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Comment by 1123581321 | Hacker News Reader

Always enjoy Raymond Chen's musings.

My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder. Awesome song that kicked off a love of the blue album, Pinkerton and the green album. (I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day.)

We'd heard of Happy Days, but we didn't know if the show was like it was portrayed in the video. We may have thought the band was from Wisconsin. I don't think either of us ever became Happy Days fans.

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> My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder.

This was a common experience back then, you got ahold of some new "piece of software" and you started discovering new stuff in it.

My fondest memory ever is one day in February 2001 browsing through the Windows 98 Add/Remove Windows Components dialog and realizing I could install the same Desktop Themes I remembered from like 1996 from my friend who had been lucky enough to have Plus! for Windows 95 (which had, years before, disappeared from his computer in that endless virus/reinstall cycle that characterized those times). Next day I showed the themes to said friend and we were speechless.

It was this promise of endless discovery that made me want to study CS.

I want to give a huge shout out to the UK magazine PC Format for the most absolute banger 90s magazine CD that I ever encountered.

It didn't just have Demos of new games, if you poked around you'd find that it had "this cool program called Scream Tracker 3" and a whole bunch of these ".MOD files" that played music that sounded like a CD![0]

[0] - Well, it was the 90s, and typical bundled multimedia speakers were so bad you couldn't tell the difference...

At their best they had an exceptional amount of demoscene / game development content overall, as well as several full (usually "previous") versions of various creative software like 3D modeling or photo editing apps.

Later on with the Internet biting into the cover disk magazines, they started to steadily fall towards the lowest common denominator and shift to the gamer lad segment. But I wouldn't have had as much fun with computers if it wasn't for a subscription back in the day. Thanks for the reminder.

mod files include their own samples, so they could have very easily been (close to) CD quality while still being quite small.

You only need to encode the notes you play on the instruments you use.

> I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day.

What kind of college doesn't allow students to leave for lunch? Lord.

Probably a US high school, where off-campus lunch is usually reserved for older students.

That's fine...never heard high school grounds referred to as a campus before so assumed college.

This is fairly common in warmer climes in the US like California. Rather than have a monolithic high school building with lots of wasted space for hallways they will have a bunch of smaller buildings that students go between outside. They are "campuses" in the same sense that various tech companies call their cluster of buildings a "campus".

I remember watching a TV show set in socal (Beverly Hills 90210 maybe?) in the late 80s I think? And them having high schools and even lockers outdoors just blew my mind.

The climate makes it work. I wish it was like that for my high school, but alas we just had the stifling building.

High school ... 20+ years ago probably

That's fine...never heard high school grounds referred to as a campus before so assumed college.

Others covered it. This was high school, not college. :) it was upperclassmen only and your parents or bad grades could get the privilege revoked.

School grounds are also commonly called campuses in the US, not just colleges. Our high school called it “off-campus lunch”.

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