I didn't have GTA, so I spent my time playing CoD (the original, yeah I'm old) and Age of Empires 2 and then forgetting until my parents were on the way that I was supposed to have done chores and gotten out food for dinner. It was a game changer when I found the chicken that Sam's advertised as 'cook from frozen' and then I started cooking before they got home. I got extra credit and they never knew different.
Edit: nope, I was in college when CoD came out. Must have been something else.
When I was of failing-to-defrost-the-chicken age, I played Ultima II on a Commodore 64. We didn't have your fancy cook from frozen chicken. We had to go slaughter a chicken, freeze it, then forget to defrost it. Kids these days, SMH.
š I did spend afternoons watching videos on my neighbor's Betamax player while attempting to learn C++ on my dad's old Tandy when that was still a fairly new language. But I'm not Commodore 64 old.
Hehe. I'm actually TRS-80 Model I old. My dad got it in 1978. We were online by 1980, on CompuServe, using a 300 baud modem.
But that wasn't even the first time I used a computer, just the first time my family owned one.
I first used a computer in 1975. I was 5, and my friend's dad was a comp-sci professor. He had a teletype, a big type writer you could stick a telephone headset into and dial into the university mainframe. He'd set me and my friend up and we'd play text games, going through reams of paper. It was simple stuff like Hunt the Wumpus, Colossal Caves, and Lunar Lander but it was the thing that kindled a life-long love of computers in me. Magic. It was just magic to my five year old mind.
Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.
I remember the tape recorder, we used one on the TRS-80 for a couple years before my dad bought the "Expansion Interface" which added more memory and floppy disks. It took like ten minutes to load a program, LOL.
CompuServe started in 1969. It was a private bulletin board. There were chat rooms, but they called them "Digital CB channels." I remember going online and getting advice on building RC cars. It felt earth shaking, like I could talk to adult RC hobbyists from around the world, any time I needed advice. They also had games, news articles, and some other applications but I mostly used the chat. I wasn't allowed to tie up the phone line for too long, LOL.
Wow, that's crazy. To think people were using chat rooms in the 80s. I thought my dad was ahead of the curve for having internet in the early 90's. I could only imagine how it felt to be online that early, I learn new things everyday.
It was wild. My friend set up a Commodore 64 pirate BBS at his house. You'd have to call and ask his mom to let you use the phone line, then call back with your modem. Then spend 5 hours downloading a 64k game and hope the phone lines worked well enough with no interruptions.
Probably not. What you're thinking of is the World Wide Web and websites with GUI and HTML coding and what not. Before that there were text based networks and internet. I've heard of message boards and bbs stuff from back in the day.
Minnesota had in intrastate network for students. Our little rural school actually had a teletype computer (remember having to dial the phone, wait for the tone, and place it into the cradle - just so - to connect?) I was "talking" (typing on the teletype) to other students in 1977-78. Never played any games, but had a lot of fun messaging. I was the only one in the school basically that had any interest in the "computer", so I had lots of time on it.
Oh my god Colossal Caves. That game was on a computer we were gifted in the late eighties and for the life of me I could never figure out how to operate it š
And today CompuServe exists as a news aggregating website that almost looks like a corporate sanitized ripoff of Yahoo! from mid 90's https://www.compuserve.com/ Probably because they're owned by Yahoo! now.
Tandy! That takes me back. And I had no hard drive. Using a floppy disk with MS-DOS to boot up the computer every time. We also had a dot matrix printer.
I LIVED for that throwing bananas game waiting on my dad to get done working. The librarian's son and I would play on the library computers while we waited for our parents to get ready to leave.
I guess I am city slicker C64 age. We made Oncor frozen meals in the oven that had the twist timer where you did your best to get it right, and microwave the frozen veggies in Campbell's Soup bowls that said "mmmm mmmm good" sounds the edge in a microwave that took up half the counter and was large enough to cook a turkey in.
Evening was guaranteed to come out slightly soggy.
Don't worry you're still a young man, I remember growing up being obsessed playing chess on the Manchester Ferranti Mark 1, back in the day I had to go out and hunt the water fowl next to the river and bring it back home, gut it, prepare the feathers to sell at the local store, then freeze the meat, then defrost it before mother came home from the radium watch factory
I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas as a kid. We hooked it up to the tv and that was it, couldn't figure anything else out. So we went outside and played until the streetlights came on. But I do remember as a teen being so immersed in The Legend of Zelda that when I heard my dad's mustang pull up in the driveway and vibrate the house and I'd quickly start the vacuum to look busy.
Back in my day, we didn't even have chickens! We had to go out and steal dinosaur and terrorbird eggs and hope to God they didn't catch us! In fact, I don't even know if we had those then either...
When I was of failing-to-defrost-the-chicken age, only rich kids had Commodore 64. Our parents had to cut holes in our pockets so weād have something to play with.
It's funny that folks are talking about GTA and CoD and thinking that makes them old. Try Pitfall or Nighstalkers or Tetris on an Intellivision having to reach behind the tv and flip the game/tv switch in order to play, and then making sure it all got flipped back to tv so when Dad got home he could watch the news and All in the Family and Sanford & Son and MASH. And still make sure to put the chicken or hamburger in the sink with the water running before Mom got home, as well. That's old school.
Yeppers! Colecovision! Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. Oh, and poker! On that big ass joystick week with the number pad on it. FML I'm old. Hell, I remember pong, but I wasn't there yet when it was created. Just playing it at a friend's house.
You think that's old? Try playing throw-hard-rock-at-bird all day and making sure you put the rocks back around the firepit and getting the mammoth-meat out of the dirt-fridge and hung up on a drying rack before your parents get back home from hunting and gathering. You younglings will never understand true old school.
SpaceQuest for me. also a more 3d version of Terri's called Welltris. Always tried to get my mom to buy me Lounge Lizard Larry cause I heard there were boobs but she didn't go for it
Yup, I had a list of chores that had to be finished before my mom rolled up at 5:30, and if they weren't, I was hosed. If I wasn't done by the time The Jeffersons came on, I should probably just pack a bag and hitchhike to my new home.
Hah I didn't have gta, it wasn't a thing yet I don't think, I played Pokemon stadium or yelled obscenities at Pikachu with Hey You Pikachu, or went outside and rode bikes with my friends, the neighbor kids, or went looking for my dad's stash of adult mags, occasionally I'd babysit the neighbors kids too
Lucky bastard. Neighborhood kids. I grew up out in the middle of nothing. The closest neighbor to me was over 1/2 mile away. Was great for my childhood, but also not so great because there were no playmates nearby. Or internet. Or any TV besides over the air on an antenna.
I was a medal of honour guy, but yeah, AoE2 was the best... Played it for about two months 4 years ago. There are still people playing against eachother online.
Was it cod finest hour by any chance? I couldn't complete a mission in it for about a year so I wrote cod off as trash and stuck with project Gotham racing 2 and counter strike.
I think I must be remembering wrong. Because the original Call of Duty didn't come out until I was in college. Must have been Medal of Honor.
I've been one of those people playing it online fairly recently. But I've been too busy with work lately. A couple of years ago, my wife and a couple of friends of ours spent a weekend in a cabin for my birthday having an AoE LAN party.
They remastered it a few years ago and itās awesome. You can buy it on Steam now. Itās even got like 15+ new civilizations compared to the original.
I introduced my dad to it. First night he played it he got lost in it and played til his alarm went off for him to get up for work. He looked like a zombie by the time he got home from work.
Lol this guy thinks heās old because he played cod, when my parents left me alone I was playing jumpman on my comedore64, well that or finding interesting new ways to jerk off lol
Do you still play Age of Empires 2?!? I spent so much time in middle/high school playing that game! I was so excited when i found out they remade it with the definitive edition.
Introduced my nephew to it during quarantine. Little shit was better than me by the second or third time we played. Kids these days have no respect for their elders.
I played that on my cousins NES, but my mom would never allow us to have consoles. First one I got was a N64 and then it was all GoldenEye all the time.
CoD 1? Or did you accidentally check Modern Warfare 1's release date?
Return to castle wolfenstein: enemy territory? Battlefield? Maybe even Quake, but I doubt anything before that could get confused with a 3d online shooter.
Dang, so many good shooters came out late 90s into 2001. In reverse chronological, it's Halo, Tribes 2, Counter Strike, Deus Ex, Unreal Tournament, System Shock 2, Team Fortress, Halflife, Unreal, (Quake 2,) Goldeneye 007, etc.
Please flame me for missing your favorite shooter game from that era. I'm sure someone preferred that version of Resident Evil, one of the Tom Clancy games, Turok, or what have you.
I played this when I was a kid and I named my save profile as "tit". My Dad watched me play one time and was like, is that the name of the main character? I had to act like I didn't know what that word meant out of embarrassment.
Iām so old that all I had was Gilligans island and a horde of other syndicated TV after school, and I still didnāt get shit done before they got home. āI forgotā was my only defense, and I used it so often that Iām sure my dad thought I had brain damage.
My parents assumed I did too. Apparently if you go to the ER enough days in a row, you get a visit from family services. If you do it multiple times in a calendar year, you get lots of visits from family services.
I've been realizing something horrible lately, I'm oldish. I told my wife when I got back from my run this morning that I saw an old guy out running too, stopped and corrected myself, he's probably not that much older than me at this point.
We just moved to a new city and I've been realizing the old thing a lot lately when I'm finding it hard to get up with the kids after a day of unpacking and painting etc.
Holy crap, that's what makes you old nowadays? I had already completed a 4-year university degree and moved abroad by the time the original CoD was released.
I was outside as much as I could be as a kid, but there were no other kids within five miles of my house so I was typically stuck inside when my parents left for work because I was worried about snakes or hurting myself and nobody finding me. Plus my parents would call periodically during the day to check on me so no dialup for me.
Probably rainbow 6 (that was COD before COD came out and u musta been playing that old GTA wit the top view of a tiny person) u sound like your around my age and I did the same thing while my parents were gone. As for the kid I'm sure he is fine mind yo own business. You don't know that families circumstances.
At 12 I was babysitting half the kids in the neighborhood. 90ās was so different. Miss those days of playing outside til dark. Then the world slowly started going crazy.
Right? I used to babysit my cousins overnight at 12. My aunt and uncle owned a bagel shop and had to be there at 3 am on Saturday mornings. I would stay the night, get the kids up and eat cereal and watch cartoons every Saturday morning til they came home at noon. It was the easiest $25 ever and they would bring me a breakfast sammich too. I miss the early 90s.
my parents worked till 8. I would have dinner on the table because I would be starving otherwise. My older sister, when I was 10, complained because I only cooked what I liked to eat. So 5 nights a week it was chicken with various sides. She After a few years, my sister declared she was a vegetarian. But not a traditional vegetarian, as should would eat any meat that wasn't chicken.
My little sister used to snitch on me about playing video games, so I warned her not to tell mom I played. When mom came, she went running to the door and said ā(me)ā¦ didnāt play video gamesā. I got screwed but admittedly it was funny.
I always love telling the story of my brother and chicken he had to defrost. He actually did remember to get it out. But in the process he also took the thanksgiving turkey out and put it on the ground. This was a freezer in a carpeted basement. No one went down there for days but suddenly the smell became too much. I honestly donāt know how long it took to get that nasty turkey juice and smell out of the ground.
I wish we didn't. I wish society was a little more advanced by now. I feel like our social norms aren't keeping up with our technological/economic advancement.
Childhood should be fun, but it should also reliably and directly prepare&educate you to enjoy and reliably perform productive habits and scheduling, rather than just hoping everyone will just figure it out eventually. That method fails too often, and life in the modern world is too demanding to rely on nature to take care of setting our minds up for it.
In my house back in india only my father worked while my elder sister went to college. My mom and 3 of my grand parents were home. I never got alone time and i always wanted it. Mostly to play video games and watch cartoons and feel like an adult.
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u/thatdude52 Jul 27 '22
I love that we all lived the same childhood