Internet nostalgia

also I totally tried to make complicated games using HyperStudio in middle school. I don't think I got very far.

usb floppy drives a fairly late-in-the-game addition i'd have thought

When I was doing my professional writing/editing diploma in 95-96, one of my lecturers was really excited about internet tech and showed us this animation that'd been made in Director called "bad day on the midway", and was on this huge tip about how Director/Flash was gonna CHANGE THE WHOLE INTERNET... I guess he was kind of right, really.

(tho "bad day" wasnt an internet thing now I think about it, it was a CD ROM, but still)

Oh also in…I dunno, the mid-90s, my parents had a contract to write a book called "Seniors in Cyberspace", so for a while we had free access to Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL. I remember that CompuServe was boring and prodigy had some freakish sesame-street interactive book thing going on. AOL was the dial-up service we "actually" used so after they canceled the other ones they tried to get AOL to start charging us again, but apparently that never worked; I think we had free AOL for the rest of the dial-up era.

i am nostalgic for playing this one star trek game (written in basic) on my school's trs-80s. when you fired a photon torpedo, a * would dance across the screen.

you damn kids don't even know what an a drive is

our science teacher used to talk about the information super highway and how it would change television forever

he was a crazy dreamer but we loved him

why did they try to get AOL to start charging you again?

al mcgore? xp

Dude I remember what a b: drive was ffs!

jesus multixpostarama.

yeah better be some other damn kids, I was playing games off of 5-1/4" diskettes into kindergarten, b:\ for life xps

iatee I think they were just trying to be honest since they were no longer you know evaluating AOL for its suitability for Seniors in Cyberspace

they gave up trying to pay for it again after one or two tries of c.

ppfft, drives, we wished for a computer with 'drives'

book fell through incidentally after a hard drive crash, my parents never became famous published internet experts

anybody else ever play "Baby Keys" in DOS

DOS? never had it so good, DOS i ask you

aw man i briefly knew how to do really useful things like print the screen in assembly language

The AOL account I got in '96 existed to exchange a few emails with friends for the better part of a year. The newsroom at which I was editor didn't get internet until fall '97, which meant Netscape. As for AOL, it served as my primary browser until 2001 or 2002, which I didn't mind because discovering the gay chatrooms in summer '99 made for a fabulous incentive to keep it.

gad I remember when Bowie posted "Telling Lies" as an INTERNET EXCLUSIVE in fall '96.

8" floppy disks on sun (unix) ftw tbh

ppfft, drives, we wished for a computer with 'drives'

the disappointment of finally getting hands on a C64 disk drive and discovering it was like as slow as tape.

xp xenix, not unix

our first computer worked on an eastern european knockoff called DONTS

Bowie had one of the most exhaustive fansites I'd seen c. 1995, can't remember the name though...

SunOS was the first thing i got on to the internet with. I used read usenet with rn and chat with irc. simultaneously awesome and awful. xp

I remember spending an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a cool AIM name. for some reason I got 'tigreazul' and stuck with it until about '95. my friend had 'iraq' and sold it for $30.

Yeah my initial internettign was on the RMIT local usenet forums, and using PINE for mail and NN for usenet I think.

at some point in my childhood my real father gave me flight simulator for christmas, but we didn't have a monitor capable of running it. so i read the instruction manual religiously for several months until my stepfather relented and bought a color monitor.

i still remember curiously much about the geography of the cities it featured: chicago, seattle, sf/oak, la, ny/bos.

rip meigs field

so i read the instruction manual religiously for several months

Nn was like this wonder of software when I finally got it.

^

aww i love you too, ilx system

Wait did I use NN or TIN? I cant even remember :(

I do know my .plan file said something like "I wouldnt know a cunning .plan if it jumped up on a table singing "cunning .plans are here again"

BowieNet, wasn't it?

Does bjork.com still have /unity/? Great URL.

Well jeez! I found it! 1996.

http://phil.cts.com/bowielps.html

Ha, it seems so small now. "Phil" stands up for Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups and I'm glad he did

Designed for viewing with Netscape Navigator 3.0

<3 <3 <3

I found it by searching "smashing atoms in the basement". Phil's Aladdin Sane write-up begins: One of Bowie's all-time best. Startled me when I first heard it, didn't know what to think. Wow, every track, no fat, except for the sound of that fat guitar smashing atoms in the basement.

My middle school friend's AOL SN was Basketball. That's like having a state-issued license plate that's only 3 characters long

http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6073/screamtracker321.png

Yeah! Screamtracker. I made hundreds of tunes on its big brother, Impulse Tracker.

LOL I think R0bot still uses impulse tracker on occasion!

Anyone still using IT (or who just misses it a lot) might like to take a look at Schism Tracker:
http://schismtracker.org
which is a free open source updated remake which is still being supported and has some new features (but still pretty much the same interface and most of the old key combos still work)

it will write your song to disk as a .wav, load .mp3 files as samples, has better midi and filters, and probably other stuff I don't know about

I feel like I can't really get on with modern music software because it's not enough like IT, but then I go back to Schism and realise I can't get on with IT any more because it's not enough like the things I've used in the 10 years since

Trapped between the future and the past...

Have you used/tried Buzz, spacecadet? Thats what r0bot (sorry, should explain: my ex bf; doglatin knows him, does excellent electro-prog music) uses and he seems to love it, it has accuracy IT doesnt, the only catch is live guitar parts have to be added in, from what I gather?)

I feel like I can't really get on with modern music software because it's not enough like IT, but then I go back to Schism and realise I can't get on with IT any more because it's not enough like the things I've used in the 10 years since

This - absolutely. I was a master at using IT back in the day - could make it do all sorts of things it wasn't really designed to do, but then I got a new PC that wouldn't run it so I eventually migrated to Reason which just isn't the same. Once Schism Tracker came out, I couldn't remember anything about shortkey cuts, FX codes, anything.

tried Buzz too, but it seemed like a foreign country

Yeah, Buzz is the main thing I've used since IT. It's a lot of fun to play with but I've made hundreds of 10- to 45-second loops and pretty much no complete songs in a decade of using it. (Well, not really a decade as I more or less gave up a few years ago.)

I always felt this was because it has so many shiny FX sliders to play with while playing your patterns on loop that I get distracted from the actual business of adding new patterns, whereas IT doesn't really afford you that luxury. It's my fault and not the software's that I fall for it, of course...

Yeah, same with Reason - I get a good thing going and suddenly it all goes wrong, like I add an fx or unplug something or try to get too clever with it, and then I'm just left with a messy 1 minute snippet with no beginning middle and end. The great thing about IT is you could copy and paste sections and parts really really really quickly using simple shortkey cuts. IT was such a simple program.