#hooray for USB peripherals!

[elkian]

Been having to remove and reset my computer setup at home over and over due to family quirks and it's been making me think of how far PCs as a notion have come in a short time. My dad has been a certified Computer Nerd since the 70s and we had a Home Computer in the 90s (just late enough to have a color display and mouse) and I recommend y'all take a moment to appreciate how easy some elements of PC setup and use are now.

Because it used to be that unplugging the mouse or keyboard meant you had to turn off the entire computer, plug it back in, and restart. Same for the monitor!

Forget tabs. Tabs weren't common until the 2000s. You got WINDOWS and god help you if you wanted to do anything else AND wanted a single webcomic strip to load.

Scroll wheels on mice (and more recently, headphones) straight up did not exist for a while. More than 2 buttons on a mouse was an absurdly wild concept.

And yes, the dial-up noise was real.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and when you wanted to go to a web site you HAD to type the "www." and the ".com". Browsers didn't autocomplete or understand how to send you to something without that exact input. I think originally you had to type the "http://" part too (this was before https:// afaik). If you did not input the URL correctly, the browser would not know what you wanted. Best case, it'd go ??? at you like a baffled dog. Worst case, you'd accidentally get sent to a porn page that'd immediately inflict 800 viruses on the PC. And home computers were called that for a reason - they were shared, and your family WOULD see where you'd been. Private browser sessions are a fairly modern invention. (Some of this is still relevant, hilariously enough.)

And if you wanted to save a website you had to remember, write down, or type into a document and save the address. The concept of a "favorites" (later just called bookmarking) was a late 90s-early 2000s one iirc and it was saved to your computer desktop, not the browser itself.

Anyways, not to 'uphill in the snow both ways' your day, just thinking of how much has changed.