I mean we did have internet, but it was billed by the amount of data you used, and being online meant that people couldn’t use the phone at the same time.
Don’t forget Hover!
What about winamp and windows media center audio visualizers. Trippy patterns
How would you acquire winamp without the internet?
It was bundled with the computer, my father won at a lottery.
Have I got good news for you.
I just had a happy flashback into my pst of playing that pinball a lot.
I had totally forgotten that.
Thanks for triggering this memory :)
Not many people owned a PC before the internet blew up
But in my neck of the woods plenty of people owned a PC before Windows networking AND ISPs were reliable lol
Like yes I had Internet at home, but sometimes it didn’t work very well, sometimes it was really slow, etc.
For years, it was almost normal in a small town to have an ethernet cable routed from your neighbour’s house to yours, share a connection. Guess what, it’ll be slow as shit when they’re using it too. Or if the router needs to be restarted for some reason and they’re not home? Welp.
Why did we have that setup? Estonia over 20 years ago was still pretty poor. This whole ADSL thing was pretty new too, it cost quite a bit. I found an article from that period and turns out in 2003 there were three main providers. Starman at 149 EEK per month, Eesti Telefon at 345 and Uninet at 800. I have no idea about Uninet, but Starman was only available in a couple of cities and even in those cities I think it was mostly just apartment buildings. Minimum monthly salary BEFORE tax was 2160 EEK. First 1000 EEK per month was income tax free, on the other 1160 EEK you’d be taxed 26% so 301 EEK. The remaining 1859 EEK, and this is with only income tax deducted, nothing else, is equivalent to 119.16 euros. 345 EEK for internet is 22 euros and change. Imagine spending 18% of your income on an Internet connection!
Still, a computer was becoming necessary for schoolwork. Researching subjects online, printing out homework, etc. If you didn’t have one at home, you’d need to use computer class at the end of the day, or go to the library. Having one at home got me into gaming and tinkering with software and the tinkering got me into programming at the age of ~13 and you can guess what I do for a living now.
US here. I got my first “home computer” a TRS-80 CoCo (16k RAM) sometime around 1981 before PCs were a thing. The internet existed but cost around $7 US per hour plus it was a long distance call to Compuserve the only ISP which would have cost around 50 cents a minute (on a 1200 baud dial up modem). I still have an advertisement somewhere. Also i have a thin book of websites. You had to type in the IP address because domain names didn’t exist yet. I couldn’t afford any of this so I visited BBS’s though I did fumble around with the internet on public library computers. The Macintosh and PCs came out a few years later but few homes had one because they were expensive and you couldn’t do much with them besides play games. Businesses of course had them because they were useful. It wasn’t until the mid 90’s did everyone buy one after the internet got popular.
I loved that game so much.
You can still play it
https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinball
Loved. Past tense.
I played the hell put of Freecell back in the day. Started going through the seeds in order, and over the course of about 2 years I made it through 1500 or so.
I should pick that up again. Only got about 30000 or so games left to finish the whole thing…
TIL about my financial situation, I guess. What’s wrong with them?
Your computers had games in colors?
I’m not a nostalgic one, but Space Cadet got me with all the good feels.
No matter what it says about my game time on Steam, XBox, etc. I still think Space Cadet has given me the most hours on record (albeit unrecorded).
Loved old school paint. I used to try and recreate 3d renders of Nintendo characters that I’d seen printed in magazines and on my Gameboy pocket pouch by doing a kind of primitive dithering technique that 10 year old me thought up drawing 1 pixel blocks of specific colours in alternating patterns to try recreate shading or gradients of colour and I’d draw whole rows of them with the line tool which naturally had a staircase effect to it. Used to save it all on a zipdisk.
39 seconds on minesweeper expert
You forgot chess {or checkers, if you want to}
Encarta was the internet
Was Encarta the one with a trivia game? Or was that Britannica? Cause I remember my antisocial young self playing it to death.
I still got some useless facts stuck in my head, taking up valuable space… I can’t conjure any of them on demand; but someone could randomly mention a species of frog and I would go, “oh yeah, they’re native to Madagascar!”
My Encarta 97 CD-ROM had a game where you went through rooms of a castle answering trivia questions to move on.
Yeah that’s the one!
I stumbled onto this at a library as a kid and couldn’t get enough! This library was a big one and it wasn’t near us, so I selfishly tried to squeeze in every moment I could.
I did feel guilty, knowing my grandmother was stuck waiting for me, but the game was too compelling, my nerdiness too severe, and my grandma too gentle. I was powerless to do anything but press on.
Years later I realized…my grandma was a librarian, and this was an unfamiliar library to her. She had the better time by a mile, and must have counted her lucky stars that I was content to just stay in one place (AKA safe and behaving myself) for hours on end. I can remember her coming to check on me every so often, and each time I couldn’t believe I got to play even more.
Thanks for the memory :)
Iirc encarta was an encyclopedia software
