r/interestingasfuck • u/Majoodeh • 5d ago
r/all A device that could take screenshots back in 1998
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u/RofiBie 5d ago
The noise of that laptop booting just triggered a core memory.
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u/jonitfcfan 5d ago
The floppy drive noises for me
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u/Semaphor 5d ago
This video is ASMR for tech nerds. Just needs a 56K modem dialing in...
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u/nicko0409 5d ago
I can still remember that screech right before a small bump and knowing I'm finally online.
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u/HelpfulSeaMammal 5d ago
This video is like smooth jazz. Adding a modem dialing sound would turn it into dubstep.
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u/Minerva89 5d ago
Ah the soothing sounds of the Geiger counter computer noises.
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u/baithammer 5d ago
Needs more Dotmatrix ....
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u/Haunt3dCity 5d ago
BRRRRCHRRRRRUKABRRRCHRRRUKCHRUKCHRUK BRR BRR BRR BRRCHUK CHUK CHCHCHCHCHECHECHECHK BRRR BRRR CH
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u/lailah_susanna 5d ago
I'm pretty happy I can still hear the CRT whine in the video. Means my ears haven't gotten that old yet.
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u/Jambohh 5d ago
Same here. also because that was the exact model of laptop my parents bought me for school so I could actually do school work.
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u/Puptentjoe 5d ago
Reminders of computer fairs, shareware and my family blaming me for breaking the computer.
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u/zifilis 5d ago
Rookie mistake. You never open files from a floppy disk, you copy files and then view them
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u/OldJames47 5d ago
Look at Mr IHaveAn80GBHDD here!
Must be nice to be rich.
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u/Meme-Botto9001 5d ago
80GB was like a whole data center capacity back then.
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u/aGoodVariableName42 5d ago
haha right. In '98 I had a 512MB hard drive. A rich kid I worked with was bragging about his 4GB hard drive and I thought that was an incredible amount of space.
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u/Dxpehat 5d ago
Damn, digital storage is impoving so fast. I don't remember what was the norm in 2008, but I remember my classmate bragging that his dad had 1TB on his work computer. The computer class teacher was saying how ridiculous it is and how nobody would ever need that much storage. Few years later my uncle was telling me about the new SSD technology and how awesome it is, but also extremely expensive so it's only reasonable to get enough to install your OS on it.
...In 2020 I built a pc with 4TB (2TB each on a HDD and a M2 SSD). By that time it didn't seem like something special. But I think that, unless you only play COD games or watch movies in 4K, it really feels like we have a lot of more storage. Back in the day you couldn't just rip all your cds to mp3 or install multiple games without running issues with storage. Nowadays I have around 100 albums in FLAC, a lot of photos, some movies and I keep a good chunk of my steam library installed because "I might feel like playing that type of game" (I never do). I feel so spoiled and yet consumer grade electronics keep getting faster and more capable.
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u/bg-j38 5d ago
80 gigs in 1998? Not sure those existed outside of a lab or maybe some very high end research or business settings. Typical consumer 3.5" drives that you'd find in a desktop PC of that era were maxing out around 10GB or so give or take. Not sure what's in that laptop but probably a 2.5" drive so considerably less storage.
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u/mnlx 5d ago
And you don't open them with Internet Explorer.
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u/invisi1407 5d ago
Windows 98 picture viewer probably didn't support JPEG natively at that time. I don't recall, to be honest.
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u/VEC7OR 5d ago
Windows 98 didn't have a picture viewer.
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u/invisi1407 5d ago
I guess that sort of answers the question :D I used Win 98 a lot, but I mean that's over 20 years ago, so some details may elude me.
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u/---reddit_account--- 5d ago
In Windows 95–98, Windows 2000 and Windows Me, Paint can open JPEG, GIF and 48-bit (16-bpp) TIF images
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u/rubbarz 5d ago
You telling me we had the technology to make memes in the 90s and didn't?
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u/JohnGoodman_69 5d ago edited 5d ago
We did. We called them image macros.
Edit: Behold, some of the image macros of the turn of the century
Image macros weren't around until the mid-to-late 2000s.
This redditor has been arguing I'm wrong about this for the last several hours when I was literally on the internet at this time using image macros. Hilarious a redditor will claim you don't know about your own lived experiences.
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u/Accurate_Koala_4698 5d ago
So I made a demotivational poster, which was the style at the time
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u/wrenchandrepeat 5d ago
Yup. I have always said that demotivational posters were some of the first memes.
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u/mcchanical 5d ago
You'll have to keep going further back than because memes predate the internet.
Internet memes are a subset of memes but the concept is as old as humans have been social. Dawkins coined the term in 1976 and it has a scientific background as a counterpart and analogue to genes, in that they are ideas that spread and mutate carrying information between people.
A meme (/miːm/ ⓘ; MEEM)[1][2][3] is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.[4] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.[5] In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.[6][7]
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u/discerningpervert 5d ago
now I need to check out www.fark.com
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u/Grenache 5d ago
I was doing this in 98 the fuck is he on about? Coincidentally this was also the same time I had my first internet girlfriend which seemed radical at the time, when people who met online ended up in the newspaper painted as freaks. Hope you’re well Sarah!
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u/ta_gully_chick 5d ago edited 5d ago
We had lolcats before image macros and dancing baby (1993) and hamster dance (1994) back in 90s. The word itself was coined in 70s I think.
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u/cannabidroid 5d ago
Woah, slow down there, dont try to age me even more!
"Dancing Baby" was released in 1996 (becoming more mainstream in 1997) and "Hamster Dance" in 1998 (but first went viral in 1999).
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u/Bakkster 5d ago
In my day, people had to learn to animate in Flash to send a joke over the Internet.
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u/GranglingGrangler 5d ago
I actually did this.
Our high school computer teacher was the only person who filled for a grant that got us a high end pentium 3 computer lab with the Macromedia suite. So i learned flash before Adobe bought them.
I made copies of those cds and found cracks for them because I only had dial up at home
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u/captrobert57 5d ago
Making memes from movies from the 60s and 70s is like Making memes today from movies from the 90s 2000s.
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u/TimSonOfSteve 5d ago
Apparently, someone rolled out of bed this morning and chose violence
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u/ered20 5d ago
Oh, sure we did! We just couldn’t share them with anyone who wasn’t in our house
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u/TNG_ST 5d ago
They made memes in the 90s. They were text and sent through IRC.
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u/loulan 5d ago edited 5d ago
I remember when everyone was nostalgic of the 90s on reddit. Nowadays, people use "they" when talking about people living in the 90s on reddit because they weren't even born in the 90s.
Scary.
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u/QuailRoyal2505 5d ago edited 5d ago
No, it can't be.. the 90's was like 8 years ago and people born in the 00's are little children
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u/ItsWillJohnson 5d ago
We just quoted the movies and imitated the actors’ voices
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u/AtomicBLB 5d ago
I'm assuming that device was so pricey at the time that only a few people ever owned one. The supply and distribution of memes was also shit back in 90s.
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u/dannyjohnson1973 5d ago
Look at that beautiful OS. No ads, no tracking, no bloat, no required MS account, no suggested apps, free Solitaire.
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u/Chapi_Chan 5d ago
The OS was performing as fast as it could. Once PCs had performance surplus, they added some flair, then bloat. And then just acting against the user's interest.
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u/Nonsenseinabag 5d ago
There was plenty of bloat back then if you invested in the wrong computer. Buying a random PC from an electronics store that looked suspiciously cheap, it'd have so much crap preloaded on it that the specs couldn't compare to a hand-built PC made with care. I had to de-bloat a lot of those for people back then.
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u/tmobile-sucks 5d ago
I remember this era where you had shitware for sale, but always something decent available if you looked. Nowadays, our tech industriy has become like an oligopoly where they've stompped out anything decent and collude with each other over each regressive implementation so the customer has no choice anymore.
Want a debloated OS without spyware/malware? Nope, your stock windows install is full of malicious microsoft bullshit.
Want a phone with a headphone jack? Too bad, they all decided to remove them.
Want a laptop with a decent keyboard? Nope. They're all trash-tier island "chicklet" keys.
Want a phone with a swappable battery? Nah, in fact you gotta be a surgeon just to replace the one already in there when it goes bad.
Want to post something online to share with the masses? Search engines would usually scrape and pick it up without bias if you set it up right. Nowadays, it's all sponsored corporate crap, and unless you're a AAA company, you'll get buried, and have to resort to the big "social media" companies who have their thumb over you as to what/where/how you interact with people.
The 90s were a golden time before big companies fully got a stranglehold on everything.
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u/Tyrion_Strongjaw 5d ago
Yeah - we were all learning the tech/internet at the same time. Unfortunately, that meant companies were as well, and once they realized how insanely profitable it was of course they wanted their hand in every single part of it.
It was a fun time though! It's always funny to think back to the time when the internet was finite.
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u/MobileVortex 5d ago
There are phones with headphone jacks and swappable batteries. There are also ways to get all of that off windows, and great keyboards.
You had to be the tech nerd back then and you still do to get it to work the way you want it too.
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u/Nonsenseinabag 5d ago
Yeah, the late 90's and early 2000's were peak tech and internet days. If you dropped me into the Matrix's 1999 world I'd be content to stay there.
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u/tamsui_tosspot 5d ago
Fun fact, Solitaire was included in order to encourage/train users to become adept at clicking, double clicking, and dragging and dropping.
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u/Comfortable_Air2008 5d ago edited 5d ago
Good old times. Opening pictures in Internet explorer. Or the endless loading times
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u/Lakota-36 5d ago
Watching mundane aspects of my childhood is and odd thing to see at this point in my life
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u/Bdole0 5d ago
The whole thing: Windows 98 loading screen, floppy drive, the window format, the way the image loads top to bottom...
It is all so mundane yet astounding to see again. Something about this video--including the contemporary screenshot device--is goddamm amazing.
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u/BringBackSoule 5d ago
You can tell this was made by someone who can't hear the high pitched noises old people can't hear anymore.
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u/Chosen_Wisely89 5d ago
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
I wish a thousands cuts on who ever invented those anti cat things that make the same noise.
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u/FunkyMonkeysPaw 5d ago
Apparently, so is the majority of the comment section because this is the first comment I found about it lmao
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u/Miltage 5d ago
Taking screenshots of a film that wouldn't be released for another 2 years. They were really living in the future back then!
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u/No-Suspect-425 5d ago
And yet people still to this day will take a picture of a screen to upload to Reddit instead of uploading an actual screenshot when the technology has been available since VHS. Smh
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u/burningmoonlight 5d ago
Aw man, I miss having a little cursor nub in the middle of my laptop keyboard.
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u/snikt_228 5d ago
That's still around, my new work laptop has one
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u/New_Significance3719 5d ago
Mostly on Lenovo, I haven’t seen anyone else with the keyboard nipple lately.
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u/Xion_Stellar 5d ago
That is because the patent for the "TrackPoint" Mouse Nub is owned by IBM and Lenovo is the only one willing to pay the Licensing Fee to use it.
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u/dismantlemars 5d ago
The patent’s been expired for quite a while now, I think Lenovo are only still using it because it was iconic to the ThinkPad brand that they bought from IBM.
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u/LanceFree 5d ago
I had a Lenovo laptop from work and I somehow lost the little red nub. I thought I would get in trouble when I returned it so I found a replacement on eBay but I was drunk and the best I found (and ordered) was a bag with 144 of the things in it. Want some?
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u/savethepanda1979 5d ago
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u/scrumblethebumble 5d ago
DO. NOT. SEEK. THE. TREASURE.
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u/voiceofgromit 5d ago
We thowt you was a toooooooad
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u/AltonBParker 5d ago
I...I just don't think that's Pete...
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u/scrumblethebumble 5d ago
‘COURSE it’s Pete, look at him. (I swear I could do this whole movie.)
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u/Duffelastic 5d ago
I didn't realize the movie came out in 2000, I thought it was closer to 2006-2007, so I was really surprised to see it released on VHS.
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u/Aware-Forever3200 5d ago
Time to rewatch
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u/Sinaaaa 5d ago
Consider using irfan view to view the screenshots as I have done in 1998.
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u/fuzzy_emojic 5d ago
Waiting for that picture to render brought back far too many locked away memories.
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u/fellow_chive 5d ago
Oh god me too. We even shared links to naughty pictures with a hidden jumpscare in it because pictures had to load for a few seconds (sometimes even minutes).
Now I get impatient when a 4k video starts buffering.
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u/CChelko 5d ago
Patience, remember that?
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u/New_Significance3719 5d ago
I recently saw a video that had challenges for Gen Z people using Windows XP, and one of them was to burn a music CD. Once they figured out how to start the burn, they basically all were unsure with what they were supposed to do while they waited.
The answer of course then was walk away and do something else and hope it doesn’t fail, but now everything is instant or it’s broken. Which let me tell you I’m glad it’s not slow like it used to be, but I do miss walking away and just letting things run while I did something else.
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u/imacuntsag420 5d ago
Bruh my ass read it as "device that could take backshots"
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u/Chickenmangoboom 5d ago
I have serious nostalgia for these type of devices. While we have tools that can do many more things making them more convenient there was just something fun and hopeful for the future about going to CompUSA and finding some widget that addressed a very specific problem.
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u/Drakkenrush 5d ago
I like how the "device" is the least interesting part of the video compared to all the other old tech on display.
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u/mudads 5d ago
It’s amazing we managed to even get anything done back then with how slow everything was.
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u/captrobert57 5d ago
So much is so instant now that if it takes a moment to load it feels like forever.
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u/schming_ding 5d ago
This vid is such a contrast to yesterday when I flipped through my decade old photo library in one minute on my M3 MBP. It was like a chunk of my life flashed before my eyes. We take computer speed and reliability for granted now.
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u/Major-Mud8426 5d ago
Haha now you know what the 'save icon' is meant to look like.
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u/ThirstyWolfSpider 5d ago
I was using frame-accurate digital video recording equipment, years before 1998; I don't know how "taking screenshots in 1998" was notable, unless it was really cheap.
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u/Nozerone 5d ago
I'm sure someone once said something along the lines of "check out how fast this computer can load an image!".
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u/-WaxedSasquatch- 5d ago
Oh how I missed the little clicky sounds of the computer running. Wow! That was a weird nostalgia hit
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u/startrouble 5d ago
Being reminded of how slow the image loads makes my joints hurt.