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.”
There was a program call “Nero burning ROM”. A pun I understood much later
Well fuck me, that’s a name I haven’t heard for close to 20 years and it didn’t twig until just now.
Ah fuck, I remember Nero, and I know why it is called Nero (because Nero and the burning of rome), but I never connect the ROM to ROME.
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.
The boomer in me still remembers Nero Burning ROM 😬
In fairness to this post, I’m old enough to have asked this same question on the other end lol.
It was so popular you could walk into a Walmart and buy blank cds and put it into most computers that have a cd drive in the last 15 years and write it from Windows Media Player.
Even today you can still do it for cheap. USB external CD drive with write capabilities: $18.99
50 Blank CDs, $16.60 https://www.newegg.com/verbatim-52x-700mb-cd-r/p/N82E16817507007
If you wanted to write to a CD more than once you could buy CD-RW’s which had the ability to be formatted (wiped clean) and used again.
The hardware to write disks was so cheap it became standard. The cheapest of laptops or desktops would have the ability built in. example:
$168.99 - Cheap junk computer from Walmart (I would not recommend that computer, just figured it would show just how cheap a computer gets that has it built in) https://www.walmart.com/ip/Dell-Latitude-E5420-Laptop-Intel-i3-WiFi-DVD-CDRW-250GB-Win-10-Professional-HDMI/376791632?wmlspartner=wlpa&%3BselectedSellerId=100001344&%3Bgclsrc=aw.ds&%3B=&%3Badid=22222222228376791632_100001344_153828919326_20723081503&%3Bwl0=&%3Bwl1=g&%3Bwl2=m&%3Bwl3=679332641651&%3Bwl4=pla-2235097983966&%3Bwl5=9013636&%3Bwl6=&%3Bwl7=&%3Bwl8=&%3Bwl9=pla&%3Bwl10=129884431&%3Bwl11=online&%3Bwl12=376791632_100001344&%3Bveh=sem&%3Bgad_source=1&%3Bgclid=Cj0KCQiAy9msBhD0ARIsANbk0A_ZhAcoOfd9b3WACPKd_QXPuq3NIZoFnxorRXOK1Xx-CwQz7SO1jSAaAlfhEALw_wcB
I’m old enough to remember a time before CDs existed.
