Dial Up. Yeah I know the sound and I know the time it took to load anything with. But it’s something I won’t ever miss having. I would much rather be on a 1MB connection if I had to choose between that or dial up ever again. I also hated how easy it was to be kicked off, if anyone called the phone, you were off it in seconds.
You remember portable CD players before they had a buffer cache? Couldn’t even keep them in your pocket without skipping like mad.
I don’t, but I’m aware of that (same in cars). I only got into CDs near the end of their popularity, maybe that’s the main reason I’m sick of tapes and like discs. (Altho frankly, any portable/headphone audio was shit compared to what we have today.)
The thing that blows my mind about tape is that copying 1:1 is real time and takes the exact same time as the track is long. Or that making a copy always lowers quality with every generation. Analogue media is whack, man.
Absolutely! And if you had a cassette that you wanted to write over (that wasn’t meant to be recorded over), you had to stuff a piece of paper in it.
That write prevention was punch card technology. Floppy disks also used it.
And how they later market on later CD players as “now comes with 30 second anti-skip!” which barely worked.
In the late 90’s, the technology was incredible tho. The little machines were fucking monsters. A few years ago I’ve got a few portables from that era and even with antiskip disabled, it’s super hard to make some of them skip. With it enabled, it’s probably impossible without the device falling apart.
It’s also interesting how even despite obvious abuse and shitty shipping, those things work perfectly. The cheap plastics and close to zero weight would suggest they wouldn’t last a month, never mind 20 years.
I had an MP3 CD player that would still sometimes skip if things were bumpy enough. First time it happened, I was like !?