let's be real - we always assumed that we could hear our parents walking in but there's no way they didn't sneak up and check what we were watching once in a while
  
  if they saw the depraved smut I was cranking to I can guarantee my ass would be a paraplegic from the whoopin I would have got.
  they didn't know. they'll never know.

Heh, this is brand new software and tech as far as I'm concerned. I remember when the computer did not automatically boot into windows and you had to cd c:\windows and then win.exe.
- LOAD “*”, 8, 1
- Honestly it feels new to me too. I just thought the meme would spark some nostalgia for all us old(er) people who like to complain about the youngsters
  
  Heh, the days when the six 3.5" floppies of Wing Commander was a huge install and often required a hard disk clean out.
  
  All this feels pretty old for me

- But can it run Crysis?

- I myself was a Norton commander enjoyer

Eh... Windows 7 background ain't THAT old. Still the best OS they made.

I still use Winrar.
- Because it really whips the llama's ass!
- 7zip is better.
  
  Unironically, 7zip is the best. It's widely available, open source, and.... Multithreaded. Really helps when I need to compress a few hundred gigs of experimental data at the 24 core workstation.
  
  I use that too, on a different computer.

I'm old enough to remember when the Internet was this for us:
- I remember this:
  
  This I remember, also askjeeves, dogpile or something (I think it searched like 30+ different search engines and combined the results)
- They've been trying to bring back online walled-garden systems ever since. Just look at Facebook, or Twitter.

The standard 5” floppy. The best part was putting down the latch on the drive and that sweet sound it made.
- Remind me to send you a picture of my 3ish feet diameter hard drive platter

Somehow I'm using the default wallpaper on both w10 and android since I'm older, I just don't care anymore while before it used to be very important lol
- Yeah, I couldn't even tell you what my background is. I used to have a slideshow of them.

Turning on the tower with your foot...yeah, that unlocks some memories, lol.
- Now do you also remember shutting it down with your foot?
  "It's now safe to turn off your computer"
  
  I didn't shut down the computer that way, I'd go through the menus and such. At that point I'd just have to shut off the monitor. If I had to do a restart 'cuz the damn thing froze then yeah, I'd use my foot.

I remember dialing into bulletin board services to leave chat comments and share small files that would take hours to download.

You guys gave guis?
- Yes, they help make my terminal prettier.
  
  What’s terminal? My os is just a command prompt. Good ol pc dos

So many games of Spider Solitaire

I need someone do this with XP
- XP was my last windows before I switched to Linux btw
  
  Sounds like a very sane choice!

Those speakers were great though!
- my grandma had those and tgey would predict incoming phone calls

4 of these don't belong
- 7 of these don't belong
  Why is there a spider on my solitaire card? Where the fuck is my Minesweeper and Netscape Navigator?
  
  Hell yeah!

https://gitgud.io/wackyideas/aerothemeplasma/
https://win7games.com/#games
thank me l8r

Good old Minesweeper and Space Cadet 3D Pinball

Someone with more skill and time than me should do one of these for System 7 Macs.
Mortal Pongbat, Netscape, ResEdit for hacking games, Oscar in the Trash Can, Marathon, MacAddict CDs.
Good times.
- NCSA Mosaic is how old I am…

Meaningless without the context of how old you were at this time. I used and relate to all this stuff!

Knowing what the save icon is and "don't copy that floppy"

Here friends.
https://classicreload.com/play/win9x-3d-pinball-space-cadet.html
- It's also available as a Flatpak for those of us running Linux now.
  
  And I just grabbed it. Thanks for the heads up.

Ah yes, the toe remote still works, also for laptops and without even changing batteries.

My first computer had the following to get a directory listing of a floppy: LOAD”$”,8 That’s how old I am

A:
- I see people be like "can we use b: for the backup drive" and it just feels wrong.
  
  I’m “boot from A:, keep user files on B:” years old

Max Payne, such a good game about an American seeking vengeance, having to survive the dark and cold winter
- "I had a permanent, constipated grimace on my face. I was revenge personified. "
  
  It is so deadpan and serious it transcends comedy and just becomes iconic.
  Perfection, lol.

Ok yeah I’m definitely that old

My very first full time job had an 'internet computer'!

I only just lost those beautiful speakers... Power cord was failing, but they still played good audio and the bass connector was a beast.
- I would've replaced the cord!
  
  I would have too :( It was purged in a major clean while I had it stored at a familys place.

Ah, shit, I had those speakers.
- I brought those speakers and my discman to school in my backpack in high school to bump music during lunch
  
  Mine were always hooked up to our PC. A lot of Age of Empires 2 played through those things.
- They would always start buzzing before my phone started ringing.

Huh I can’t hear the meme unmute it please.

Let's just say my first computer did not have one of those cup holder trays but my second computer did.

I had those exact speakers! Kept using them until a few years ago when one finally died, too.

I remember aged 5 watching my dad install Windows 95 from the floppy disk edition. I think that took like a dozen or so floppies?
- I remember not having the internet because "why would that be interesting at home? That's something you use at work"!

Hi, kiddie!

You think this is old? Where are the stone tablets with chisels? Kids the days...

Me asf