Episode: 4606
Title: My Nerdy Childhood: From Floppy Disks to Dial-Up Dreams
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4606/hpr4606.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:01 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4606, for 2026-03-30
Today's show is entitled, "My Nerdy Childhood: From Floppy Disks to Dial-Up Dreams"
The host is Trollercoaster and the duration is 00:15:30
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Trollercoaster talks about his childhood and first years of nerdlyhood"
Yeah, it's gonna be one of those episodes.
An old fart telling you all to get off of my lawn
and be quiet about how terrible things are today
because everything was better in my olden time.
Everything was worse in my olden time.
So I'm gonna talk to you about my childhood.
Yeah, it was 1987 when my dad took me to Flonder Technology International
Flonder's aimed to be a technology hub for the world.
There were demonstrations of fuzzy logic.
As an 11-year-old, I could not wrap my head around that concept.
Actually, I still can't wrap my head around what it means.
Anyway, it's also here.
I first saw a guy moving a wooden block around
and a small arrow moved along the on the screen.
And that's when I decided.
If I ever wonder computer, it should have a mouse.
So the very next Wednesday, I walked over to the local computer shop
and there they actually had an Amstrad BC 1512.
And imagine, it had a mouse.
I asked if I could play a bit on their computer in the showroom.
The shop owners were so sweet, they allowed me.
And I also kept coming over the next Wednesday
and the next Wednesday afternoon.
And the next one.
And for roughly a year, the shop would be
my after school spot every Wednesday.
Then I spent hours there, playing with the computer,
drawing stuff in the gem windowing system,
one of the first commercially available cookies.
More than once, my mom asked me to tune down on going there
because I would certainly overstay my welcome.
And, and Patrick, the bosses at that place,
for some reason, grew soft spot for me.
Maybe because they saw my on the stfasination.
For sure, it was because all of the great things I created on those machines.
And obviously, my charming presence in the showroom
was invitation for the hundreds of other customers
that came hoarding in buying computers at the time.
Anyway, afterwards, they told me that they were a bit overwhelmed
by my shameless assumption that they didn't mind.
They were reluctant to send me home and expected me to buy a computer there.
Much sooner than I actually did.
And along that line, well, yeah.
That little 10-year-old had a certain charm, I guess.
By the time I had saved enough money,
the new machine in their showroom was the Schneider Euro PC.
This one had a whole computer built into the keyboard.
It was a coolest thing on the world.
I booted with the MS-DOS 3.3 floppy disk,
and then I had to start juggling.
Popped in the floppy with my old-time favorite game,
digger.
When I wanted to play with Spaceman,
I had to pop out digger and pop in Mrs. Spaceman.
No more needing to put money in the arcade, but there was the Durbo button on my PC.
And how I broke Miss Spaceman on my computer.
The game was written for a 4.77 megahertz machine
and my machine could go a whopping 9.54 megahertz
that actually wasn't the Durbo button.
It was a slow down button,
but I guess marketing didn't like that concept.
If I forgot to turn off the Durbo mode,
the average game lasted half a second.
But my first computer came with a bunch of floppys.
I already talked about the MS-DOS floppy
that I needed to boot my computer and some of the games I had.
Next was MS works 1.0,
the baby brother of MS office allowed me to write text,
have a tiny spreadsheet, and do some database things.
It secured my first summer job at the age of 13,
printing invoices for a nearby company.
Initially, I made the invoices with the typewriter.
I got paid like a viewbracks per invoice I typed,
making a bit of money every week.
I could get hit myself, I don't make a spritzard.
When I offered to take the invoices home
and bring them back when done,
the boss wasn't amused when I returned,
with the invoices roughly 15 minutes after leaving,
doing the work of a whole afternoon in a quarter of an hour.
Little did she know.
I worked multiple nights to write my little automation,
and soon enough they weren't willing to pay me the safe price anymore.
I guess that's where I learned my first marketing skills.
At the age of 14, I was very happy though, getting a bit less,
and didn't realize how important my skills were.
The other floppy I had was the one with GW basic.
So, I wrote my very first program soon after.
10, print, hello world.
20, go to 10.
And going forward from there, I took evening classes to their programming
and despite my young age, or maybe thanks to it,
I easily outpaced all the grownups in my class.
I felt like the computer expert.
I could do everything.
I was heamer.
And the master's of the universe.
Or one of the masters of the universe.
Games were such a great incubator for my computer skills.
But only did I learn about copy protection and how floppy's worked.
You really don't think I could afford buying all those games to you.
I mean, a game caused me a whole month of my allowance.
I also learned about memory management,
because the spite billgates back then thinking
that nobody would ever need more than 640 kilobytes of RAM.
I quickly coughed off the extra money to expand my RAM from 512 kilobytes to 768.
But that meant manually tweaking the boot procedure by editing the config.sis and auto-execute files,
because a high-members think, and unless you're my age,
you've probably already do stuff.
Maybe wondering, by now, what browser I was using?
Well, the internet doesn't exist yet.
The playing game required me to invite my friends and switch chairs
if you wanted to be in front of the keyboard.
Can you imagine that?
I could have also flipped out my Atari to 2600 and then pay in the videos.
But the computer wasn't playing on the side.
For starters, it was in my bedroom, and not in the living room,
and the Atari was way old.
We already had that for 10 years or so.
Another computer that's made strong impression on me was the Commodore 64.
Wow, the dead machine had cool sounds.
Those rough pixels didn't really matter for the gameplay,
and how that machine could pull all those games off with only 64 kilobytes of RAM.
That wasn't incredible.
Anyways, one special earlier that the C64 had on me when I was 12.
The big guys had their Commodore with a whole bunch of floppies with games on them.
And one set of games was for betting for us kids.
When I was outside, and then sneakily peeked through the windows,
Samantha Fox haunted my dreams for weeks, since that peek between the curtains.
Back then, there was no such thing as the internet.
All you had were floppies, computer clubs, back then, were popular places to treat floppies.
At the age of 14, we didn't wonder about the origin of software,
who just copied a troublemaker.
That's how I discovered all the great software, from RoboCath to Portland, Pascal,
all the serious things that you could use to impress your friends.
Never used them actually, but I had them.
We also exchanged cool games like Double Dragon 2, which was one of my favorite games.
And then there were those adventure games.
We all take pride in playing the Legend of Zelda, or Monkey Island.
Secretly, the most exciting adventure game was leisure suit of lazy Larry, looking for love in all the
games.
Friends told me how they could get cool games online, and also some of the stuff are
moms, and that's where it allowed to see.
So the next thing I stayed for was a modem.
And online doesn't mean the internet here.
It means dialing into a BBS.
It did a whopping 2,400 bought, or bits per second,
and often the first thing you need to have that need to happen,
was figure out if I had 7 database, or an apperity bit.
It took half an hour for me to get my animated panel and understand
they watch running over the beach.
It often paid off if I could sell them to my schoolmates.
One, or two pics on a floppy disk.
Yeah, a 720 kilobit floppy disk could hold 2 images if I was lucky.
The art was to dial up during off-big hours.
So in the weekends, and also after 8pm, all through the night.
I could convince my parents how during those hours connection was cheap.
Yeah, it really was compared to the other big hours.
We had for some reason my first month in dial-up cost my parents a quarter of a monthly income.
Somewhere over 10,000 Belgian francs.
But hey, at least I got 2,000 francs from all the floppy size sold at school.
Needless to tell, that moment that were furious.
Actually, no, they weren't.
They were too shocked to be furious.
When they asked me how I got such a big bill.
No way, at Earth, I was going to do it mid.
It was an Anderson who started up all my time.
Well, there's this simulator too that I had to download for school.
And I also let guilty to downloading some work to cartoons.
They had been saving up for a nice wristwatch for my upcoming birthday.
And well, let's say that my old casheo had to serve for a couple of years longer.
I promised to have a piggy bank next to my modem and throw money in the piggy bank every time I connected.
Suffice to say that my estimates never covered to the cost of the dial-up connections.
But that again, it was also their own fault.
If they would only just remember to not pick up the phone every time I was downloading my next picture.
It's their own fault.
I mean, they broke the connection.
It's their fault.
I can't help it. I was only 14 or something like that.
Anyways, those BBSs had forums.
And it was for the first time in my life that I was able
to communicate with the groups of people all around the country without having to stick a stamp on it.
Or my parents listening along. It was the first time that I developed friendships with people
whose real names I didn't know let alone their age, gender, or even where they lived.
And you know what? I didn't care.
So that was my first computer.
By the year 1990, I got fed up from juggling discs
and I started dreaming of a new computer.
Luckily, I had a nice summer job early on and could keep saving.
So I went looking for enough brand computer manufacturer
who could build me a mini tower with a real C-gate 40 megabyte hard disk in it,
running a 380 sticks SX and with a VGA card.
All of a sudden, I had 250 sticks colors and 640 by 480 pixels on my screen.
Instead of a of dos, the machine could boot in Windows 3.0.
I won't waste my time explaining what that Windows looked like,
but suffice to say, I no longer needed to type commands like X-copy, CD, or file name.exe to make something
I could just double click in the file manager.
But while they started the whole new era, it's also the end of an era.
By now, computers were starting to become mainstream.
It was in the following years, though, that I started reading about AOL in America
and how that was so much cooler than those BBSs.
Universities in Belgium had e-unit to communicate with other academics about news groups,
about IRC and how this was the wild wild west of the upcoming internet.
How I found a slackward disk that I couldn't figure out how to use.
There was no exe file on there and later learned that was a Linux distro.
There actually existed other operating systems, then dos and Windows.
But that's a story for one of you to tell.
I'm convinced, some of you will also have cool stories to tell.
Maybe your 10 years younger than me and the story of the internet is your childhood story.
Or maybe your 10 years older than me.
You could talk about your first personal computers, about the PDP, at your university,
or even about shared computer spaces.
Anyway, I'm curious to hear the story of your nerdy childhood, keep trolling, keep having fun.
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