PC In Our Days

Today's kids are a whole bunch of lucky bastards, no doubt the luckiest little annoying things. Back in the younger days, we soon-to-be-3-piece-old-birds (or some already more than 3 piece) don't have broadband, MSN, Torrent, eMule, Microsoft Office, YouTube or any other bollocks that just pop up in the last few years. We have other wares to use to chat, download any freakin thing, and to play games when I was about 1.5 decades-plus younger. Lets start of with games.

Gaming & hardwares

You lucky bastids nowadays got all new shiny graphic cards by the age of 10 and can play games with great graphics. Back then? We were running on DOS and Windows 2.1x or if more advanced Windows 3.0. The kick ass game with that time's so-called kick-ass graphic: Doom 2, although don't follow up on Doom 3 cos not really a fan of FPS since I ended Counter Strike days. There were Voodoo cards by 3dfx, which eventually was "consumed" by the company a lot of people call GeForce instead of Nvidia today. Older than that, you probably need to ask Mike kekekeke.

Back then hardwares were so freakin expensive and an uber slow. A full set of PC (paria speakers, LPPL keyboards, ball mouse, CRT monitor, fugly beige casing, thats all) costs around the region of 4k to 5k. No wonder my old man goes botak so early. There wasn't any "personal specs" type of PC back then. All came out under some screwed up companies that package the whole thing. Eventually people get smarter and starts "pirated PCs" or what we call "clones". You can request for and your specifications can be obtained for the PC. The only difference is, they fake a sticker of one of those companies and stick it on your CPU. So it was just mostly Pac Man (the silly yellow round thing with mouth?), Doom 2, Pinball, Arkanoid, etc etc back then, nothing fancy. I can't recall some other games that I play that gave me a lot of kicks as a kid.

WTF is MMORPG? No idea. WTF is online gaming? Haven't exist. WTF is cyber cafe? Um, place you yum char in space. Lim peh em jai.


Downloading

Nowadays got broadband damn syiok eh? Click only page open, only some freaking graphics extensive page needs to wait but just for a little while. Last time mana ada such thing. We have 56K dial up which if you have is already very the jialat cos the internet fee itself is more than the amount your sister use having phone sex 9 times a day with her boyfriend. Page loads ok considering back then HTML is not so fancy. No widgets, no nonsense bollocks. If you wonder how sites in 1990s looks like, go and check out Steven Lim's site. But be warned, get your shades ready cos one he's disgusting, two the site's so fugly.

You bastardious little things nowadays got Torrents (although Streamyx have limited the dl rate) and other fancy fancy download softwares. We either search high and low until we find a site that can download stuffs with a couple of miserable links, or we hit mIRC on some certain channels (more to that later). But to download a single song, it might take you forever considering how 56k last time was a shared line with your phone line. That means if you connect, house phone is inactive with static noise till someone calls in. When they call in, you'll start cursing cursing cursing and cursing, cos the call disconnects you.

Porn websites? Got, but need membership one. So all "blue tapes" still came from VHS tapes that time. Now 1MB broadband consider fast for single user and you still wanna kao peh kao bu this not good lah that not good ah? Send your whiny ass back to the 56k era see how you survive. Li na beh.


Chatting

As we get a bit more advanced in computing stuffs, comes teh internets for the lulz. No, there wasn't any 4chan, Caturdays, or Lolcats back then. I don't know the existence of chatrooms till I found Comic Chat by around 1996/97. Every PC then by the default comes with this Comic Chat where you take up comic characters and chat in what looks like a comic page. But the uber or king of chatware happens to be mIRC (Microsoft Internet Relay Chat) that time. It's nothing fancy, just a big-ass public chatroom like the chatterbox you bastards are using nowadays, which is much smaller and useless compared to what mIRC can do.

Malaysian IP were banned from one server (I can't remember what name is it) and we all have to jump ship to Dalnet server instead. We can use it as chatrooms, can create our own rooms, and can even download mp3s on some dedicated rooms with some extensive long commands. Don't play play. It has this sort of thing that if you see someone typing you know he's about mid 20s to early 30s. The "/me" command (I don't do online gaming so I don't know if you use that command or not in online games). Basically on mIRC the "/me" will turn to your nick followed by the action (whatever bollocks you typed behind it) in purple. E.g: "/me slaps ABC" will turn out to be "Acey slaps ABC". There are a lot more other commands which I don't remember at all after the damaging classes of programming during my college.

You want voice chats? We have, but not so easy as MSN. We had a software that I can't remember the name. The thing looks like a bloody old school square grey phone, and each user get their own number. You just punch in the other user's number, dial, they answer, and you start talking over the mic. After that comes the more advanced flower-iconed ICQ, which to me is one bloody irritating thing. Everytime a message comes in and if you forgot to turn off the sound alert, it goes "UH OH" every single line. And when you type with the sound on, it goes "TAK TA TA TAK TAK TA TA TA TAK" like a typewriter. And yeah, it keeps on getting disconnected.

KNN, nowadays sometimes MSN cannot log in due to maintanence some people like can die. Last time we have to grit our teeth when phone calls come in and disconnected us in between of chats or downloads. Worse is, I can't curse when the phone call is from a relative and its for the old lady. Cos by the time I finish cursing I'll be out of saliva. She sets the phone on fire with the time length.


Documentation

Microsoft Office? What's that, can eat one is it? We had fugly word or spreadsheet processing stuffs. I remember getting hauled to typing class by the old man (which now I appreciate its usefulness) using WORDSTAR that is no longer in practice. Everytime we wanna save our work for the day, we use this big ass 5.25" disks that we can slap you lucky new-age people with. Seriously, its freakin big. From the transition of the 5.25" to Floppy then to thumbdrives its like from Vinyl to the cassette to CDs. More old school than that is the 8" disks which I never seen. Anyone have it?

If you wanna do spreadsheets, there is the ever confusing Lotus 123 which I cannot understand at all (I guess I already proved I'm bad with maths since I was young). Green and black thing that makes your eyes spin after a couple of minutes. I just can't stand looking at it. Oh well, DOS and old stuffs are meant to be like that. You think got wizard to help you out? Dream on. Anything donno, ownself go bang wall, drill a hole on the wall and poke it to find solution. No fancy Mr. Paper Clip popping up "Hi, do you need any help on writing an article on fapping?". No keh kiang stuffs like "Do you mean (insert word that you don't need)".

If you type halfway without saving and suddenly blackout jalan lor your hard work. Last time mana got autosave one?


There is nothing else I can think of right now. That's all before you fall asleep on computers during my time. Those people older than me probably gonna say "You also lucky bastard, got computer to use, last time we only play guli!". But I also played guli and riding bicycle around the house compound before I had my first PC.