Would love a technical explanation of how all that stuff worked by someone who did that kind of stuff in those days. In the old days I personally never saw anything bigger than a four line BBS. But I remember reading about that one in shareware README.TXT files

Wouldn't mind hearing war stories from the cdrom.com guys as well.

https://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9904/08/cdrom.idg/ and https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/wow-what-a-system-ftp... I'm not aware of any others with more details and war stories.

A couple Facebook Marketplace tabs that have videos of the item for sale would absolutely crush my 2017 MacBook Pro.

My M1 Air would slow down a little, but was still usable doing the same thing. And they both had 8GB of memory.

I wrote 99% of a large PHP app on an six year old laptop with a single 17" LCD. Meanwhile, at my desk, I had a Dell workstation with 3 monitors at the time, but it was easier to squirrel away in a corner somewhere, undisturbed.

After all, the actual server ran the code, I just needed text editors, terminal windows, and web browsers.

I always wanted to like DVD-RW and CD-RW. But I just couldn't.

Cost. A couple dollars per disc, versus a couple pennies per disc for the one-time use.

Easily scratched.

They were slow. You could use a Syquest or Iomega 1GB drive, boot off it, etc. Basically as fast as a hard drive was.

They were compatible until they weren't. Plenty of issues trying to read those things on other computers.

Your grandma doesn't give you a $10 check for your birthday in Europe?

What about manufacturer rebates?

Europe is a big place, but my understanding is that the US is the outlier here and Europe is relatively similar in this regard.

The only time I really saw checks used was when I was a child ~30-35 years ago and my parents used them. I did once cash a check from an elderly relative, but that was very unusual and only happened once. I didn't even know it was still possible to do that, my reaction was more like if someone had handed me a stack of punch cards to run on my computer.

There hasn't been anything an average person used checks for in the last decades in Germany. Except a few elderly people, nobody uses checks and there are no rebates via checks at all.

I live in France and I still have to write a check here and there. Very minor, but still present.

Receiving a check however is even rarer.

To receive money from someone you can just give them your bank account number or if you both have Vipps or similar just your mobile telephone number.

Granny can always give you cash or just send it directly to you account in the same way.

Cash is still fairly common, and manufacturer rebates are basically not a thing. If they were, you'd send them an account number (IBAN = bank ID + account number at bank) to transfer the money to.

In fairness, manufacturer rebates have pretty much (mercifully) disappeared in the US as well as they were basically a scheme to mentally make you account for a lower price you wouldn't end up being rebated for various reasons.

I am in the UK and I have received two cheques in the last year, both for small amounts.

As it turned out, my bank rejected both because they were made out to [middle name] [surname] rather than [firstname] [surname]. Ironically the former is unique (probably) whereas they had another customer with the latter.

The last few manufacturer rebates I have gotten come in the form of a pre loaded Visa card

Visioneer paperport!

I wonder if you can use a webcam?

> Arent these basically minimum wage jobs? I mean throw a few dollars an hour on top of that, but there are plenty of jobs like this.

Getting rid of them isn't a good thing.

Entry-level jobs are important.

The labor zero hyper-efficiency maximalists aren’t going to like this one.

> I'm curious if anyone is going more rogue with their solution and using off-prem storage at a friend's house.

Have been doing this for 25 years.

If you have asymmetrical connections it's easiest to do the initial backup locally and then take your drive(s) to your friends house and then just sync/update.

At least when the USA did it they only had 75-100 million citizens doing the polluting.

Agree on the Touch ID. Love that feature for passwords etc.

Not terribly happy about the USB 2.0 port as well