There was a program call "Nero burning ROM". A pun I understood much later
Well fuck me, that's a name I haven't heard for close to 20 years and it didn't twig until just now.
Ah fuck, I remember Nero, and I know why it is called Nero (because Nero and the burning of rome), but I never connect the ROM to ROME.
What is the pun in NERO omg
Emperor Nero is rumored to have cause the great fire of Rome in 64 AD that burned over 2/3rds of the city
You make it sound like all older people knew. I work in IT and most users, regardless of age, do not know anything about computers. They don't know how to navigate file systems, they don't know where they saved anything, they don't even know what the recycle bin is sometimes.
I once had a user plug a power strip into itself and then didn't understand why there was no power.
Hell, they don't even know how to read. I lost track of how many times I had this conversation:
"There's an error message on my screen."
"What does it say?"
"I don't know."
"There's an error message on my screen."
"What does it say?"
"I don't know."
This was painful to read. I'm a developer and have colleagues who can't read. "It failed! It says that I need to clear all changes before I can branch, how can I fix this?" "Well clear the changes and then branch". It's just learnes helplessness, people want to sit back and let someone else do the thinking.
I work in IT, at my second full-time job at a small financial firm in Manhattan I would get at least 2-4 tickets a day that said "my computer doesn't work, please take a look" and 90% of the time it was one of two issues:
The tower was off but the monitors were on
The tower was on but the monitors were off
Occasionally it was the Display Port to HDMI dongle became dislodged or bent which stopped the PC from POSTing (of course I didn't blame them for this one)
These people were in their 40s and didn't know how to press a fucking power button even though they had been using the same computer for years. Some would even say "I know the monitors are on because I see the yellow lights on it, but when I move the mouse nothing happens!". After about a month of this I would just say "Hi", press the power button, and then walk away shaking my head. This was in like 2016.
My dad was an electrician by trade and he would always tell me a story about how he was working at a nuclear power plant that was being built in the early 90s and the engineers didn't know how to turn on the PCs they worked on every day and he would have to show them.
I’m glad to hear you say ‘regardless of age’ as it really isn’t a generation thing. I’ve met people younger than myself and I’ve had to help them navigate some basic computer stuff. it doesn’t make it easier when they get very frustrated and transfer all their anger of computers at me like I alone have created computers everywhere to annoy everyone. “WHY ARE THESE LIKE THIS.??”
It feels like we just got past teaching the population that gender doesn’t matter when it comes to using computers and it’s like we have to go through all of it again to teach the population age doesn’t matter either.
You will find people of your own generation who really hate technology. they exist everywhere and you really see it when you’re in a support role. Maybe you didn’t meet them today but it doesn’t mean they aren’t out there bugging the heck out of someone else right now what with refusing to read some super basic error message or not remembering their own password.
They don’t know how to navigate file systems
that's a thing we see with gen z especially nowadays, because of the advent of tag-based file management in iOS.
Look at all these rich people in the comments with their car stereos that could play CD-RW. Some of us were lucky to have one that would play CD-R 80% of the time, and it was completely brand agnostic.
I got a JVC head in like 2002 that could play MP3 cds. I was the king.
To be fair, CD/DVD burning peaked and declined extremely quickly in comparison to most other media technology. We went from nobody having a CD burner to most people ditching DVDs for blu ray and/or streaming in what, 15 years?
“Lasers”
Many monks would spend months on illuminating just one CD.
I'll never forget the chant:
"See-Dee Rahm, See-Dee Aye, See-Dee Are Plus, See-Dee Are Minus, Are Double-yew."
CD-RWs were truly the flash drives of their day
I legit never reused a CD in my life. With how cheap CD-R was, I'd just buy a spindle and burner go brrrrrrrr.
In fairness to this post, I’m old enough to have asked this same question on the other end lol.
It was so popular you could walk into a Walmart and buy blank cds and put it into most computers that have a cd drive in the last 15 years and write it from Windows Media Player.
Even today you can still do it for cheap. USB external CD drive with write capabilities: $18.99
50 Blank CDs, $16.60 https://www.newegg.com/verbatim-52x-700mb-cd-r/p/N82E16817507007
If you wanted to write to a CD more than once you could buy CD-RW's which had the ability to be formatted (wiped clean) and used again.
The hardware to write disks was so cheap it became standard. The cheapest of laptops or desktops would have the ability built in. example:
$168.99 - Cheap junk computer from Walmart (I would not recommend that computer, just figured it would show just how cheap a computer gets that has it built in) https://www.walmart.com/ip/Dell-Latitude-E5420-Laptop-Intel-i3-WiFi-DVD-CDRW-250GB-Win-10-Professional-HDMI/376791632?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=100001344&gclsrc=aw.ds&&adid=22222222228376791632_100001344_153828919326_20723081503&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=679332641651&wl4=pla-2235097983966&wl5=9013636&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=129884431&wl11=online&wl12=376791632_100001344&veh=sem&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAy9msBhD0ARIsANbk0A_ZhAcoOfd9b3WACPKd_QXPuq3NIZoFnxorRXOK1Xx-CwQz7SO1jSAaAlfhEALw_wcB
Wait until they find out there's a difference between DVD-R and DVD+R.
We took a magnifying glass and very carefully burned in the 0s and 1s by hand. /s
The back half of millennials might not have burned CDs either.
The iPod came out in 2001, my first car I played music with a cassette-tape to aux converter and a first or second Gen iPod, my second through a USB stick plugged into an aftermarket deck I bought from Walmart. Music downloaded from Limewire.
When I was a kid I had two radios.
One with a cassette player in it that had a mic built in for recording. I found it in the trash.
The other was a small FM/AM alarm clock that was dangerously hot at all times and had a noise as it was an analog clock with the little cards that flipped and the such. My opa gave it to me when he said it got too hot for his liking.
It was not long before I had figured out that if I played the radio really loud on the clock, the cassette mic would record the songs onto whatever tape you had. Be it blank, or with tape over the security gaps on the top, any tape will do.
Hardest part was the timing to start and stop the tape. And making sure you were in as close to total silence as possible as the mic picked everything up.
Even if the hot buzz of the alarm clock motor fighting to flip into the next set of minutes would make it on the tape, the recording/welfare piracy continued. It was the sneezing/siblings walking in/parents making ugly sounds that were the worst as you'd have to stop the tape, rewind to the part of the tape you were using, and wait for the radio station to play the song again, so you might be able to try and tape it again.
I just saw a post on Reddit two days ago that said "During the 80s, did kids really just go outside and run wild for hours or is that just in the movies/TV?" and the same feeling hit haha
I remember many years ago when I was going through a box of my burned CDs and games and realized I could just download any of them whenever I wanted. Plus my computer didn't even have a CD/DVD drive any more. End of an era.
I've got a nearly 20 year old cdrom drive that just keeps getting transfered from build to build because you never know. I don't think I've opened in like 3 years... I'm gonna see if it still does real quick.
Ok it does but there was a driver cd for a motherboard I don't own anymore in it.
You had to put it in the toaster while the songs you wanted to record were playing on the radio.
Why burn it when you can spin it on a Dremel until it explodes from centrifugal force?
I just bought an external CD/DVD read/write. When I built my most recent PC it didn’t have external bays, and I didn’t even worry about it. Changing my tune.
I have a lot of older games on CD, music files, and movies.
The games I actually own, that can’t be randomly shut off by lack of support. Music files not tied to a streaming service. Movies I can rip and put on my own home media server.
That old tech is still useful. It’s from an age before you “rented” your music, movies (blockbuster notwithstanding), and games.
I mean I just bought a cd DVD burner. I have a ton of blank DVD and a blank cd to burn songs for my dad. It is still nice to own a physical copy of something.
I'm glad I no longer have to be concerned with Nero. But there were many alternatives after a while. This one was my favorite: https://www.imgburn.com/
Lol not like any of us actually know how it works, just push the button and the magic lasers make it happen 😹
The only rule was was to use ALL of the 700mb. I paid for that 800k, you bet your ass I'm gonna use it.
There are people who don't know what a vhs is, and I'm not old and have used multiple. The fuck?
I remember being the first person anyone knew who had a deck to deck burner, it was a Teac, TDK, or a Kenwood, don't remember that well. I didn't have a computer of my own at the time and was bootlegging discs for all of the people in my friends group. Everyone would bring their own spindle of blank discs and we would drink and swap discs until we either went out to go party or until everyone had copies of what they wanted. Eventually I got a few more burner decks to make things quicker, and then I sold off the extra decks to friends before moving away. Not too long after the devices were completely useless as everyone started having a burner built into their PC and just about everyone soon had a PC, still sold my last burner deck for more than I bought it for.
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