I took a lot of photos with a lot of people during the late 90’s. I wonder if those backup CDs in storage are still good.
I wonder if it only took until the 1920s for people to say “back in the 1800s” in order to anger the old people
It angers old people because of the poor grammar and bad maths habits, not because children are implying they’re old.
That’s such a widely accepted and familiar way of expressing this that I can’t even see the poor and bad parts. What do you mean?
Millennial lies!
Porn in the 90’s, that was not in print, was stored on tape. By the mid 90:s the most tech savvy of us saved porn on a “zip disk” which were also primarily tape drives.
Zip disks were closer to floppies. Magnetic disks and tape are fundamentally different (random access, especially), although the physics behind the R/W operation is the same.
I remember trying to convince my dad to buy me a zip drive for this (well I didn’t tell him it was for this) lol.
were also primarily tape drives.
?
no. zip disks were a shitty removable format that ran off parallel (slowly) or scsi (paying more), or eventually atapi/ide and usb iirc.
iomega also made tape drives, but zip disks weren’t it.
No, that was my porn collection. And yes i lost a lot of it.
Assuming that as an older millennial, I’m the parent you’re talking about, no. Porn almost never went on those. VHS and paper magazines mostly. Computer porn would be downloaded to a convoluted folder depth with misleading names on your hard drive, and would never be placed on removable media unless you had a CD burner, which was rare as fuck (but they did exist).
Seriously though, people used to make genuine mazes out of nested folders.
If you were in the era of dial up BBS systems, you still were far more likely to use a hard drive than a floppy. The reason floppies weren’t used is that even at low resolution with still images, not much would fit on the things, super inconvenient. Shareware, sure. Porn? Not likely.
I can confirm the existance of said mazes of nested folders. Also renaming files to have the wrong extension for the file type, to prevent anyone else from finding them.
Windows sold me out by having a “Recently viewed files” section on the start menu that I had not noticed. Luckily, it was my friends that found it and not my parents.
Still, though, being caught red-handed with badly photoshopped fake nudes of Britney Spears was quite embarrassing for teenage me.
Back before searching for files was built into the file explorer in Windows, I created a folder scheme where each directory had 10 subfolders named 0-9. You needed the “pin” to find the right one. It was good for maybe 4 deep? before it the folder creation script fell apart.
Disclaimer: this was so long ago, and this post triggered the memory, so I honestly can’t remember if this was just an idea I had that didn’t work, or if it was a real thing I managed to pull off with some basic batch scripting. Either way though, the folder decoy thing was real.
I used floppies. The only PC in the house with interet was shared by 5 people and I didn’t trust that the folder maze method would actually work. I eventually set up our old PC in my bedroom but I didn’t have Internet on it. On that one I hid my porn folder in the program files for Microsoft Money.
Screw you, buddy. It took me 3-years to download those 20-disks of porn and I’ll be god damned if I allow my efforts to be besmirched by the likes of you!
Nah these were still king of the pron. Blanks in a shoebox under a bed. Some wild jungle shit on them that made you understand why you are a mixed baby. It wasn’t your parents on the tape. It’s just what daddy liked.
That’s cable/rental porn backup though. Definitely not internet porn backup.
My boomer parents weren’t using the internet for porn.
I taught my dad how to find porn on the internet in the early 2000s.
Before that, though, he had two VCRs and a black box between them that let him copy rented porn tapes. He had a collection of 75 to 100 by the time he quit.
but, the internet is for porn?
Then why are we talking and not watching porn together?
It was feasible to download online images or WMV, AVI or RealPlayer videos to floppies. But it would take 8 minutes to download 1.44 MB over a mid-range 28k modem in 1999, and it could hold about 50 640x480 JPEGs or two minutes of 240p video.
Or did you mean “this was the internet back then” as in sneakernet or another non-computer alternative (not actually a connection between computers but accomplishing the same goal)?
Alternatively, “porn” could also mean lewd text, which load faster than one can read even on slowest modems, and a floppy can hold hundreds of pages printed on a dot matrix printer. Over two thousands with compression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Animation_System_for_Professionals https://www.fileformat.info/format/grasp/egff.htm in the early 90s
you could find porn on BBSs on this format… a lot of it was 2 bit black and white dither stuff but animated… better than the the bra section in the jcpenny catalog lol.
Oh sure yeah in 1906 people had porno jpegs on floppies, only problem was they didn’t have the technology to access them 😅
Nah, it usually was tapes and magazines.
Even using just 8bit color depth you’d only be able to store a single 424x424 pixel image (uncompressed) on a “high density” 1.4MB floppy.
That’s absolutely garbage, but makes it all the more impressive that an upgrade from windows 95 to the first version of windows XP only took two floppy disks.
Edit: It seems I might be mistaken and the two-disk upgrade was more likely from 98 or 98SE not directly from 95.
How would that be even possible? At least all graphics and the system kernel would have to fit in about 3MB.
Do you have a link about that?
I did it myself on a relative’s very old laptop a few years ago. I think it was specifically the 32bit Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) upgrade for Windows 95 (maybe 98?)
I just searched it up and was able to find an iso with only 129MB which is still impressive. But that’s a clean install and I think it’s for both x64 or 32. If I get more time to look into this later, (or if I can find the floppy disks themselves) I’ll try to find the original and send it to you if you want
Also you’re right, the fact it got images is pretty insane. Then again the only real “graphics” would be default icons, and possibly the green landscape but I wanna say that it didn’t even have that background image when I finished the upgrade; I think it was just a solid color. (The real crazy thing I remember was that the laptop had a color capable screen but had a purely black and white OS on it originally lol)
I think much of the kernel carried over. Also I can’t recall if I updated it to 98 before xp or not. That might’ve cut down on the needed install space.
Anyway you’ve gotten me curious, I kinda want to find that laptop now. Maybe I’ll use it to make authentic “Analog nowhere” style art with paint lol
Edit: This site seems to have the boot images for windows xp floppies and exe’s to create them. Looks like only 6 floppies are needed in total for all of Windows XP SP1
Uhh, that’s not what I was asking
Hmmm sweet 16 colors 320x200 jpg.
Progressive JPEGs.
Your parents in 640x480 glory.
What, you have porn in 4k?
… what for?
Those do not look like VHS cassettes
I never heard any one call those cassettes. Everyone I know just called then tapes. But your usage is correct according to Wikipedia.
I always figured cassettes were small.
Video Cassette Recorder, VCR.
As opposed to reel-to-reel video recorders:
Cassette just means a small case, compact enough that you can plug the entire case straight into your machine. A “normal” sized case would be one of those metal canisters that store 8mm movie reels, and you need to take the tape out of those to use them.
Kind of cool that as storage media on tape shrunk in physical size and grew in data storage the term cassette started to change use in shorthand parlance.
It’s a generic term but yeah to everyone nowadays a cassette would be one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape
That wiki article has more examples in it of older ones too and competitors if you feel like a little random reading.
That’s what I think of when I hear cassette. Thanks for the link!
If you were a real pervert like me you needed zip disks
Because floppies held like 4 low res images?
I didn’t even know of the existence of those! Thanks for the new knowledge, I guess they never really took off much?
They were moderately popular around the turn of the century. They held 100-250MB but were pretty fragile. There were others called Jaz disks that held 1GB.
But once you could burn a CD or use a thumb drive they weren’t worth the risk of data loss.
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