Comment on Are those of us who grew up on older games more attuned to latency?

• Redredme@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Oh, you sweet summer child…

  Up to the 90s my friend. Then 3.5 floppy"s took over (1.44 MEGAbyte!) then came zip (100MB) but only for rich people, then it became the era of CD and later dvd burning. Internet was not measured in mbits back then and most of the time not even in kbits. The internet was not a valid delivery system. It was slow and very expensive. Also the first memory cards (CF) around the millennium and from there it went on to the 10s and around there you got the pivot to what we have now.

  Tape is still around in computing; its cheap, it’s cheerful, dependable and has quite a throughput. Seeking on it is still horrible though. But anyway, watching a real mechanised tapelibrary do it’s thing backing up computer systems is still mesmerizing.

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  • FigMcLargeHuge@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You left out 5 1/4 floppy disks that were actually floppy. Yes, I know there are 8" floppies but those were mostly business use and specialized drives that you didn’t really get in the home computer market. Atari, Commodore, Radio Shack, etc all had 5 1/4" floppy drive, and when I got my first box of floppies, it was $50 of early 1980’s money for 10 disks. And on my Atari they held about 90K wroth of space.

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• Acamon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Not only on tape, but some radio shows would transmit computer programs that you could record and use. I know of the UK and Finland, but I think other European countries did it too.

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  • bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Definitely also a thing in Germany. Alongside magazines printing source codes of games for you to type off.

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• Jrockwar@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  The generation of Amstrad, Spectrum etc had the games on tape. I would say they were the closest thing to a console pre-NES, so 1980s. I had an amstrad that was handed down to me by a friend of an older sister and it had tapes like this.

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• Hawke@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Late 1970s / early 1980s.

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• bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  C64, for one!

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• jordanlund@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Atari 2600:

  en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starpath_Supercharger

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  • Redredme@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Nobody had this, it was way too expensive for what it was. Everybody just kept saving for a msx or Commodore and skipped this.

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    • jordanlund@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I had one, I had the tape drive for the Commodore 64 as well.

      The Supercharger back in the day wasn’t that expensive, about $70 or the price of 2 games, because you had to supply your own tape player, the supercharger just connected to it with a wire.

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