I used to write the software to refresh and update student labs like that. There's nothing quite as satisfying as seeing the entire lab reboot simultaneously .. and nothing quite as frustrating as seeing all of them fail at the same point in the boot process .. thanks to Microsoft.

Proof: https://www.itmaze.com.au/articles/zen

Yes, but because it was completely pre-enshitification internet, with so much hope and promise to be something good for everyone.

I don't know if I miss this or if I miss being young but yes.

Maybe I just miss using a computer without ads all over the place.

The computers were always slow. SSDs are a wonderful thing as are multicore processors.

But I miss when I had a positive view of tech.

lel

I miss computer time being something special.

I miss who I was in those days. Or more to the point, I miss not worrying about bills, the state of the world, the health and well-being of my family. I miss that my biggest concerns were around school exams and girls.

And yeah, I do miss the culture of the time, and the general attitude of hopefulness that seemed to pervade. But times change, life moves on, and as they say, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

I miss most of all when the internet was the domain of nerds only. Us nerds are nicer than other people on average.

As someone who had to maintain school computers I will say with certainty that I don't miss those old ball mice.

I miss not being exposed to every low IQ chode's trashcan opinions on social media. And I really miss not watching those low IQ chode's trashcan opinions influencing large numbers of other low IQ chodes into doing things like making a felon rapist pedophile our leader.

What do you mean, old enough?

Those are fairly modern computers. They don't even have 5.25-inch floppy drives!

Yes I do. I was too poor to have my own "modern" computer. Yet I was way ahead of anyone else in the class. So they would just let me fuck off and do whatever I wanted to avoid disruptions.

Going to university in the late 90s/early 00s, when not everyone had home computers and especially not laptops. We had the computer lab in the basement where were could go to print out essays, do research, etc.

There was the library as well with a few computers on each floor, but those were always taken, and lab access came with our tuition anyway.

Other than that and a rather simple cellphone, we were device free. We still took notes by hand, copiously highlighted lines in ridiculously overpriced text books, met with friends at the coffee shop to study, and essentially kept technology compartmentalised.

Do I miss it? Oh hell yes.

Playing Unreal Tournament and Duke Nuken 3D with everyone else in the lab.

Yes, comprehensible systems? Just enough to be very exciting? Positive energy? My youth? The music?

Uh, yes?

Mid 90s. Our school built its first computer lab. The guy they hired to teach students how to use computers was probably in his mid-20s. He installed Doom on a few PCs, and the few of us who figured out there were games hung around near the end of the school day to see if he would allow us to play. He eventually let us when he was convinced we won't tell anyone.

No. Not one bit.

Between the 50Hz fluorescent tubes that were common at the time and the cheap shit monitors running at 60Hz, also common at the time, I had migraines 3-4 times a week.

I categorically do not miss those days.

I miss youth and the sort of reckless abandon and constant sense of wonder. The easy friendships and stuff. The discovery of learning tech. The tech was cool and new and dramatic but our tech is def cooler now.

Things are pretty cool now too if you look for it. Sure there are problems but there have always been problems. I look for things to trigger my sense of wonder and it still feels amazing. Just harder to find cus I'm more experienced and well traveled or whatever.

I dunno I was a goofball kid working at tech then and I'm a goofball kid in a old body oggling tech now too :D

I can SMELL this room. Like ink toner, burnt dust, ozone, and slightly cooked plastic.

Also, yes and no. There were many positives and negatives. I just really fucking hate the fascist politics and the absolute horseshit that has enabled to proper and grow. In many ways, it's like we all died in 2016 and this is a parallel nightmare dimension leading to really bad shit.

Do I miss those days, like in that picture? In some ways, yes, but in many ways, no.

If that doesn't truly make sense to you, you aren't old enough to understand and I'm not about to explain it.

I'll be honest I don't really miss a lab full of win95 shit boxes further crippled by net nanny. It was just a partial escape from the other abuses of middle and high school.

I miss the freedom. We would sneak out of class, play games, smoke weed, fuck. Sneak out of the house at 1am, cause hell, be back in bed for school. No ring cams, no cell phones. I didnt have all the bullshit of the world shoved in my face daily. Just hop on my bike, be back before night. I dont miss my circumstances though, my childhood was ruined by adults and social workers. I still remember the era fondly though. Life was good. I had friends and loves who I cared so deeply about. I didnt feel so strongly about anyone until I had kids. I dont think I ever will again.

Being optimistic about technology and humanity

Yeah and would go back.

I used to be excited about the future. Now Im excited about the past.

Yes. Although, more than the technology or the culture, I probably miss being a kid with a bright future ahead of him...

Why am I crying?

The tech has evolved a lot. Especially in the FOSS area! And I am thankful for the progress. But along the way, the average culture is what I miss the most. Do I miss the very convoluted, fragile, non-standardized, and hard to configure hardware? Heehee naw.

This image is nostalgic because it recalls when personal computers were conceptually personal, even when they were public. New tech was fun and exciting.

Some of my fondest memories were easy LAN parties and collabing on XP-era machines in my 3D Studio MAX class. Also, computers didn't feel near-useless without an Internet connection.

It's been said before but bears repeating: "The Internet was a place." It didn't follow you everywhere, spy on you, sell you out. You weren't supposed to divulge your whole life to strangers, but somehow you still made new friends.

People logged in to hang out. Heck, know what I miss most? People seemed to have TIME to log in and hang out. Even busy people. These days I feel hurried to smash out a text message while in motion.

People made personal, expressive, whimsical websites for fun, and not just as a hopeful web-dev portfolio. The Internet was only about making money for tie-wearing squares; everyone else just did things for the fun of it.

I think that's what we miss. People were learning and using these miraculous machines that were capable of anything.

Now the machines are consumption-first appliances primarily aimed to drain your wallet and personal information, and the people have gotten so dumb. Computer literacy dropped with all the rest of kinds of literacy, and I long to find a way to push against that tide...

Yes and no.

Computers and computer systems weren’t so much enshittified back in those days.

But the bulk CRT screens, I don’t miss those…

By the way, at those times almost every screen had one of those stupid placebo ‘glare filters’ . I don’t miss those either.

The mouse was the rolly ball kind, and you hoped that you were assigned a computer where it still worked properly, or you could arrive in time to grab one where the mouse still worked. Or, if your lunch period coincided with the lab class lunch period, you came in to swap mouses with the bully in the senior class.

Yeah, you could do the thing where you remove the ball and try to clean it, but that only works so much, and for so many times

I was lucky in the early 90s in that my dad had a PC for work. A 14.4 modem and random BBS's to dial up to, and I got an interesting first experience with computers. Our local library had UNIX PCs, so I had to learn random protocols like telnet and gopher to access anything. Once I got to middle school we had labs like this. I definitely miss the LAN café feel of that era.

I miss having enough friends that we could have a full 5v5 in CS without needing bots or the server open to the internet. Especislly true of high school, where I had CS and a few other games installed on the network (we had a networking class and our teacher was also the IT manager for the district and the 5 people in the class were given admin access for something and it was never revoked) so literally every PC on the network had access to it and you could be playing a game in any class, any period.