Whine like a baby, now with 500% more drama!
- Thread starter strawman
- Start date
I don't know how much time you have spent around kids, but the whining sure to ensue if you play video games in front of them when they aren't allowed sucks the fun out of it. That being said, I don't really ever use the consoles, and my son has his own Mac, so I don't suffer when they get punished. ^_^
GasBandit
Staff member
Admittedly not much, but I have noticed the wheeling and dealing that goes on with my best friend's 5 year old when she's not allowed to do something. Amazing how often "bed time" ends up being adjudicated down to lying on the couch with her eyes closed in a room with 4 other people who are watching walking dead.
They're having trouble teaching her "do it the first time I tell you!" I wonder why.
Unrelated, but it also boggles my mind that this is a 5 year old who has never known what it means to not own her own laptop computer.
GasBandit
Staff member
And since this is the whine thread, I'll grouse that I didn't get my own computer until I was in middle school, and that was my only christmas present that year. And it took a whoooole lot of cajoling to get a 2400 bps modem the year after that, because my folks had seen War Games (the movie with Matthew Brodrick).
Didn't get mine until 2yrs out of college. *Did* get a 14.4k modem with it, though.
--Patrick
We had a home computer when I was in high school, but I essentially had to sneak on it to use it, because I would run up the Internet bill something fierce. (Charge by the hour services lol) I didn't get my own computer until I went to college. My parents can't figure out why my husband and I need to use 2 separate computers.
Well the good news is my mom doesn't have Cancer, the annoying news is that her shit doctor made here wait two fucking weeks to tell her! Two weeks and an hour and a half doctor's appointment just to hear everything is fine! Fucking insurance leeches, that's what they are.
GasBandit
Staff member
We had a "family" computer that was an 8088 since I was about 7... but my first computer that was mine was a 16 mhz 386-sx with one whopping megabyte of ram. Later I pumped that sucker up to 4 megabytes of ram and dropped in a math coprocessor to make it a DX. Then in 9th grade I built my own 386dx 66 with my own money... and again as a high school senior I put together my own 486 DX4-100, which I took with me to college.
I was 19 when I worked a summer in the oilfield to buy myself an 8088. 30 mb hard drive, I thought I'd never fill that sucker up. Dang thing lasted 8 years.
We got an apple 2+ in 1979. I didn't get my own machine until about 6 years later, and I had to buy it with my own money that I earned mowing lawns. It was about $1300 in 1985 prices, which makes it about $3000 in today's money.
My first modem did 300bps and baudot so you could connect it to a teletype machine.
My first modem did 300bps and baudot so you could connect it to a teletype machine.
I did not get onto the internet until my second pc, in 1995.
GasBandit
Staff member
I didn't get in-home internet dialup web access until 1995, but in 1993 I participated in the LANL supercomputing challenge which gave me dial up access to their Cray XMP, which was technically on the internet and could send e-mail but was all text-prompt driven unix. And even in 1995, I was really just using a friend's older brother's university dialup access at UCCS. In 1996 I started paying for my own dialup internet access as a 17 year old because said friend's older brother graduated.
Whew, some of you guys make me feel old. My first computer, wife and I together actually, was in 1988, an IBM-clone 8088 with 256k memory and a jiggered up external 40meg hard drive that we build the case for. We had a tractor feed dot matrix printer that by the end of my wife's college was being kept alive by use of duct tape, bailing wire (yes, actual bailing wire) and prayers. I have been on the interwebs since '92 or so and played the heck of of Tradewars on a local BBS, that if I remember correctly was running some version of Wildnet.
GasBandit
Staff member
Legend of the Red Dragon FTW. BBS Doors - the reason you stayed up till 2 am so you could be first on after the fidonet downtime.
We got our first computer (with printer!) in 1993, and by we I mean my grandparents bought it for me (in my room, my parents never used it) so I wouldn't have to keep writing my papers on a type-writer. However, it didn't have a modem, so I didn't have internet access until I got to college in '98.
In '86, I wrote my own BBS for the apple 2c, because an ex-girlfriend kept calling me and I was content to let her eat carrier noise. All of my other friends had modems, and so we kept in touch that way.
In '92, I ran a dialup BBS on TAG/OPUS called "Inn of the Laughing God" in Houston. We had tradewars, LORD, and a ton of Neo-Pagan/Wiccan discussion from FidoNet-linked forums.
in '94, after a falling out with the other two sysops on IotLG, I ran Silicon Dreams, a single-line OPUS board, and was a co-sysop on Media One Studios, a 16-line pay-for-play WorldGroup bbs. After I left Media One, I got an actual paying job running Xciting Systems Online (a multi-line Major BBS/WorldGroup board) for a titty bar, paying around $350/week, while simultaneously running my own pay-for-play 32-line Major BBS, Tiger's Eye (which is where I met my second wife, incidentally).
I think I started hitting the internet itself right around until the end of '94 or beginning of '95.
I might not have a lot of nerd cred when it comes to anime or nerd pop culture, but I got shit tons of BBS nerd cred
In '92, I ran a dialup BBS on TAG/OPUS called "Inn of the Laughing God" in Houston. We had tradewars, LORD, and a ton of Neo-Pagan/Wiccan discussion from FidoNet-linked forums.
in '94, after a falling out with the other two sysops on IotLG, I ran Silicon Dreams, a single-line OPUS board, and was a co-sysop on Media One Studios, a 16-line pay-for-play WorldGroup bbs. After I left Media One, I got an actual paying job running Xciting Systems Online (a multi-line Major BBS/WorldGroup board) for a titty bar, paying around $350/week, while simultaneously running my own pay-for-play 32-line Major BBS, Tiger's Eye (which is where I met my second wife, incidentally).
I think I started hitting the internet itself right around until the end of '94 or beginning of '95.
I might not have a lot of nerd cred when it comes to anime or nerd pop culture, but I got shit tons of BBS nerd cred
GasBandit
Staff member
In '86, I wrote my own BBS for the apple 2c, because an ex-girlfriend kept calling me and I was content to let her eat carrier noise. All of my other friends had modems, and so we kept in touch that way.
In '92, I ran a dialup BBS on TAG/OPUS called "Inn of the Laughing God" in Houston. We had tradewars, LORD, and a ton of Neo-Pagan/Wiccan discussion from FidoNet-linked forums.
in '94, after a falling out with the other two sysops on IotLG, I ran Silicon Dreams, a single-line OPUS board, and was a co-sysop on Media One Studios, a 16-line pay-for-play WorldGroup bbs. After I left Media One, I got an actual paying job running Xciting Systems Online (a multi-line Major BBS/WorldGroup board) for a titty bar, paying around $350/week, while simultaneously running my own pay-for-play 32-line Major BBS, Tiger's Eye (which is where I met my second wife, incidentally).
I think I started hitting the internet itself right around until the end of '94 or beginning of '95.
I might not have a lot of nerd cred when it comes to anime or nerd pop culture, but I got shit tons of BBS nerd cred
Hey now, I'm convinced the only thing keeping me from having a similar story is that fact that it took until 1994 to get that first computer because I was the first person in my family who ever managed to save up enough to actually buy one.
It's part of why I'm a bit bitter. I'd likely be a sysadmin or developer right now (and almost was out of college!) except for the late start.
--Patrick
It's part of why I'm a bit bitter. I'd likely be a sysadmin or developer right now (and almost was out of college!) except for the late start.
--Patrick
My parents got me an Atari computer that had to be hooked up to our tv rather than having a monitor of it's own (maybe an Atari 600XL). I couldn't figure out what to do with it. My only other computer experience was a class I took for one marking period where I learned how to make my name flash all over the monitor (on a TRS-80 of course). I might have been 10 or a bit older. I didn't know anyone who owned a computer.
I bought my own computer in 1994 when I was 22. It was a piece of crap Compaq All-In-One. Built my first PC in 2000, around the time we finally got cable internet in our area.
I bought my own computer in 1994 when I was 22. It was a piece of crap Compaq All-In-One. Built my first PC in 2000, around the time we finally got cable internet in our area.
Don't worry, they'll collude to offer you the exact same packages and prices, so that neither has to bother competing with each other.I'm moving to a new apartment in August. My choices of internet providers for the area seems to be limited to Verizon or Time Warner
GasBandit
Staff member
Back when our cable service was extraordinarily shitty, I actually did something like that.. not really load balancing per se, but did all my torrenting on the higher bandwidth but higher latency/more often troublesome cable connection, and also shelled out extra for a verizon DSL hookup which was only 1.5 megabit but consistently got me 10ms ping times to use for gaming.
GasBandit
Staff member
I know, man. Those feels. Especially the one about crying. I keep a half-used bottle of eye drops on my desk at work as camoflage because of how often I start uncontrollably leaking from the eyes. It happened today, in fact.
Sippy time
Will take digital hugs.
Was in a meeting today and suddenly we heard this awful wailing and sobbing in the room next door. Just earth and soul shattering. Our hr managers husband had just been killed in an industrial accident. Unfortunately this is also my bosses brother so she fell apart too. First thing I did was message my family a hello. Keep family close.
Was in a meeting today and suddenly we heard this awful wailing and sobbing in the room next door. Just earth and soul shattering. Our hr managers husband had just been killed in an industrial accident. Unfortunately this is also my bosses brother so she fell apart too. First thing I did was message my family a hello. Keep family close.