Spent my childhood optimizing CONFIG

[artemis@climatejustice.social]

@fribbledom I hated that the guy in the electronics shop thought he had to explain usb stick sizes to me because I was a clueless old lady, not because my first computer had 16K of RAM and a cassette tape. 128 gig of storage the size of a car key blows my mind.

[alesroubicek@indieweb.social]

@fribbledom just starting Firefox on a Ubuntu machine with 4GB RAM mostly ends up with a crash. I remember times when I cherished the Firebird browser on my thumbstick and used it on whatever computer I was sitting on.

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

@fribbledom

what kinda socks we talkin about here

[popekingjoe@mastodon.social]

@fribbledom relevant

[brahvim@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@fribbledom ...More like 1,700 companies these days...

[roadskater@mastodon.social]

@syferdet @fribbledom In the future?

[deepfryed@fosstodon.org]

@fribbledom best part is the ads they show you won't be anything related to socks.

[scott@sfba.social]

@fribbledom ah! A happy childhood!

[yurkshirelad@mastodon.social]

@lord @fribbledom We care about your privacy. Here’s a list of our 970 partners.

[viharm@twit.social]

@fribbledom

well said

[jeroenvanbergen@mstdn.social]

@mtnrbq65 @Megawatt @fribbledom TSR

[dwardoric@chaos.social]

@GeePawHill @fribbledom Recently spoke with an old friend and he was like "I miss the days when I knew exactly why the activity led on my hard drive or floppy was flickering."
I agree.

[abmallgren@mastodon.social]

@fribbledom They don't have construction materials in Europe either?

[cy@fedicy.us.to]

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[abramkedge@beige.party]

@fribbledom remember, exTENDed memory TENDs to be useful, while exPanded memory is Practically useless.

Back in those days I regularly had to talk sewerage workers through editing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to get the data from their gas safety monitors to upload. There was only one editor guaranteed to be installed on their computers, edlin -- which could be a challenge.

Funny enough, unlike a few of our directors, not one of them had any problems following the instructions over the phone.

[fabrixxm@social.gl-como.it]

1320 cookies, at 20g at cookie it's 24.6Kg of cookies... that's a lot of cookies...

[fred@social.fthevenet.eu]

@fribbledom yeah... I think if I had to pinpoint a defining moment for my vocation as a professional computer toucher, teenage me successfully getting Wing Commander 3 to run would probably be it! (Damn you, Mitsumi CD-ROM drive!!)

[artwaw@c.im]

@fribbledom I feel very seen right now.

[boysenberrycider@mastodon.social]

@alesroubicek @fribbledom if you're interested, I set up xububtu on an old netbook with 1GB of ram, and found Firefox can still be really fast, but their current defaults blow chunks. Some of it is telemetry (and now AI), some of it is dumb choices. If you mess around with the settings it can easily be as fast as you remember.

I think from memory this is the guide I used:

https://linuxreviews.org/HOWTO_Make_Mozilla_Firefox_Blazing_Fast_On_Linux

Apologies for dropping in with unasked-for advice.

[dr_laemmerbein@mastodon.social]

@fribbledom Ah, it was nice to have that much time. And the occasional defrag run!