• @[email protected]
    12•2 days ago

    MS paint used to have a spray paint tool. I spent a lot of time using that tool to fill the entire canvas.

  • @[email protected]
    6•2 days ago

    I just had a happy flashback into my pst of playing that pinball a lot.

    I had totally forgotten that.

    Thanks for triggering this memory :)

    • @[email protected]
      6•2 days ago

      But in my neck of the woods plenty of people owned a PC before Windows networking AND ISPs were reliable lol

      Like yes I had Internet at home, but sometimes it didn’t work very well, sometimes it was really slow, etc.

      For years, it was almost normal in a small town to have an ethernet cable routed from your neighbour’s house to yours, share a connection. Guess what, it’ll be slow as shit when they’re using it too. Or if the router needs to be restarted for some reason and they’re not home? Welp.

      Why did we have that setup? Estonia over 20 years ago was still pretty poor. This whole ADSL thing was pretty new too, it cost quite a bit. I found an article from that period and turns out in 2003 there were three main providers. Starman at 149 EEK per month, Eesti Telefon at 345 and Uninet at 800. I have no idea about Uninet, but Starman was only available in a couple of cities and even in those cities I think it was mostly just apartment buildings. Minimum monthly salary BEFORE tax was 2160 EEK. First 1000 EEK per month was income tax free, on the other 1160 EEK you’d be taxed 26% so 301 EEK. The remaining 1859 EEK, and this is with only income tax deducted, nothing else, is equivalent to 119.16 euros. 345 EEK for internet is 22 euros and change. Imagine spending 18% of your income on an Internet connection!

      Still, a computer was becoming necessary for schoolwork. Researching subjects online, printing out homework, etc. If you didn’t have one at home, you’d need to use computer class at the end of the day, or go to the library. Having one at home got me into gaming and tinkering with software and the tinkering got me into programming at the age of ~13 and you can guess what I do for a living now.

      • @[email protected]
        7•2 days ago

        US here. I got my first “home computer” a TRS-80 CoCo (16k RAM) sometime around 1981 before PCs were a thing. The internet existed but cost around $7 US per hour plus it was a long distance call to Compuserve the only ISP which would have cost around 50 cents a minute (on a 1200 baud dial up modem). I still have an advertisement somewhere. Also i have a thin book of websites. You had to type in the IP address because domain names didn’t exist yet. I couldn’t afford any of this so I visited BBS’s though I did fumble around with the internet on public library computers. The Macintosh and PCs came out a few years later but few homes had one because they were expensive and you couldn’t do much with them besides play games. Businesses of course had them because they were useful. It wasn’t until the mid 90’s did everyone buy one after the internet got popular.

  • @[email protected]
    9•2 days ago

    I mean we did have internet, but it was billed by the amount of data you used, and being online meant that people couldn’t use the phone at the same time.

  • @[email protected]
    6•2 days ago

    I grew up with a a Windows 3.1 machine, so for me my game selection was Chip’s Challenge, Miser Mind (MasterMind), WinTris (Tetris), Atmoids (Asteroids), and JezzBall. Oh and SkiFree of course but somehow I never played it.

    Chip’s Challenge was my favorite. To this day I still haven’t beaten every level.

  • @[email protected]English
    15•2 days ago

    I played the hell put of Freecell back in the day. Started going through the seeds in order, and over the course of about 2 years I made it through 1500 or so.

    I should pick that up again. Only got about 30000 or so games left to finish the whole thing…