My favourite name for any application ever is Nero.
What does Nero do?
Burns (CD) ROM!
I saw some post the other day by a teenaged girl, saying something along the lines of “y’all are mixing up the Challenger explosion and 9/11. There’s NO WAY teachers actually turned the classroom TVs on to watch the towers fall. You millennials didn’t watch it happen live.”
Oh girl, we absolutely watched it live.
Oh girl, we absolutely watched it live.
then got sent home from school that day and saw it covered everywhere and it was the only thing everyone would talk about and wouldn’t shut the fuck up about. After a while it was just fucking annoying to hear about it.
I’m in Europe. I still remember my dad calling me on the landline after school, telling me to “turn on the TV and have fun”. To this day I don’t understand why he added the “have fun” part…
I believe you (I’m 29) but why did everyone’s teacher wheel in the TV cart?
My school, we had a CRT TV up in the corner of each room. How else would we see the student-produced morning announcements?
I remember some schools having that, others not
Mine didn’t, if I remember correctly. She thought we were too sensitive or something.
It was our generation’s Pearl Harbour. You remember the exact moment you heard about it and what you were doing.
For me, I was in the car, getting driven back to school after having gone home for lunch.
I was literally in between jobs, at home which at the time was in The Netherlands and by chance was watching CNN International and saw the second plane hit the Twin Towers as it happened.
So, live, a 1/4 of the way around the World.
I was in my first year of graduate school when it happened. When we got out of class at 11 am, I rolled up to my laboratory and it was empty. At around 3 pm, one of the techs came into the lab and was like, “Why are you still here, NYC is under attack.” No one notified the graduate students what was going on, and I had way to much work to be fucking around with looking at the news. The best part was, I was from NYC and most of my family was down there. I was pissed no one in graduate administration checked in with me to let me know what was going on.
We had to use these dammit.
Remember kids, be kind rewind!
I burnt a cd like 3 weeks ago, this technology isn’t as archaic as you think
We’re on lemmy. Our opinions on how widely used tech is don’t count.
Personally my last 3 PCs haven’t had a disk drive and I can’t remember the last time I’ve SEEN a disc. It was almost certainly before college.
Anyone else remembers having to cook eggs to replace the ball on the mouse? It was ridiculous.
Eh… What?! Certainly remember pre-optical mice, but replacing the balls with eggs was surely not a thing?
Ask your parents, sure they did it and never told you about.
Doubtful, I’m 49!
Maybe you forgot about it. Ask your parents, for sure they can help you remember
Haha
my brother (at the time 10yo) told me (4yo) that it would explode if i drop it on the floor.
What happened to the original ball?
Its get used and dirt for the table. You can clean the ball but eventually it lost material and became too small to work functionally and you had to overcook an egg to replace it
Please don’t do animal cruelty
My mother just gave me the walkman I had in high school, which I guess was in a box somewhere in her house. It still works, and in it was a cassette I taped off the radio
Is that even legal??
Not only legal, this was an old way of distributing software.
In the early 1980s, engineers over at the Dutch broadcasting organization Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS) had this fantastic idea of distributing computer programs over the radio
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/04/people-once-downloaded-games-from-radio.html?m=1
Yeah but I read it took forever to download them.
Everything about computers was slow then. There was a time when you could read text faster than modems could run text through them.
I wish I was born in 1970 so I could’ve experienced all the old technologies as well as the premium LSD of the 90’s. So many people used to tell me, “You would’ve done great int he 80’s,” I didn’t know what that meant until I was older and they’re right, I would’ve enjoyed myself and I would’ve been one of those nerdy fuckers. Then again, I’ve enjoyed myself throughout my life and I am a nerdy fucker lol.
The first OS I ever used was Windows 95 in 1998 at 6 years old. I didn’t grasp the inconvenience of dial-up until I was a little older but everything after Windows 2000 was fast.
We all taped the radio. If we ran out of cassettes we’d get sticky tape and put it over the hole at the top to allow recording over recorded stuff we didn’t want
A friend of mine spent weeks creating a single cassette mixtape off pausing recording while songs were being played.
Snitches get stitches.
Yeah, it would be fair use. Selling the tape would be illegal tho.
No, it was not legal. Did I give a fuck. Nope.
Had an audiophile buddy who bought tons of Japanese import vinyl records which he would burn(copy) to tape for me. Later on to CD then even later to DVD’s. Many years later bought tons of original CD’s at flea markets at rock bottom prices. Mainly got them for the artwork. Was not ever worried about the illegality of it.
Edit: I also have a boatload of .flac rock songs and oldies I downloaded as well and have stashed away.
It’s totally legal to tape the radio for personal use
Call the feds
Amongst other things it dependend on the country.
As a kid in 1980s Portugal, I used to go to a store selling software for the ZX Spectrum (which loaded the software from audio tapes) where the guy just had a bunch of tape copiers and would copy the game as you waited. This was in the outskirts of Lisbon, so hardly an out of the way place.
Good thing too - that’s how I got my hands on an Assembly compiler and decompiler (this was before the GNU tool suite) and really started my way into programming.
So it was de facto legal enough that somebody could have an actual store doing it.
This comment makes me feel so old
I miss Zip drives.
The Old Magic Will not be Discussed with Children of New
“Ripping CDs” was a concerning term for non-technical friends even back then. I had to assure them it wouldn’t ruin their discs. It does sound more violent than it really is.
Jeez… I’d record on a cassette the top 20 from the radio on friday nights!!
Me and my sisters got a cassette recorder we had to share between us for such things. There were a lot of hours spent listening to the local AM station doing homework and hoping you could catch your favorite song to record.
It took determination and time to fill a cassette doing that. Buying 45’s was faster but more expensive.
Difficulty 1000x https://youtu.be/KkZ-8gcgyCE
Hoping that the deejay wouldn’t talk some vapid shit over the end of the song while they fade it out
My car is a 2001 and has a CD player. Normally, this would preclude playing phone music (without that FM transmitter bullshit, at least), but this CD player was built to accommodate a 6-CD changer in the trunk, and you can buy a little gadget that plugs into the port for this and allows an aux jack to feed audio into the player. This worked great for me until my latest phone which has no audio port. My USB-C to 1/8" jack technically works, but the volume is way too low. So I’m back to burning CDs for my car.
You can get Bluetooth to aux devices so you can send music over Bluetooth. Works great, did that for a long time myself.
I’ve got a similarly older vehicle. I ended up buying a little Bluetooth dongle that plugs into the aux jack for, like, $10.
I wish I had an aux jack. 2001 just predates that, I guess.
From waaaayyyyy back in the day, most cars didn’t have FM radio, just am band. You could buy an add-on FM band device that would receive the FM signals and then transmit them to the AM radio to hear.
Today, you can get a cigarette lighter powered unit to connect to your phone by bluetooth and then to an unused radio station to listen to your phone. About $10 to $20 or so. They work fine. I have one in a Jeep.
Have you tried USB-specific players? I remember using USB player pro or whatever it was called, did the job perfectly.
If you’re going to get BT adapter, may I recommend this?
When I was 15 I bought a CD burner for my PC. This was circa 1999 and Napster. It cost about $250 (which is a little over $500 in 2026) and it had to be installed and in a more complex fashion beyond plug USB and let’s drivers auto install. I was selling custom CDs for $5 with case inserts and paid off the burner in about a month. Then someone snitched on me in school and eventually burners started becoming standard on all new machines
Remember the audio cable that had to be installed inside from the CD player/burned to the motherboard?
If you didn’t install that you couldn’t actual hear the music from audio CDs (which had a different format than data CDs) because it was the player itself processing on the fly the audio tracks like the in the standalone audio-only CD players, rather than it coming in as data to the processor (this was probably done like that because the processors back then were pretty weak plus PCs didn’t have that much memory and audio CDs had the data in PCM format, which is not compressed, so we’re talking tracks of 90MB in systems with less than that in memory).
I think burning CDs is a hate crime. They should be loved, and maybe given better wigs
Wigs?
CD also stands for Cross Dresser.
Captain Disillusion
Lmaooo
There was a day when you inserted a CD into your computer for the last time and you didn’t even realise. Sad when you think about it.
I didn’t find it sad. The writing was on the wall for physical media and I ripped it with the highest accuracy I could. I still have those albums in CD quality today.
That track at the end of Further Down the Spiral that relies on CD skipping is sort of lost to us, I guess. You can replicate it but kids won’t accidentally stumble upon it. Just like kids won’t accidentally stumble upon the “3rd spiral” of vinyl records. The Easter egg era is over.
Hey, I’m one of today’s ten thousand! I don’t think any of my LPs have a hidden groove but I want one now!
My Easter egg musical experience was with a CD, Guster’s Keep it Together. I was the first person in the family to get an mp3 player, and when I ripped the CD I found a minute long “Silent Track” before a hidden song, Two at a Time. When we saw them live next and I knew the lyrics to that song my parents were baffled lol.
Hidden grooves on records were not terribly common, as far as I am aware. I have Tool’s Undertow (which — if you have the CD version — you have already heard it) and a Monty Python record Tie and Handkerchief.
Not a terribly strong argument to preserve a format because I have no motivation to revisit either, but a fun little one time experience if you have either of those handy.
And for CDs, before the zero mark, there could be data. I think the X-Files TV show soundtrack had a couple of songs if you inserted the disc and immediately rewound before the starting zero. Like, in minus time. The table of contents apparently didn’t care about minus numbers.
I still have an optical drive, and i just put a disk in it about an hour ago.
The only sad thing is people foolishly abandoning physical media.
My old pc’s still have drives I use sometimes. Or well, only my previous pc. My oldest one, the one I built when I was 18 (21 years ago), still works but it’s a time capsule. Running state of the art XP and photoshop 7, Winamp, C&C red alert 2, age of empires 2.
Last time I burned a cd was to copy a CD a friend bought in North Korea. Maybe I’ll backup some photos on a dvd in the future. Because fuck cloud services.
I was bored one weekend and went through all the photos on my phone and sent a bunch them to Walmart to be printed into photos. Now I have an old school photo album in my living room that friends and family can look through when they come over.
I plan on doing the same for my current vacation to South Africa. Otherwise I’ll never look at the photos again.
When I upgradedy pc a few years ago I realised the case doesn’t have bays for my bluray burners. Instead I bought an external case with usb 3.something.
It’s not an amazing setup but it means on the rare occasions I need to use a disc I can. Usually it’s ripping CDs bought from charity shops and adding to my collection on my NAS or the occasional Blu-ray rip.
What was on the north Korean CD?
North Korean music. Typical propaganda music in North Korean style. Women singing about soldiers and the great leader (I assume, I don’t speak Korean but this is what I was told). If interested I can share, in September after my vacation in South Africa.
Yeah that would be interesting to hear. Thank you.
I was still using 3 1/2" floppies regularly until 2014.
