How old are you?

I was just thinking this the other day. I also remember that you had to open the mouse to clean it because the little internal rollers got tangled in grossness.
- And the balls in the mice at school would get thrown around the room/lost/stolen until the computer teachers glued them shut so you couldn't clean the rollers and it was almost impossible to use them
Our first mouse plugged into the serial port with a pass-through connector so you could still use the modem. There was a power adapter that plugged in there, too. Then you had to load the driver for the few programs that used it... though I think it also had a mode where it would work on a text screen, since so few program supported it. We didn't use it much.
This would have been on our IBM PC XT clone in the early 90s with 512k of RAM and a 5.25" floppy drive for storage. I don't think we used it with the PCjr we had before that, but I don't remember.
You were doing what with mouse balls?! Why would you even have those near your computer? even older dust
And having to clean those rollers…

This old.

"Coaxial mouse old" isn't a thing, gramps. I hate to tell you, but the senility's kicking in...
- It was to hook up cable TV to a TV that only had UHF/VHF.
devil horns

I'm no-keyboard-and-mouse-connector-at-all-because-keyboard-is-built-into-the-computer-and-mice-aren't-a-thing old.

I feel attacked

Apparently some of us are older than even the corpse....no mouse gang here.
- I got your VAX/VMS right here homie! (PTSD ensues)

8088 represent. 640kb should be enough for everyone.

640kb, what are you a millionaire?

“Press play on tape”

load, "
Wrrrrr

Huh. Toslink is in quotes like it's a coliquialism, but it's the actual name for that port.
- Maybe because it's sort of a brand name?
Jesus I’ve used every port on this image. I’m gonna go order my casket now before it’s too late.
They're missing the BNC connector. Our lab has equipment that still uses them to plug in test probes.
SP/DIF can't hurt you, SP/DIF doesn't exist
Lol listing adb and svideo differently
- They used the same shape but transmitted very different data. ADB was for peripherals, like mouse and keyboard
This picture was around when people using PCs would know what a ps/2 connector was. I'm not sure if the fact it calls usb3 future, ages the picture or makes me feel old for knowing a time before usb3.
- A time before... 2008???
Once I used a Mac serial cable to network 2 Macs directly together (classic Mac OS 9) so that I could play Marathon multiplayer mode with my brother. It worked and it was rad. 90s LAN party of 2
- You mean AppleTalk?

Still is! I rock many DIN-5 cables in my home studio for MIDI. You’re not joking when you say “you could rotate it until you got it with no guessing”, I have to do that every damn time.

Bottom picture isn't even that old

RS-422 is from 1975
- RS-232 was what PCs used and its from 1960.
- ... :(

I had to put my HDD in park position manually.

I don’t think I’m on the chart. First computer was a RadioShack TRS-80. 4 kb of RAM, but I upgraded to a blazing 8 kb. Yee-haw! No floppy discs: my programs were saved on cassette tape using a cassette recorder connected to the computer. Those were the days.

You had a TRASH-80?!? Amazing. I only got to play star trek on one at school.
Yah, and we had to wipe out the ram to load the program back in from the tape. And sometimes the volume wasn't set perfectly in the cassette player, so you lost all your work.
Good times?
This was me but with the Commodore Vic 20.

Member when you edited your ~~himem.sys~~ config.sys and autoexec.bat to play your game?

Remember when you had to navigate through DOS to start your game?
- Remember when you had to find a stick for stick and hoop?
- Remember when you had to make boot disks for games?
- Remember when you had a quickload cartridge in the expansion slot but not every game would be able to use it? And when you blew the video card pulling the keyboard too hard since they were all hot connections? I still haven't fixed that.
Ahh the good old days when you had to flip dip switches on expansion cards to avoid IRQ and address conflicts.
- Freaking sound cards sucked back then.
Config.sys actually. Himem was a line in the config.sys file.
- Oh, fuck. Right. config.sys! I'll return my old fart medal right away, sir.

In my day, the keyboard was the computer!

Time to get a Raspberry Pi 400 to get that feeling back!
Raspberry pi 400 gang?
- Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3
  128KB RAM, Z80 CPU, floppy disk drive.
Our first mobile PC was a Compaq Luggable.
Thing had two 5 1/4" floppy drives, a 4 Mhz processor, an 8" monochrome green monitor, and weighed 30 pounds. The keyboard was the lid that covered the screen and the drives.
We eventually upgraded it to have a 10 meg hard drive instead of one of the floppies.

Let's be real, usb-a is ancient now.

to be fair, Matt Damon ain't getting any younger
Yeah it seems like USB-C is overtaking A in a lot of applications
- It's a beautiful thing!
Still widely used

Rude

I feel attacked

So mid 30s = Crypt Keeper

Got it.

Ain’t nobody in their mid 30s ever even seen a DB9 serial port used for a mouse. I haven’t even used one for over 30 years and I AM as old as the crypt keeper.
- I'm 38 and I absolutely used a serial mouse and PS2 keyboard. Our first Pentium 120 used a serial mouse and PS2 keyboard from 1994 or so.
- I was in IT at a university you bet I saw it 😂
- The Commodore 64 was discontinued in 1994 and it used a 9 pin peripheral connector for things like mouse, joystick, etc.

I'm a musician and I send Midi all over the place pretty regularly. 5 pin DIN connectors are very much still a thing.

Edm crew represent

This meme is already outdated, we have USB c now.

Older. The C64 was my second computer. Or the third, if I count in the one I built myself, too.

That 1351 mouse could be adapted to run either serial or ps2. Which diapers do you prefer nowadays?

I feel personally offended by naaaaah, jk, I’m just gonna say that the first pc my dad bought was a Commodore 64 and he let me play some games on it 🥰

Radar rat race? I had that on a cartridge.
I spent way too much time playing Ultima IV too.
- I never knew about rat race!, had to google it and it seems fun 😄
  The one I remember the most was a game called tooth invaders, then Test Drive, and a game about space but I can’t remember its name.

My first PC was a 286. Learned to program on it

TI99-4a Keyboard built in; What's a mouse?
Learned BASIC on it. Thought I was going to churn out some rad racing games.
The first PC I got to use was an IBM PC Jr but I didn't get to own one until a 286 for that sweet Lotus 123 and Word Perfect action.

White and red live on in the audio world, but yellow is definitely in retirement now.

ZX81 owner checking in. No mouse and Bearley a keyboard. What did I win

Apparently, I'm dead.

Kids these days... 🙄

"Your computer came with a detachable keyboard?"
- I love my C128D!

TRS-80 gang assemble!

I had access to a model III in middle school, does that count?
- We'll allow it. 🤣

Raise your hand if this looks familiar…

LOAD “*” ,8,1

Back in my day we didn't have no fancy AT keyboard connector, the keyboard was part of the computer and that's how we like it.

this meme and the fashion world at large agree that I am a decrepit hag at 30 years old

Trust me people who use multiple monitors LOVE the VGA cable because it's +1 monitor on what usually would be only 1 HDMI slot, maybe 2 if you were lucky.

That’s serial not VGA right?
- Correct.
- CGA / EGA had an identical 9 pin connector, FWIW
  Editing to add: now that I'm thinking about it the connector pictured almost certainly is CGA / EGA since it's female and 9 pin serial ports are typically male.

Vic20 - C64 - Atari 2600 - Amiga 500 - 286 ... I actually don't even remember but it has a shitton of cores.

I just printed off this year's greeting cards via printshop via c64 emulator VICE.
Go me.
- Hah, that brings back memories.
- If you mean age, I'm in my 40s,.
- That's a lot of cores.

Radio Shack TRS 80 was my OG.

Ha my days spent retyping hundreds of lines of code from a brick of a book that came with it to end up spitting out errors!
Those damn , and . Got confused a lot.
I had no tape backup or floppy drive so lost everything at power down.
Loads of fun tho !

glances at MX518 on Max Payne mousepad

Fuck.

Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 here.

That bottom one is the C64 joystick port...
- That's a serial port, son.
- That's what I thought at first, too. The DIN connector on the right being the power supply connector, and the DSUB9 being the joystick port (one of them).
  BUT: In every C64 model I've seen, there is the power switch right between the DIN and DSUB9. Which, in the photo, is not. So it is not a C64.
  It could still be a joystick port, as DSUB9 was the most common joystick port form back then, before the DSUB15 commonly used on PCs for analog joysticks were a thing. Actually, serial ports back then used the DSUB25 connector. DSUB9 "reduced serial ports" came later.
  Another common use of DSUB9 was for VGA before the three-row DSUB15. The DIN connector was commonly used for audio but also (composite) video.
  My personal guess is that the bottom picture shows the video output of a computer, with the DSUB9 being an old-style VGA and the DIN being audio+composite video.

I’m 8-track tape in my first car old.

what if we go back to a time before there were ports for keyboards. a la atari 800

We're highlanders, apparently. I guess we make the zombies look young.

DIN and RS232 gang!

Thank you for actually calling it DE9!
A DB9 would have been 9 pins in a shell the size of a DB25 port!

We’re not dead yet.

I'm 40 and my first machine was a commodore sx64. I'm not old lol.

Your old in social media terms. Anyone over 35 is a literal dinosaur. I'm in the same boat.

Damn you kids and your newfangled RS232 connectors.

Um Young kid is actually USB-C now and it's a mobile device 😆

I'm off the bottom of the chart.

I am 50 (going on 29) and remember connections other than these in devices like the Commodore 64.

That 5 pin DIN was on the older C64s for the AV port. I had a newer one as well and they switched to an 8 pin variant. C64s also used similar DIN connectors for the power supply and disk drive.

I remember my school getting our first PCs in the library around the time the Columbia went up the first time. We thought the future was then. Little did we know...

Our family's first computer was an Acer Anyware, 386 with a greyscale display. We had a serial trackball for it.

Ahhh, the good ol' days playing Wumpus - "I smell a Wumpus!" - or "Adventure" - "It is dark. You may be eaten by a grue." Went through rolls of paper in the old teletype.

I love that most of the commenters are older than the oldest example in the meme.