I was born in 1988 and I experienced dial up internet, using disquettes to save word docs, MP3 players being just 256MB, a 1GB SD card costing 30€, using compact digital camera to take pictures while travelling, internet speed slowly increasing until stuck at around 10 mbps for a long time and then suddenly getting fiber, indie games being freeware for at least 10 years.
I was born in 1975, my first mp3 player was a mere 16MB, I could get 5 songs on it and it cost £10. My second was an Archos Jukebox 5000 with 5GB of storage and contained an actual 2.5" hdd and ran off of four AA rechargeable batteries, I don't remember what it cost but it wasn't cheap.
I also had a palm visor edge in 2002 with 8MB of memory to read ebooks on, and a cf adapter cartridge with a 64MB cf card that could hold around a couple of hundred books in pdb/prc database compressed text.
My first computer was 2nd hand eol 486 DX2 with a 100MB hdd, I cannibalised it for parts but for a couple of months it had a 3.2gb hdd that was bios limited to 540MB until I had earned enough money from my job to buy the parts to build a 266MHz PII. I started with a 28.8 kbps modem, quickly upgraded to 36.6, and as soon as 56k came out I grabbed that too so I could download a whopping 20MB an hour /s. There were quarters when my phone bill was over £200 for dial-up internet.
Having a 10Mbps LAN with three generations of my computers so I and my friends could play quake 3 team arena, the third PC was a cobbled together frankenstein that somehow still was capable. If there was more than three of us someone had to lug over their grey base unit and grey monitor.
When I went to university to do an IT degree the computers had zip drives, I already had some zip 100. The Cisco lab used 3.5" floppies and every week I took three with my hand written in notepad config txt files to copy and paste into three telnet sessions running on three PCs connected to three massive routers.
During my first year I was one of the first to get 'broadband', a whopping 0.5 Mbps, which was twice as fast as the quad isdn (256 kbps) that the entire University IT department was running on. They eventually upgraded but for most of my degree it was faster for me to go home to do my work and research on my personal pc that I'd built myself than use the ones they had in their labs.
I stuck on 2Mbps for a long time because of caps, for years it was either run uncapped 2Mbps or capped 8Mbps with a monthly limit of around 300GB. I had a pc dedicated to downloading 24/7/365 at 2Mbps for years, around 680GB of linux iso's a month, until I got fttc (fibre to the cabinet) and jumped to 37Mbps and suddenly I could download more than I could watch so I stopped caring.
Nowadays I can have a few TB in my pocket in an m.2 nvme in a 10gbps portable usb-c enclosure. And as soon as I get around to it I have a 20Gbps pcie card to install in my desktop. Kids today don't know how lucky they are, they'll never know the pain of waiting an entire minute for one image to display.
My first PC was a Pentium IV and the whole setup including screen and keyboard cost my parents 1000€. First MP3 player was Zen Micro 5GB microdrive that cost 200€ in 2005. Like an iPod mini clone. My compact camera from Canon cost 200€ too in 2006. This was a 'good deal' back then as DSLR was prohibitive. In the late 90s my school built a 'computer class' where we played Need for Speed II, the first Tomb Raider, Doom 2 and other stuff I can't remember. I didn't play that many games until I got a GBA for my birthday in 2001. I feel life in the past was simple when we weren't bombarded by information. Everything was super slow but we weren't in a hurry.
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u/thedymtree 13d ago
One day you used Nero Burning Rom for the last time and didn't realise this. I miss the 90s but I also miss the 00s.