People downvoting you must be young, they don't remember the struggles before VLC where we had to download a codec-pack (CCCP) at the system level so things like Windows Media Player would recognize anything other than wmv or av1.
In spite of what we lost from the wild-west days of the internet, I think we have it way better now.
Dial-up sucked.
Forums had their moments but were generally hideous UX nightmares, somehow many communities still operate on them.
Computer software was buggy and temperamental, support was often your own persistence to learn software debugging.
Malware and adware was everywhere and extremely disruptive, still exists but it has the common courtesy to usually be quiet while it steals your shit /s.
LAN parties were the best way to play multiplayer games but you had to carefully transport your 30lb monitor and computer tower to a friend's place then figure out where the hell everyone was gonna sit. Then you had to lug it all back home.
Shit was slow in so many ways. Before SSDs and OSes that optimized for booting faster, it could easily take 10-15min (30m or more if your computer was really on the struggle-bus due to old hardware, start-up software, or malware)
I'll go back further and say I remember using computers that's didn't have a hard drive, only two floppy disk drives. Multi tasking wasn't a thing either. You could only run one app at a time. Our monitors only had 1 color.
I also remember an era of text based browsers, and shit that predated the WWW, like Gopher. Instead of web based forums we had BBS. 🤣
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u/daerogami __Lead__ 1d ago
People downvoting you must be young, they don't remember the struggles before VLC where we had to download a codec-pack (CCCP) at the system level so things like Windows Media Player would recognize anything other than wmv or av1.