2017-10-06 16:50:46

Maybe I'm getting old or something, but I figured I had some time to kill and boredom and things.  With the official discontinuation of AOL's instant messenger which has been up and running since 1997, I found myself longing for so many things I know I'll never ever truly have again.  This isn't, however, meant to be a topic full of commiseration and self pity, but rather a topic in which we can share and enjoy each other's memories, should you care to  join me.  I'm a 90's kid for the most part, though I was actually born in 88, but I'm not limiting it to that timeframe nor do I want you to feel as such.  Post in list format or just ramble on and on about things you hold dear and wish you could have if only for a second.  :d
1.  AOL's instant messenger is actually how I got started in the big bad world that is now the internet of things.  I remember it's fairly accessible tab interface; things got really interesting if you actually went all out and got the AOL desktop app complete with a web browser, email client, media player, simple suite of clean up utilities and a bunch of other nifty tools all in one.  For awhile, AOL was my access to the internet, and then highspeed happened; cable companies started dishing out internet packages that were much more enticing.  Bye bye AOL dialup.
2.  Hello MSN messenger; you were actually cooler in some senses, and not just because I could assign sounds for people who messaged me rather than having to stick to the crap on AOL.
3.  Windows XP, because I'm a jerk, I guess.  Yeah yeah, moan and groan away about how I shouldn't have brought this one up, but seriously!  It was clean, usable, powerful, beneficial, and in practically every house, store, building and institution I visited for the longest time because of how accessible it was to everyone!  It's sounds were unmistakable and iconic, the themes that shipped with various versions were absolutely smashing, and listening to people playing pinball just never got old to me.  I actually started out on 98 and liked it almost as much, but XP was my home for far too long.  I obviously let it go willingly when I had to and knew it was absolutely time, but need and desire are completely different here.
4.  Is it just me or did poptarts use to be thicker and tastier?
5.  I believe serial in a paper bag stayed fresh for longer periods of time and tasted better as well.
6.  School... I see my children going and think about how their futures will shape up and wish I had had access to all the goodies they're going to get as they grow older... If only I could have had an iPhone back then...
7.  The feeling I got when watching my favorite TV shows; most of them are on streaming services now but I just can't feel the same anymore and wonder why I even liked them to begin with.  lol
I'll probably come back with more a bit later, but I figured I'd see if this generates any interest.

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2017-10-06 16:56:47

As primitive as it was compared to what's available today, I will always look back with a deep fondness for the days when I had an Apple 2, then a 2e. Many great memories from those days, and not only because I had good vision back then. It wasn't a perfect 20 20 but it was plenty good enough for bike riding all over the place.

2017-10-06 17:07:38

Windows live messenger was my childhood. Especially 8.5.

I post sounds I record to freesound. Click here to visit my freesound page
I usually post game recordings to anyaudio. Click here to visit my anyaudio page

2017-10-06 21:38:34

I miss my portable CD player!!!!! The older CD players had hell of DACS on them. My goodness. Same with the older sony walkmans. Very good audio for the time. I also miss my fillips stereo with it's amazing tape deck, cd player and radio. I could DX on that thing like nothing.

2017-10-06 22:43:57

Off the top of my head, I miss how some MIDI files used to sound on the sound card that was in my old Gateway desktop. Sadly I don't know what card it was or what soundfont was loaded on it, but I suspectit was one of those ensoniq ones. All I do know is that it was a single channel card.

2017-10-06 23:16:53 (edited by flackers 2017-10-06 23:21:05)

I really miss the old playstation  games from the late 90s when I used to play. particularly syphon filter and GTA. I get really jealous listening to playthroughs on yt because those games are clearly still eminently playable. I even thought about buying a PS2 and a few old school classics just in case the miracle happens and my sight gets restored. On the same subject, I recently  discovered a book called subway art that I worshipped when I was about 12 and into graffiti art, was still in print, so I bought a copy. I'd love to see it again. I stole my first copy because it was very expensive and I just couldn't leave the shop without it after I saw the amazing art. it was very scary because I was alone and not a shoplifter. It was down in the basement floor of a massive bookstore, so I had to ride the lift back up and it seemed to take forever with the guilty secret that seemed so big in my coat. Worth it though smile.

2017-10-07 00:33:52

Nocturnus, I'm only 5 years younger than you, so I can definitely relate to some of these. The ones I can most relate to are 3 (Windows XP), 6 (school), and 7 (TV shows).

Here's one of my own. Those who know me well will not be surprised. long story ahead!

When I was in high school, I took a music technology class which was pretty much my dream class. For 45 minutes a day I sat in front of a computer producing music. Most of the software they used wasn't very accessible, at least not with the old version of NVDA that was out at the time. So I took a copy of my favorite midi sequencer which could be run portably, and put it on a flash drive. While the rest of the kids were playing with Finale and a DAW which I can't remember, I was creating music with my preferred midi sequencer (qws) instead. The instructor frequently went from trying to help me, to being too busy with other students, to leaving me to my own devices, and before long, being outright intrigued at what I could do with the school's cheap workstation keyboards.

The sound was far from ideal. To start, the headphones I was using had past their prime, which made the sound muffled. The headphones also left disturbing amounts of residue around my ears. Even more frustrating was that the left channel on the keyboard had a faulty output, leaving me with sound only on my right side most of the time. Add to that the noise of talking students was really loud so I couldn't hear well what I was doing. This is high school though. I came to expect those sort of difficulties; My high school experience at least was full of equipment failures, routy kids, uncertainty, all that. To keep me sane I focused on my musical areas of interest which led me to wonder what kind of keyboards they were using. I had never heard the sounds before, but I liked them for some strange reason, even though they were really not high quality sounds.

I don't know exactly how I found out, but I'm almost certain the workstations being used were Korg X5D keyboards. These were released in 1995, and were entry level keyboards, even then. The sounds on the Korg X5D were taken from other higher end workstations which were four years older, having originated on the Korg 01/w in 1991. And a few sounds were recycled from the Korg M1 in 1988. So yeah, these sounds were old way before I even heard them. My first exposure to them was in that music tech class in 2012! Despite them being 20 years old I still liked them. One fond moment was when the teacher was showing us how midi worked and how different sounds could be selected on the X5D. He pressed a button and hit a key, and the next thing I knew, the keyboard showed off this impressive display of whooshing jets, dramatic cinematic cymbals, timpani, strings, and tinkly sweeping etherial sounds layered together. The teacher was like, "whoa, that's not what we want... What the heck is that? *checks the display* Solar flare... hehehe yeah you get all sorts of sounds on here..." I wanted to ask how the heck it did that. Until that point I had only heard the conventional GM sounds, akin to the ones that come with most computers, and I thought they were interesting but I had hardly heard anything like that. My first thought was to jump up and ask, how does something just do that? If it can do those crazy effects, what other things can it do?

I started exploring buttons on the X5D over time, and eventually learned that Solar Flare was a combination of sounds layered together. I learned how to switch from that to the basic patch set I had been composing with. Combinations aren't meant for composing on the computer, they're more for live performance. So, when I would get bored of composing, I'd switch to one of those combinations and just scroll through and allow myself to be inspired. It's ashame I only got to hear the right side, because I've heard recordings that really do show off cool stereo effects. I was playing with a particularly strange sounding one with what sounded like chanting demons and weird ethnic instruments, and the teacher comes over, not being able to hear what I'm doing, and glances at my display. "Headhunters," he observes. "Sheesh." With how demonic and crazy the sounds were, headhunters seemed like a fitting name for that combination. Another combination I later learned the name of was phantom sax, and I really liked that one too because it was very ethereal but musically expressive. All of the sounds, including the combinations with all their cool effects, and despite being impressive and huge, had this 90s gritty sound to them, and I find that sort of gritty low fi quality, in moderation, to be soothing and nostalgic. I wouldn't want it put on modern stuff as much, I only like it if it's genuinely brought on by old technology or really good emulations. And it's funny, I normally don't like really old sounds, but these I did. Something about them just sounded warm but uniquely cheesy in all the spiciest of ways.

The sounds would've been perfect for animated films, and in fact I've heard it used on budget films and documentaries. There's one in particular I know it was used on, but I can't remember what it was. I heard it in a history class in college, and even though history is my least favorite subject, I'd still watch that film to hear those sounds. I missed the sounds so much after high school that I couldn't bare to hear any of them for I'd say 6 months after the class had ended, and refused to touch the midi files I had created even though I'd backed them up and took them home with me. It's silly to think about it now, because they weren't really all that impressive. I could only access a subset of the sounds available since I didn't know how to use the unit, so I was limited in that way. Plus I wasn't as good at sequencing then. I think it was just that unique sound I've been raving about for the past 5 minutes.

I had long resigned myself to the fact that this was over. I didn't need these old sounds. I had much better stuff at home. So in 2015, when a friend of mine got the Korg X5DR (basically the X5D without the keyboard), I became pretty envious for a while. He hooked it up to his computer and showed me sounds on it, and started composing some stuff with it, and I instantly wished I had it. He graciously sent me recordings of my music tech compositions which sounded as I remembered them. I got to hear them better though since they were recorded properly and I heard them over nicer headphones. That brought back memories. The friend told me that they were a little difficult to record since the way our unit at school was set up was a lot different than his, so a few things were difficult to establish. The sounds were the same though, so they could be fixed, he just didn't have the original memories as a frame of reference. I wished I could've fix them.

I was still resigned to the fact that I probably wouldn't get these sounds back, but for curiosity's sake I asked him if he thought I should get the X5DR. He told me that if I wanted even more, I should get the NS5R instead. It's a step up from the X5DR. It has all the same sounds but includes a lot more, and it's also easier to switch between sounds. My friend also said there were newer things I could get but they would start to cut the old sounds I wanted, or would mess other things up. I forced myself not to look this up, not to listen to demos, not to even start anything. Just to forget about it. The main reason for this was that my parents, who still managed my finances, seemed to be hesitant about me making Ebay purchases, and I respected their concern and didn't want to tempt anything.

Last week, I was listening to my music tech compositions again, which is something I do every few months when I get bored. All the while, I was asking myself why I let myself give into nostalgia. It occurred to me that finding an NS5R or perhaps X5DR would be pretty easy to do. I hadn't even looked on Ebay yet for fear that I'd be tempted and want to get one, and my parents would refuse. But then I thought, why not at least try? I have nothing to lose by being proactive and seeing how the ball rolls. So that night, I brought it up to my mom, and while she was a little nervous I think, she didn't refuse. Soon, I will manage my own finances, but I'm not quite there yet. So we found a used KorgNS5R unit from the US which I could purchase for $180. Not a bad price for what it offers. There were some that were lower but seemed to be in worse condition than this one. We ordered it on Thursday September 28, and it was at first scheduled to arrive here today, October 6. However it's since been delayed to Monday October 9. So I'm literally on the edge of my seat waiting for it. I've read manuals for the X5DR and NS5R. I had to OCR both which meant that they were sometimes a little hard to read, but I got a lot of things out of it. While the usage seems to be different, they seem to share similar features. I really do hope I don't regret buying this synth or any old synth for that matter. I don't think I will, but I guess we'll just have to see. I can always resell it.

So there's my crazy story of nostalgia. If you're still with me, congratulations! Lol. I will try to record demos of this synth and other things when I get it, if anyone is interested.

Make more of less, that way you won't make less of more!
If you like what you're reading, please give a thumbs-up.

2017-10-07 00:47:41

Wow thanks nokturnus for this topic.
What I miss.
Oh wow, there is a lot.
I miss.
Windows xp, in fact all windows from xp lower.
I miss the pree nt systems where you could run what you wanted without incompatabilities and stuff.
I miss dos.
I miss the 386 and older systems.
I miss 5 hours to reinstall things, keysoft and mastertouch.
I miss the floppy disk drive.
I miss 28kbps and 14.4kbps modems.
I miss the isolation before the net ever existed.
I miss casette tapes, the old radio shows, old shortwave, and old radio programs.
I miss old sweets and some foods I can not get anymore.
I miss low priced fuel, and all that sort of thing.
I miss the good old days when a kid could eat what he wanted and no one batted an eye.
Before the health rage took off with all its good and bad sides I miss well the simpler times.
I miss the time before the approaching apocolipse where the us was understood as the country that would nuke everyone if you messed with them, so no one messed with them and the world mostly functioned.
Life in the 90s right up to 2001 was a simple life for me in new zealand, you did what you wanted and when you wanted, there was no net no blogs, no terrorists at least not in range, no isis.
No big news that effected you directly and things like that.
Kids actually still played outside and had nice lives, true we had game consoles but people didn't grow fat all day on the net.
To really be away from it all, I have to actually not take my computer with me on a trip.
I guess I miss the old interfaces like symbian, the old os interfaces, the fact if something broke you knew what it was and could fix it easy without resorting to simply reformatting because all the component codes did your head in.
Or having something fail which is unable to be solved by you directly as such.
I have an issue with some messages with attatchments being stripped through the net to some locations its not my problem as such its in the middle.
Life has got quite complex even if I don't want it to be.
To be honest in the old days, you were blind.
You lived a helpless blindy life in a helpless society that didn't care.
You were entitled and were given and you were blind so you couldn't do anything because you were poor and helpless.
In actual fact that meant you could do just about anything without all the paperwork involved if you put your mind to it.
Now I am not giving up my rights as a blind person of today by any means, but with rights and responsibilities, there becomes procedures and regulations.
And the fact while I understand progress can be hard, it certainly was easier before the mainstreaming of the blind, the blind were helpless and dumb and that was fine with me.
I didn't have to understand the sighted, I had my life and they had theirs.
Now I have to adapt, so do they but they are still resisting a little.
Sometimes I want to go back.
Its more together blind and mainstream intergration like the new cloud os, but I guess its selfishness.
I would dearly like to go back to my blindy world and my blindy devices because all I'd have to think about is me and it would be much simpler at times if I could do that.
On the other side, that world didn't have rights for us and now we do.
I don't think I'd relinquish my rights for the old world.
I will have to adapt with the changes as even our blind schools are changing.
I suppose its natural for all humans to remember the easier times of yesteryear.
Yet we think the grass on the other side of the river is better.
Tomorrow is better than today.
Then when we get there we realise that we actually had it good or that we were actually ok and as soon as today goes I will say today was better yesterday.
For me this missing topic does bring a tear to my eyes though.
In the past I had my grandparents and my family was closely nitt.
Now everyone is doing various things and without my grandparents both sets are dead now and 1 just recently the family has drifted into their own clubs.
Some we don't talk to anymore and some have vastly different lives that connecting with them is a challenge

2017-10-07 03:33:47

Hmm, for me it would be the apple IIGS I would play on in elementary school, the damn braille 'n speaks, though I don't know why, I always liked them, even though a $2 calculator from today could probably outstrip it as far as processing power. I miss when I moved out of my mom's and into my dad's when I was 13. He taught me how to do the things you need to do, like cook, laundry, etc. All that stuff, which I know some sighted people couldn't even do when I went up to college, well I could. I miss the showers on the back porch because our bath tub was shit, and he didn't have the money to fix it for a while, so we had this long host clamped up to the kitchen sink, slung over the clothesline and we'd shower in the evening. I'd turn on that water, walk out there, and just bask in the hot water, but with the cool air on me. Doing that in the winter was the best feeling ever. I miss actually getting up and getting ready for school, standing there on a cold morning, just the scent of that crisp, cold air. My dad was out of the house by 3:45, since he'd have to go in early to work to supervise the guys loading up and stuff, so it was up to me to get myself up and ready and out the door to the bus. I miss walking into school every morning, going right to that soda machine and buying a mountain dew code red, just savoring it. I miss some of the meals from school, even though that sounds completely crazy, I'd kill to eat that again. I miss hanging around with friends at college, hanging at the pool or at the hot tub on campus, drinking. I even miss walking the 3 miles round trip to get groceries. Even the worst of it when it would be winter, and by the time I got home, my fingers were so cold and numb I couldn't even get them to clamp tight enough to  get the key out of my pocket. I miss playing basketball with my friends when I was a little kid. Riding my cousin's bike because it was a girl bike and didn't have the nut busting crossbar like mine did, also hers had better braes, and the front one would grab so good, you'd do a stoppie. I miss all the devilish shit I used to do like play with fire, steal cookies from the ala carte line at the school cafeteria, etc. I miss the care free days where all I had to worry about is keeping my grades up. Yeah there's a lot of it, but whenever you get a glimpse of it, its never as good as you remember, so its better to just let those lie, and move on with your life, because trying to relive old memories will only disappoint.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2017-10-07 09:28:04 (edited by afrim 2017-10-08 00:45:09)

I miss a lot from the good old days, particularly the years 2000 to 2005.
Living in a poor country as I do does sometimes help understanding the power of human nature, as we did not have computers, expensive phones and fancy cars, but we were closely connected to each other and the most important thing was love, and good relationships. At that times we had truly good friends who would never turn their back to you even for things that mattered. But even if at one point we encountered a conflict among us as friends, that would be over in hours and we'd very quickly be hugging each other again.
At least in my society where I lived with many other people, we never had amongst us phenomena such as discrimination, drugs, disobedience, rivalry, gangs, rap songs that promoted only violence and instability in our society, that turned females into proud objects of sex, that turned teens into dumbs that are unable to count 2+2, that by and large, turned our society into a hungry being that has an unprecedented lustt for money and fame, where the most important thing is the oppression of others and the ensurance of a safe spot on the highest latters of society.
What I truly miss today are some of the activities I would never get bored of, such as riding my little bicycle in my neighbourhood that today  looks nothing more than a block of houses, jumping on and from the trees in my green garden, running, just running for the sake of running in the streets of my neighbourhood, and playing with my beloved cat. I also miss a radio that could only produce sounds through headphones; it was that little thing which introduced me to popular names such as Scorpions, Queen, Modern Talking, Abba, The Beetles, Elvis Presley, Adriano Celentano, and many more. I was five at that time, now sixteen years later, every melody of songs of 70s to 90s sounds familiar to my ear. Anyway, in just a few words, what I truly miss nowadays is simply a peaceful state of mind.

2017-10-07 09:31:13

This thread reminds me of something I ponder now and then.

Often times, we say we miss things like going to school, watching TV after coming home from school, etc. Sometimes we even say we miss a certain time period.

But is it that we miss those things or times, or do we simply miss being young? Since our brains are different now than when we were younger, would we still get that same feeling we used to get now? If we were to travel back to our favorite time, would we still enjoy being in that time as much as we did? Would we enjoy life in this time period more if we were younger?

Deep questions, I know. tongue

2017-10-07 19:29:17

Hmmm you may be right drack.
When I was a blind kid life was full and rich.
The news, well fuck the news!
I am poor and helpless and blind and probably retarded, what do I care.
The sighted were as far from me as india and I liked it that way.
Sure I was blind and helpless but it meant I could still live my life.
Life was endless.
When you are a kid up till you get to the age where you stop being given and have to wake up, you certainly can dream.
Ofcause I stupidly thought, wow if I was an adult I wouldn't have to go to school I could stay home and sleep all day.
Or what would happen if I stayed at home and listened to things going on.
Now I wish the reverse.
Life after school finnished stopped just after my premiture exit from university which I have covered in another topic.
After that as a freelance contracter living at home jobs have been scarse I joke with myself spending cash on music, wasting cash wasting to much cash online.
But I know its all a game.
Sometimes like now I get in trouble with myself and spend to much and then I think about later.
Ofcause my life as far as the real world has gone has been done for ages I can accept it.
The actual end, not the dieing end just yet but the end as it stands now will be in 20-30 years after my parents go.
There are various places the disable go, and well I guess thats where I go to.
I will never be able to afford a house or a standard normal life as I stand and well I just want to dream still.
This topic is good though.
It made me think back to the time life didn't matter, and how free I was and how stupid to think I wanted to continue.
But I guess its that retrospective thing.
I do know that at the age of 35 I have about 20-30 years ahead of me where my life could go any way.
But once you pass that,life enters another phase.
I may get another 10-20 years of quality life after that, but after that is anyones guess.
I guess when it came to that I'd like to become a kid again and end as I started.
The world, the news, and everything else can fuck off.
I want to live the last years in peace and not care just as I lived my life in ignorance growing up even though there was a lot of stuff going on.
Sadly with the world going slowly towards apocolipse ai and things, if I were a betting man and I aint cause god holds all the cards and I don't think if I were him I would bet, we aren't that far from the end, the way its all going, its only a matter of time.
maybe 1-2 years maybe even less before the end.
The way tentions are building something will have to give.
That doesn't worry me as such if it goes then it goes.
I do worry about the semi peace I will probably miss out on.
And thats another thing, we worry about the future yet we wish we were back in the past.
Yet if we traveled back in time I wander if we would like it or not.
One more thing I do miss is tv.
Today's tv is full of news, and reality tv.
Cooking shows to the nines which is fine for a bit.
A lot of surviver style and stupid shows like married at first sight.
In the old days, before the likes of startrek, stargate and docter who as well as other things like space 1999 and space above and beyond ended, I had to fight for tv.
I know there was more in the 60s.
Anyway I remember fighting for startrek and stargate series on different channels  all at once all at the same time.
I remember watching the startrek series days.
There were on weekends where you started with tos, tng, then voyager and ds9 all in a row from 1 pm in the afternoon to 6 at night.
And if anyone got in the way of that I'd kick them in the balls for making miss things.
But every series from startrek to stargate is basically ended and gone.
There is fan fiction but with paramount putting rulwes on that a lot of that has gone to.
There is the net but with all the hackers, terrorists and government spying even though in most cases thats fine, there is to much reality in fantasy.
We tend to know before we need to and thats fine but the surprise is gone now.
At christmas and birthday its not what you will want or need but you may buy it yourself.
Either that or you have everything and well its different.
The worst thing is that the people of today and certainly of tomorrow can not imagine a world without staying inside to play games all day, fuck excersise fuck everything.
If it went then they would be lost.
I remember a time when twitter didn't rule the roost and where people were people not slaved to their machines like some extra device.
Even me who is typing this has to actually go away from his machine and make a concious effort to not be a slave to it.
The problem isn't the machines, its that we want convenience and so because we want we get.
The downside is we loose our reality away from that convenience.
This topic is interesting.
Please keep it going.

2017-10-08 13:33:16

Hi.

I miss tapes. Having anything you wish on your computer or external hard drive is great but I dunno, tapes are better for some reason.

I mean, I love that I have the Harry potter audiobooks on my external hard drive but having the first book on audio tape was amazing!

I'm gone for real :)

2017-10-08 15:40:20

I miss the nintendo ds. I used to sit and press buttons and listen to the sounds and music that would come out of the thing. I used to try and play the games with friends because I couldn't stand the fact I couldn't and everyone was playing with that so I wanted to be like them. I can remember playing pokemon platnom on the thing and mario party with my sister who helped me read the menus and things.
More than that though, I miss the wii. I memorised the mario cart menus and used to play block plasa and all the other coin runner battles either completely alone without help or with friends. Wii sports was great too, all those games like baseball golf and others were very easy to play. Also, I miss christmas as a kid. Yeah, its still a great time now, but as a kid you had the added excitment of what santa was bringing and I was always hoping for cool stuff like noisy toys with buttons and sounds and things, I loved noisy things. One time I also brailled a letter saying what I wanted for christmas and actually got one back in braille, I was pretty excited because I thought santa could read and write braille or something, looking back on it now its good someone at canada post knew what braille was and its good that that kinda thing was sent to blind children cuz it makes kids happy to get that and its good blind people are included in that stuff.

I am the blind jedi, I use the force to see. I am the only blind jedi.

2017-10-08 16:54:48 (edited by flackers 2017-10-08 16:55:27)

@Rory, it's really nice that the post office got someone to read the braille and write back.

2017-10-08 17:36:16

I'll address everyone, first by thanking you all for posting; I really sincerely apreciate it.  I'll also do each and every single one of you as much justice as I can because memories!  Woohoo!
@Draq concerning post 11,
There's some truth to your pondering; as a child I looked ahead and wanted to grow up.  Now that I'm grown up, I want to be a child again.  No, it probably wouldn't be the same if I took a trip back in time and kept the memories of everything I know now and, perhaps a better way of phrasing what we're all doing here is to say that we can appreciate the different times we've had in our lives, which is why a little nostalgia helps us sort it all out and see it for what it is.  Still, from this side of life you do miss being a child and a bunch of things that came along with it.  When you consider a life on average can have as many as a hundred years in it, and laws in many places in the western world seem to regard you as an adult anywhere from 16 years onward, you truly begin to realize that you only have a small percentage of your life to freely enjoy before responsibilities sart piling on.  It's getting worse by the years; I don't remember having homework at my son's age, but he gets the stuff all the time.
As I posted above, however, this isn't supposed to be a let me wallow in self pity because I've lost things I can't get back topic... I really appreciate everyone's replies thus far and look forward to more.  Three and 4 reenforce the feeling I got when I heard AOL was discontinuing AIM and which started this whole topic, that it wasn't too long ago that we used to chat and listen to music in completely different ways.  Six?  I sympathise with you... I stole a book called castle in the attic and don't remember what happened to it.  I have since reread it thanks to the bard service provided by NLS.  Eight?  I'm with you too; my younger sister, cousins and I spent most of our childhood outside, riding bikes, rollerblading, soaking each other with water guns and garden hoses long after the sun went down.  One of my favorite tweets of all time illustrates a 90's kid talking to a present day child and saying, "Hey, lets go to the park!"  The present day child responds with, "Are you sure they have WiFi there?"  We didn't used to care so much.
Nine, if there's any little devices I learned to use to their full capacity, the braille N Speak and Braille Lite have to fall into that category.  I demonstrated a bug to a friend in which he password protected a file on his BLT; I moved it to flash memory and was able to access it regardless.  Ten?  Spot on about the feeling to some degree, but wrong in many senses... I can point you to tons of songs in the 90's that promoted sex, drugs and violence.  You're right about one thing though; as technology has progressed we've become a rather disfunctional society that cares more about the quantity of friends rather than the quality of friendships.
Thirteen?  I still have tapes and even some records and, bless me, a way to play them both.  The last stereo system I bought back in o5 still plays cassettes like a pro, while a friend of mine actually has the record player.  Fourteen?  My brother did the playing... I did the listening.  It was better that way in some senses because I always knew he was going to get to the end of the game and I'd here practically every sound associated with it.  Nowadays I listen to speedruns on youtube but it's not quite the same.
Two?  I never had the privelage of dealing with the machines you mentioned, but the bike riding was fun... Yes, I still did it even though I was blind and have videos to show for it because my parents thought I was the brightest kid on the block and treated me like I was the stuff of legend, superhuman capabilities that allowed me to hear and feel things that just seemed to astound them, until I pointed out that if they would just pay a bit of attention they could honestly do it as well.  It's easy to distinguish between the sounds a dime and a quarter make, or a soda can versus a can of beer when both are being opened.  These are things sighted people take for granted because of the most magical of accessories on the human face, the human eye.  Today, my hearing is nowhere near as good as it was 20 years ago... I don't ride bikes anymore, and I can't tell one can from another.  Most blind people want their sight restored, and I suppose if you had it to begin with that is something you should want.  I personally want my hearing back, but wouldn't argue to having my sight, if only to be a better parent, a dad who can take his children to fun places without the worry of having to call someone else just to get it done, no cabs, no buses, no extra transportation assistance required.
I hope I got everyone, because I truly meant to.  If I still haven't, you're about to be addressed, because if there's any one thing that disappoints me, it's that no one has mentioned the atari 2600 yet. :d

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2017-10-08 19:15:57 (edited by musicalman 2017-10-08 19:20:47)

Nocturnus wrote:

If there's any one thing that disappoints me, it's that no one has mentioned the atari 2600 yet. :d

I can't address the Atari 2600 natively. Heck the first console I even vaguely remember hearing was a Sega Megadrive, and I think it was emulated on a Playstation, but I'm not sure. I am really intrigued by old video games though, and I sometimes wish I was 10-20 years older so I could've been a kid during the times when older video games were out, when it was all new. I've heard those were really fun times to be a kid, especially in the 16 bit era with the console wars. I would've sided with the Snes because of more realistic sounds, and no other reason. big_smile

Even though I still would've been the blind outcast I was at school, I think conversations would've been more interesting for me to listen to. I'd not only be intrigued with the sounds of those old consoles, which I still am, since I've worked with emulated soundchips, but I'd like listening to people talk about the games, and on occasion, maybe? I'd ask a friend to show me the game and I'd indulge my sound fascination that way. Our fascinations and viewpoints would be different, but I think I'd fit in a bit more at that time than I actually did when I was growing up. When I was growing up, Playstation and PS2 were all the rage, and most of the people I got to hang out with were talking about sports games which were miles above what I could comprehend. Technical specifications were by and large not relevant anymore to the average person. In older times, I suspect technology was a bit more of a forefront if you played video games, since it was new and things were still developing and kinda complicated.

Make more of less, that way you won't make less of more!
If you like what you're reading, please give a thumbs-up.

2017-10-08 21:17:37

Well interesting reply nocturnus.
I also have a casette deck and a digital radio.
My now dead grandpa left me his old 1970s analog shortwave radio.
Its needs a good service but it does work.
There is not probably much in the way of shortwave out there now days.
I tried my darndest to buy an accessible shortwave unit but failed big time.
One thing I do miss is dos, now I do have dos but no synths to run dos though I have all the old keynote software here.
Dosbox works but I have never got com0com working on my 64 bit box and I havn't messed with the emulator for a while.
One thing I miss a lot is the pre spam is bad error.
That was from 1995 when we first got the net to 2001/2002.
In this era there was the first free drive system xdrive and that had a lot of free stuff that came with it.
You also had the free net era which didn't last to long.
I remember listening to music, downloading some stuff and being told to subscribe or run something to play it.
I did and got subscribed to a newsletter with a lot of music reviews and things in it.
One day I got a popup saying I needed to enter all my address information to get a free cd.
I did this and got a free cd of weird stuff which I still have.
What I miss is that your average junk mail was the same as well junk mail.
It was probably lagit and probably by a big company somewhere.
In most cases it was harmless there were even money making programs and the like.
And before 2001 you could bet your dollar that at worst you would end up with something being delivered to your house.
Sadly after or shortly after the blogging revolution in 2002-2004 things started changing.
My first incling was that my security suite, norton at the time started to become more aggressive.
After that, cloud networks came up.
We also got news of the first actual spam/scam attack.
Things have gotten worse from there.
I stayed on my joke and family chat lists, mp3 lists book lists till about 2010 at which point there was so much with piracy laws and the fact of malware, fishing and ransomware most of which we never thought about at the start that I pulled out of most of it.
It was about the time I quit third party security after some of it trashed the network.
Another thing I really miss are the netguide cds and computer cds that came with magazines as well as how games were structured.
At the start, your average game maker put his sounds in plainview in a folder on the disk and audio tracks on the disk so pulling these were no issue.
Later on they used things like crf, and pk3 which were basically zip files with different extentions.
Then I had to use dragon unpacker to get a few things.
Now days if you want free sounds from your games its impossible to do that.
Technically you can extract steam files but its not like you would necessarily want to if all you want are sounds and music.
Then there is the fact that while you can usually get into the files most are in cabs now or their own format but even if you could get in there there are a lot of encripted hex files.
I also think that with the new tech and ways to solve issues we have lost respect for our machines.
In the old days if you had an issue you may try to solve it now days you have almost no chance if its deep enough.
I have people that say if something breaks, you start your recovery drive and it fixes it.
Its just a reformat.
Sadly if its not a checkbox or something fixable in a short time thats what I usually end up doing to.
Technology as a whole is more stable.
I have for example kept computers running for 6 years without a reformat.
In fact I had to reformat last year because my system had become to broken for me to ignore.
Sadly there were oses that I had to reformat more than others.
The worst culprit was sadly windows xp, which unless you cleared run history with tweakui, it would  end up not working right and till I realised this I had to reformat constantly.
Win98 was a stable os, se was anyway bar norton which had issues.
win95 had its moments.
And you never had to with dos unless you screwed something up big time and in 6.22 you could bypass the config files so.
And while I had a memmory manager and extra programs, I really miss the fact that if I needed to really get to bios and the like with my old toshiba that I could just load the kernal and basically that was it and well run without configs.
You can't run windows without services, or things like that.

2017-10-08 22:04:41

There are lots of things I'm nostalgic about, even though I'm only just getting into my 20's. When I would still play games on the play station, and then watch friends play them, and then go to finding walkthroughs basically turning it into a cooperative process (you were supposed to be sneaky in metal gear solid? Who'd have thought, we just choked everyone!), playing GTA 2 at a friends house for the first time, which got me into the series and probably also into computers, because I wanted to play it at home that badly. On the topic of computers, all the stupid flash animations that were sooo popular in the early 2000's, like
The one showing you how to distinguish a normal cow from a mad cow
or this one which took a screenshot of the desktop and then let you destroy it with different weapons. Technology wise, it's honestly pretty amazing how far we came, but on the other hand I'll never forget the first time I saw a phone that had a voice recorder, or one that could play MP3's. I would go around asking people to let me look through the ringtones on their phones. Then eventually I was able to get a Sony Ericson Z520 which was pretty much a dream come true for me because it had a voice recorder, could play MP3's, and a speaker phone. Also, it had a music DJ app that let you put together little midi loops into a song which I spent probably more time than I should have playing with.

Technology aside, I definitely miss my tapes. Maybe not so much the format, but all the stuff I recorded over the years and all the readalongs I had in my childhood and read periodically. Winnie the poo books were one of my most favourite IIRC. And that rather nicely transitions to TV shows because boy did I watch a lot of them. My favourites were gameshows and cartoons. I was growing up at a pretty awesome age, because Poland had just started seriously dubbing various animated series. On one hand you had older stuff like the Flintstones, Scooby Do or Jetsons, and on the other Cartoon Network had just launched, and I got to see stuff like Cow and Chicken, power puff girls, Dexter's lab, Courage the cowardly dog or Johny Bravo. They also showed really old stuff like Merry Melodies and Tom and Jerry. Amazingly, both my parents and Grandma would sit with me and describe what was going on in them, so I got to also experience the really visual part of television history. big_smile

To all of you talking about playing outside or more specifically cycling, I used to do that all the time too. I was lucky enough to live on a very quiet street which basically never had cars on it. It was also rather long, about a hundred meters of a straight road. So, I got a bike, and really quickly learned to keep my balance on it. I used to ride around with neighbors all the time. Those are all really good memories.

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

2017-10-08 22:57:41

Ah yes, tapes. Having been born in the early 1980's, I'm quite familiar with those. smile I also had one of those four-track players that let you plae normal tapes at different speeds and in reverse. I think it was called a C1 or something.

This also means I'm old enough to remember the original NES. My favorite game on that was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade Edition. Of course we also had the original Mario, Duck Hunt, Doctor Mario, and probably some others I'm forgetting.

Speaking of the BrailleLite, I loved that thing. Specifically the BrailleLite 2000. One day I figured out that if I wrote one word over and over again and set the display to its highest speed, I could make that word vibrate on the display. That was awesome.

2017-10-08 23:27:47

Hi,
Well time for me to chime in here too, what an awesome topic.
I had a sega megadrive, am still not happy that my Mum sold it hehe well, it's ok, but still a little meh. So many memories of Altered Beast, Golden Axe and of course Sonic, although I probably played Golden Axe hte most.
I also used to have, might still have in the atic, a Nintnedo 64 and I love Smash Bros and Pokémon Stadium.
I used to have a portable tape player with loads of blank tapes, it travelled with me to the US where I recorded some of my experiences in Orlando back in 2002 and 2004. I, luckily, still have these digitally.
I remember windows xp. Back then, I used hal. I remember Hal version 5 at my middle school in the UK, we got someone to come down and train me in how to use the net with it.
I then found out about Troopanum, and my school teacher, someone called Mr Blake, then decided to help me out by putting some audiogame demos onto a cd until I got broadband. He was an awesome guy, even playing through bits of a couple of text adventures with me during some break times to see how I got on, and because it let the brain engage a bit. But he also let me play with some of the arcade games as well, and introcued me to Mac 1, the regular one before the tts version, and thus, all of Jim Kitchin's games.
Oh, I can never forget the playstation. I still have  ps11, 2 and 3, but I loved it back in the day when I'd really play those old games. Tekken 3 was the first game I can say I completed, fully, without sighted help, by unlocking every single chracter even the secret ones and getting all the endings, even the hard to get Doctor Boskanavich.
Soul Calibur iii was my favourite ps2 era game, due to the sheer amount of content and the soundtrack. Sc2 comes very close to SC3, but SC3 just trumps it for me, and these are two soundtracks that I carry around in my pocket on my phone to this day.

2017-10-09 00:21:52

Wooooooo!  Super smash brothers!  man oh man that brings back a ton of memories of busted n64 controlers after trying and failing miserably with various characters to defeat the master hand when I was 9 or 10, tons of furious button punching involved, and that thing just kept doing whatever attacks it did that made my rumblepacks go psychotic and my characters freeze for the span of about 3 seconds.  I finally managed it though, and between a few friends and I we grabbed Nes, Luigi,  captain falcon and others.
Playstations?  I loved the twisted metal series!  I found a bug in TM4 where if players 1 and 2 both fired Calypso's projectiles at precisely the right time at one another you could lock up the whole game and have your controlers continuously vibrate until you reset the system, while a fire loop just played across your screen... Nothing else you could do, really.
Keep it up, peeple!  I'm totally enjoying this one!

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2017-10-09 04:15:21 (edited by Draq 2017-10-09 11:25:35)

I remember The SEGA Genesis and CD. Those ones had some neat stuff. There was a SEGA CD called Silpheed that I loved a lot. There was also a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers one that was basically playing through a few of the episodes by pressing the right buttons during fights. Certain games could be put in CD players and you could play the soundtracks. Sewer Shark was also a fun one. You go around shooting giant rats in this ship thing. Of course I can't forget the cartridge games I played on that either. My favorite one of those was the Star Trek TNG game. You could fly the ship and battle Romulan Warbirds in that one.

A couple of my favorite games for SNES were Donkey Kong Country and Street Fighter II Turbo.

Hmm. Let's see. What else? That computer that had the sound card with the MIDI sound I miss ran Windows 98 SE. I replaced all the Windows event sounds with Star Trek computer sounds. Fun times. I also found out that having a password on windows 98 was pretty much pointless. All you had to do was hit the esc key to bypass the password prompt, and everything was accessible to anyone anyway.

I also remember... Floppies! Back when I first got that computer, all my sound files were on a ton of floppies. Lol. Fun times right there.

2017-10-09 10:55:05

Wow yeah!  How could I forget floppies!  Once upon a time, JAWS came entirely on them!  JAWS 4.51 came with a CD and a floppy that was used for authorization purposes.  After that I don't recall seeing them anymore.

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2017-10-09 14:01:30

Hi,
Regarding playstation games, Are the early twisted metal games playable, or is it better to play those locally with friends?
Also, how is cycom filter playable?