Microblog Memes

There was a program call "Nero burning ROM". A pun I understood much later

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."

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.

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.

In fairness to this post, I’m old enough to have asked this same question on the other end lol.

CD-RWs were truly the flash drives of their day

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.

You had to put it in the toaster while the songs you wanted to record were playing on the radio.

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.

even he knew

Why burn it when you can spin it on a Dremel until it explodes from centrifugal force?

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.

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.

Lol not like any of us actually know how it works, just push the button and the magic lasers make it happen 😹

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/

The boomer in me still remembers Nero Burning ROM 😬

There are people who don't know what a vhs is, and I'm not old and have used multiple. The fuck?

I'm old enough to remember a time before CDs existed.

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.

A lot of gen z knew/knows how to burn cd's.