We had to use these dammit.
I saw some post the other day by a teenaged girl, saying something along the lines of “y’all are mixing up the Challenger explosion and 9/11. There’s NO WAY teachers actually turned the classroom TVs on to watch the towers fall. You millennials didn’t watch it happen live.”
Oh girl, we absolutely watched it live.
I was literally in between jobs, at home which at the time was in The Netherlands and by chance was watching CNN International and saw the second plane hit the Twin Towers as it happened.
So, live, a 1/4 of the way around the World.
Oh girl, we absolutely watched it live.
then got sent home from school that day and saw it covered everywhere and it was the only thing everyone would talk about and wouldn’t shut the fuck up about. After a while it was just fucking annoying to hear about it.
I believe you (I’m 29) but why did everyone’s teacher wheel in the TV cart?
My school, we had a CRT TV up in the corner of each room. How else would we see the student-produced morning announcements?
You ever have a car cd player that plays files? You could put every song you downloaded from LimeWire onto a single disc.
That was an amazing time to be alive. I miss it sometimes. No need for a music streaming service when you have 4 gigs of music on one CD. Then If you get bored you can pull out the other CDs that also have stupid amounts of music. Or maybe you burned all of a language learning program onto one disc. ALL of the language discs onto one.
When I started listening to the harry Potter audiobooks I had the first 4 on tape. They filled a small suitcase.
I got 5 and 6 on CDs, each with ~20-25 CDs.
The 7th book came on mp3 CDs. Just 3 for the whole book. It absolutely blew my mindhow did you 4 gigs of music on a 700m CD??
They probably mean the mp3 equivalent of what it would be in wav, since most any CD player that could genuinely care about files could play mp3’s. … Although that could easily get past six CDs on one’s worth so… I dunno’!
He probably meant dvd.
I had a 6 disc changer in the trunk AND a head unit that could play mp3s … coolest nerd in the parking lot
Could the disc changer play files? If you filled all 6 with files, I think you would have had all of music ever made up until 2004. Which is when I’m assuming you had this car.
It was a mk4 Jetta, I had a stupid wiring harness adapter from an Acura spliced inbetween the Bose system and the aftermarket head unit, but … yes.
We discovered the 6 disc changer in the trunk cuz my mom had been driving the car and hated it because she “needed” to use a portable cd player with a cassette adapter. I put a head unit that could handle mp3s and had a usb port, no cd slot because of the 6 disc changer.
Loved that car.
We had so much music at our disposal whole smoking blunts in it
I was a Napster guy, then a Kazaa guy. I had moved on to torrents by the time Limewire was the big thing.
Though I haven’t actually pirated anything in over 10 years. Was thinking of getting back into it and setting up a Jellyfin to keep some family members from giving money to streaming services that support fascists, but don’t even know where to get files anymore. I’ve already got a VPN for privacy reasons, so I think I’m good there, but I can’t imagine Pirate Bay is still a safe source
My mother just gave me the walkman I had in high school, which I guess was in a box somewhere in her house. It still works, and in it was a cassette I taped off the radio
Is that even legal??
Not only legal, this was an old way of distributing software.
In the early 1980s, engineers over at the Dutch broadcasting organization Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS) had this fantastic idea of distributing computer programs over the radio
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/04/people-once-downloaded-games-from-radio.html?m=1
Yeah but I read it took forever to download them.
Snitches get stitches.
We all taped the radio. If we ran out of cassettes we’d get sticky tape and put it over the hole at the top to allow recording over recorded stuff we didn’t want
A friend of mine spent weeks creating a single cassette mixtape off pausing recording while songs were being played.
No, it was not legal. Did I give a fuck. Nope.
Had an audiophile buddy who bought tons of Japanese import vinyl records which he would burn(copy) to tape for me. Later on to CD then even later to DVD’s. Many years later bought tons of original CD’s at flea markets at rock bottom prices. Mainly got them for the artwork. Was not ever worried about the illegality of it.
Edit: I also have a boatload of .flac rock songs and oldies I downloaded as well and have stashed away.
Amongst other things it dependend on the country.
As a kid in 1980s Portugal, I used to go to a store selling software for the ZX Spectrum (which loaded the software from audio tapes) where the guy just had a bunch of tape copiers and would copy the game as you waited. This was in the outskirts of Lisbon, so hardly an out of the way place.
Good thing too - that’s how I got my hands on an Assembly compiler and decompiler (this was before the GNU tool suite) and really started my way into programming.
So it was de facto legal enough that somebody could have an actual store doing it.
When I was 15 I bought a CD burner for my PC. This was circa 1999 and Napster. It cost about $250 (which is a little over $500 in 2026) and it had to be installed and in a more complex fashion beyond plug USB and let’s drivers auto install. I was selling custom CDs for $5 with case inserts and paid off the burner in about a month. Then someone snitched on me in school and eventually burners started becoming standard on all new machines
Remember the audio cable that had to be installed inside from the CD player/burned to the motherboard?
If you didn’t install that you couldn’t actual hear the music from audio CDs (which had a different format than data CDs) because it was the player itself processing on the fly the audio tracks like the in the standalone audio-only CD players, rather than it coming in as data to the processor (this was probably done like that because the processors back then were pretty weak plus PCs didn’t have that much memory and audio CDs had the data in PCM format, which is not compressed, so we’re talking tracks of 90MB in systems with less than that in memory).
The Old Magic Will not be Discussed with Children of New
I’m actually considering going back to doing this… just with blurays.
My data hoarding illness is getting out of hand and m-disks are starting to look attractive to me.Still doing it today. Its not an old thing. I have hundreds of Cds. Best form of physical media for me.
Especially with insanity HDD costs. I did the math, and while ridiculous, buying blank DVDs vs a 12 tb hard drive is only minimally more expensive and discs last longer. HDDs die all the time.
Obviously I still use drives but disks are definitely viable especially as data centers continue to ruin everything.
used to have a bunch of DVDs with my favourite shows. but I kept them on a spindle and didn’t look at them for years, only to find out they had all become unreadable
I think burning CDs is a hate crime. They should be loved, and maybe given better wigs
Wigs?
CD also stands for Cross Dresser.
Captain Disillusion
