You kids never experienced the pain of setting shit up in DOS/Win 9X
My (newest) desktop PC built in 2001 ran anything 95 to XP SP1 perfectly, and with some mental flexibility DOS/3.1(1) to SP3 -- using a past verb since HP had the clever idea of removing drivers and documentation for most of their stuff from that age and who knows where are the CDs I backed them to
Even ME wasn't that bad - before you start adding drivers for then-sub-$200 products, of course!
if you didn't had a crossed ethernet cable, you had to use a switch\hub to do a lan party with your friend, manually setting up your ip addresses,then have to use that addresses in the games
What's old about that, to be honest?
It's been the norm for directly connected 2-player Minecraft back when it still was popular
Or when all the non-iPod MP4/MP5/MP∞ players needed an exotic video format to play on a 1.5" screen. Those were the days.
AMV and MTV, more like slideshows (optimized for absolute minimum processing power = BMP or JPG and WAV)... got one of those players as a gift but never got the "Chinese" aka all question marks converter to work -- besides, a DS with Moonshell had loud speakers, way better colors, and an equally crappy video format that at least worked
so the motherboard has a ton of debug LEDs
Nerf this!
Oh wait, newer laptops (if they have any useful LED at all) have them in disgusting blue or white
I remember using early wireless routers or usb wifi receivers and they had terrible range (sometime around 2006 ish). I even recall using tin foil or soda can cutouts to focus/increase range. It wasn't until years later (I'd say 5 or 6) until they improved wifi standards and made better tech available at cheaper prices. But man... It was a blessing to see a strong unsecured wifi access point (even in your own home). Pokemon GTS trading was absolutely necessary as a kid.
I actually bought a PCMCIA wifi card in 2005 (the high end model with hardware accelerated WEP) to play Mario Kart online... never got it to work, but I bypassed the issue courtesy of my neighbor...
A couple of years later, with a brand new Vaio (in retrospective the worst PC I owned due to those infamous Nvidia failures but let's be grateful to my parents which spent 2000 cucuzze on it) and its 3-antenna Intel 4965, I was on the 6th floor of this building (higher than any others in the line) and I could see the network of
a camping 2 towns away! It didn't actually work but it was very cool...
Unrelated but back to the former computer, my friends and I spent the previous summer doing real work on that one - namely, designing ball racetracks in Openoffice 1 and levels in Lunar Magic, too bad they've long been lost :/
Saving school data into floppy disks, and those damn things always corrupted your files when you needed them.
A PC magazine around 2003 (remember those? ads and reviews of stuff you wouldn't need, lame tutorials or editorials, at best 2 pages of tech support, but you only bought them for the yearly "365 registry mods for XP" books and monthly shareware CDs) had this tip:
"How can you improve the reliability of floppy disks?" "Throw the drive in the trash and buy one made in the early 90s, they don't make them like they used to"
and only as of this year I can confirm - decently kept old stock or current production (intended for retrocomputer fans and older but perfectly working music keyboards/CNC) is having more effort behind them, rather than when the format was for those too poor to afford CD-RWs and DirectCD (one of the stability disasters I mentioned above!!)