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This is how I used to live my life. Sort of. I mean early 2000s when I had left home and moved to a far away city for a job in IT. All I had was a stolen 256M R
by INTPenis 7y ago
This is how I used to live my life. Sort of. I mean early 2000s when I had left home and moved to a far away city for a job in IT. All I had was a stolen 256M RAM laptop with FreeBSD. No internet and no TV at home because I lived in a shitty apartment building.
At work I had all the bandwidth and resources I could use.
So I downloaded all I could during the weekdays and during evenings and weekends I'd just browse manuals and try things on my laptop, in my own little virtual LAN.
That's how you learn, kids.
- anthk 7y agoI was like that. You read a lot and get a lot less distracted.
- qznc 7y agoAround 1995 I had my own PC but only my dads PC had internet access. Every other day I had half an hour of internet to download stuff. Then lots of time playing around on my PC. I did Linux from Scratch back then, for example.
- m0xte 7y agoUgh bad times. I had to relay Debian buzz on floppies from a dialup. I sooo got owned when he got that phone bill.
- quickthrower2 7y agoFor me it was MSDN discs and a Charles Perzold book. Made a tree on MFC!
- tiborsaas 7y agoThat's how I learned web development in the 2000s. I downloaded stuff at school on floppy disks and took them home to inspect them. I had cool gifs, midi files, html files and I had Home Site 4.0 which had a great documentation about HTML and some basic JS.
- anthk 7y agoDitto, plus ROMs. SNES/MD/GB ones could be compressed very well, even the N64 ones could be splitted with split(1) and merged with cat. PC games were expensive and except Max Payne, I'd get bored of them very fast. But the moment I (re)discovered interactive fiction (I seldom played it under an Spectrmum emulator) for the Z-Machine and Nethack from a distro CD, I was hooked.
- IggleSniggle 7y agoSadly, for me in the late 90s, it was learning the ins and outs of how to modify Win95 UI. Turns out a whole lot of those skills were total dead-ends. But I can help you make your Win95 look and feel however you like! Need your cursor to be animated but change animations depending on what you're doing? You got it! Find that editing .ini files lacks a certain flair? No problem! Prefer a fuchsia screen of death, or a "fortune" style "safe to turn off your computer" message? I got your back.
- aruggirello 7y agoCool times anyway. Windows 95 brought back the fun I was missing so much since when I reluctantly moved from my beloved Amiga 4000 to an anonymous Pentium PC circa 1994 - I had been programming under Windows 3.11 for a while when Commodore went down the drain.
- Legogris 7y agoI recall that custom animated bootup screen was something that had a different variation of the quirky hack in different subversions through 95-98. Also made a point of reskinning every last pixel. I still get a similar feeling tweaking my Linux environment (albeit stronger focus on productivity these days). Some inspiration in /r/unixporn, maybe you can relive that again ;)
- IggleSniggle 7y agoI don't care to admit how much time I spent on fzf, autocompletions, and zstyles today.
- noisy_boy 7y agoI bought the computer, installed Mandrake Linux on it via CD but didn't know how to configure the modem. So I would make notes/print out manuals regarding modem configuration and try them at home daily - until the sweet sweet line noise of connection happened and I was online.