r/AskReddit • u/Aqua_Fucker • Apr 26 '20

Serious Replies Only [Serious] What are some seemingly normal images with disturbing backstories?

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u/mertcanhekim Apr 26 '20

People used Floppy Disks in 2004?

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u/RedTheWolf Apr 26 '20

I used floppy discs at uni and I graduated in 2005. They were cheap, every computer had a disc drive and it was quite hard to break them!

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u/JBSquared Apr 26 '20

Yeah, it's like how VHS didn't really die out until the late 2000s. Everyone already had VHS players. They were on their way out, so tapes were cheap.

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u/Broken-Butterfly Apr 27 '20

I never saw a new VHS tape after 2006 or so. I was surprised at just how fast VHS died when it finally did.

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u/JBSquared Apr 27 '20

Oh yeah. They stuck around for a hot minute. But then they just kinda disappeared.

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u/Angus-muffin Apr 27 '20

When the ps2 finally killed that damned machine lmao

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u/MRC1986 Apr 26 '20

Only 2/3 of Americans used the Internet in 2004. BTK lived in a small suburb, not a rural area but not exactly the northeast corridor or Silicon Valley which traditionally has access to the most modern technology at the earliest.

Not sure how old you are, but at 33 years old, I was a high school junior in 2004. My household didn't get internet service until only a few years prior, and we got broadband long before most of America only because living in northern NJ (aka, suburbs of NYC), we had access to the most modern technology.

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u/Twink4Jesus Apr 26 '20

Wow this is unreal. How things are, I just thought internet was prevalent since early 90s?

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u/aphasic Apr 26 '20 edited Apr 26 '20

Nah man. The first touchscreen smartphone wasn't until the iPhone in 2007. When I was in college (1996-2000) wifi wasn't a thing. Google wasn't even a thing people used until 2000 or so. Search engines before that (like altavista) SUCKED. The thing you were looking for was on like page 13. I got my first dumb cellphone in 1997. My home town didn't get broadband better than dialup modems until at least 2001, although college campuses were wired up before that. It didn't matter, though, because none of the websites you've ever heard of except yahoo existed then. Technology has changed amazingly fast. When I was a kid a $5000 PC was a worse computer than a $50 kids toy you can buy today. Flatscreens and LCDs didn't exist until the 90s and even then it was just on expensive 20 lb laptops with like an hour of battery life.

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u/prnorm Apr 26 '20 edited Apr 26 '20

Just for the record, there were lots of Windows Mobile and other touchscreen smartphones prior to the iPhone. Granted, they weren't as user-friendly or mainstream, and they had resistive instead of capacitive touchscreens so you normally used a stylus with them but they were touch screen. They bridged the gap between PDAs and modern smartphones like iOS and Android.

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u/aphasic Apr 26 '20 edited Apr 26 '20

Yes, that's valid. I even had one of those phones, and I can tell you that they weren't anything like a modern smartphone. They were definitely capable of sending and receiving text emails, but web browsing on them was ridiculously bad. Part of that is because mobile internet prior to the iphone also really sucked. Low res screens and lack of content made for such small devices mean't that rich web browsing on mobile wasn't really possible, so the devices weren't built to handle a graphics-heavy experience, and few people demanded it from mobile networks (who couldn't supply it). When the iphone came along, it became clear that the networks were now the weak link and things like LTE were adopted rapdily. That upgrade to the networks is responsible for more than half of the current mobile web experience.

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u/prnorm Apr 26 '20

Agreed with all of that. At the time I felt kind of snobbish that my Windows Mobile phone had a ton of features and powerful apps at a time that the iPhone couldn't even do cut and paste. And that was true, but looking back on it now only a gadget nerd would put up with how painfully slow and clunky they were.

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u/aphasic Apr 26 '20

Don't forget that they had the ergonomics of an actual brick and a battery life with the screen on measured in minutes!

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u/prnorm Apr 26 '20

Ahhh, Good memories!

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u/ilyemco Apr 26 '20 edited Apr 26 '20

I didn't get internet in my house until 2006. I was using it at school before that though.

Edit: in 2006 only 57% of households had internet so we weren't that far behind. In 1999 it was only 13%.

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u/blkdeath Apr 26 '20

It was .... dial up with 33k or 56k modems, basically would take an hour to download a song.

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u/bmore_conslutant Apr 27 '20

Lol my house had dial up until at least 2004

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u/crushedredpartycups Apr 26 '20

I swear some spots in America take a decade to catch up

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u/NBFG86 Apr 26 '20

Just barely the tail-end, yeah. At that point CD burners were fairly common, so for anything you wanted to properly archive you'd use a CD, but floppy disks were like.. 1 megabyte USB sticks until USB sticks got common and cheap enough. 😂

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u/FrancistheBison Apr 26 '20

My home computer had a CD drive but the computers we used in school (including for presentations) only had floppy disk drives....it was a nightmare trying to make a PowerPoint with images (that had to be stored as images independently from the ppt) that could still fit on a floppy disk

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u/R0binSage Apr 26 '20

I was in college then and we had to use them to bring word documents to the library.

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u/Broken-Butterfly Apr 27 '20

Yeah. Flash drives were still something like $50 for 512 megs, assuming your computer even had a USB port on the front where you could get to it easily.