4 ms·

> I remember struggling with torrent clients, cracked games, dodgy drivers, unrecognised CDs, building my own pc &c. then in uni I was toying with linux distros

> I remember struggling with torrent clients, cracked games, dodgy drivers, unrecognised CDs, building my own pc &c. then in uni I was toying with linux distros, I probably spent more time hacking around to make them work than actually studying but it taught me a lot of things, things that were useless on the spot but are helpful in the long run You do realize only a tiny tiny subset of kids were like that back in the day, right?

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>You do realize only a tiny tiny subset of kids were like that back in the day, right? Not if you grew up in some post-communist/eastern european country in the '90s to '00s and wanted to play pirated games on the family PC. Except the linux part, no kids really cared about it. All that tinkering to obtain and make pirated games work made a lot of kids proficient in PCs and Windows internals. Almost every 15 year old back then new at least something about .RARs, ISOs, .DLLs, .cfg and .ini files, IPs, network settings, registry settings, direct connect, CD burning, anti-viruses, binary patches, driver installs, etc. I remember some article about 15 years ago that the SW industry and computer usage proficiency in eastern Europe blew up so quickly despite being impoverished VS the richer west because kids there had to fight witch complex systems to play videogames VS the kids in richer countries who would just plug in a cartridge or disc in the console and hit PLAY. Not every kid back then was into tinkering and hacking, we only wanted to play games, but those of us who were went into tech as adults and the childhood experiences around PC problem solving definitely helped.
lm28469 4y ago
> You do realize only a tiny tiny subset of kids were like that back in the day, right? A good third of my totally average school class was doing it, any kid into PC games basically
- karmelapple 4y ago
  By school class, do you mean the hundreds of young people graduating in your grade? I can think of no more than 5% of my class doing it, and I graduated in the first half of the ‘00s in the USA.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>You do realize only a tiny tiny subset of kids were like that back in the day, right? Not if you grew up in some post-communist/eastern european country in the '90s to '00s and wanted to play pirated games on the family PC. Except the linux part, no kids really cared about it. All that tinkering to obtain and make pirated games work made a lot of kids proficient in PCs and Windows internals. Almost every 15 year old back then new at least something about .RARs, ISOs, .DLLs, .cfg and .ini files, IPs, network settings, registry settings, direct connect, CD burning, anti-viruses, binary patches, driver installs, etc. I remember some article about 15 years ago that the SW industry and computer usage proficiency in eastern Europe blew up so quickly despite being impoverished VS the richer west because kids there had to fight witch complex systems to play videogames VS the kids in richer countries who would just plug in a cartridge or disc in the console and hit PLAY. Not every kid back then was into tinkering and hacking, we only wanted to play games, but those of us who were went into tech as adults and the childhood experiences around PC problem solving definitely helped.

lm28469 4y ago

> You do realize only a tiny tiny subset of kids were like that back in the day, right? A good third of my totally average school class was doing it, any kid into PC games basically

karmelapple 4y ago
By school class, do you mean the hundreds of young people graduating in your grade? I can think of no more than 5% of my class doing it, and I graduated in the first half of the ‘00s in the USA.