I am everything you hate about people on the internet. I am here to help.

[Blacklight]

I am male, mid 20's and grew up with this technology.
Wondering what something means?
Wondering how to do something?
Wondering how your kids did something?
Wondering if you should let your kids do something?

Thats the one! Screaching the place down, the joy when we got a floppy disc drive, and only had to wait 10mins

Is it true that if you type 'Amazon' in to Amazon, then online ordering breaks?

I got my first email account when I moved to the UK for my PhD.
I still have a netscape email address. :) Probably the only one in the world.

My favourite game was Paperboy.

Or is that AliBaba? [helpless][very pretty in her helplessness]

Pd well binary not about so someone had too

I actually had a computer beginners course on MS-DOS with 5" floppy disk and we had to download the operating system every time we started the computer.

Janet yes! And Horace! Did anyone play Jetpac on the Spectrum?

I want to know just why Blacklight is here. I can't decide whether he's a troll or working up to some sort of advert. He's not very good either way.

Fucksake, it's taken me an absolute age to change the ribbon on my typewriter so I could write my reply...is the OP still here?

nevergoogle tbh your name is almost certainly better advice than any the whippersnapper OP can suggest to us old geeks :)

It's ok, Derek, you don't have to grow a penis (although I get these emails that offer to help in that department if you are interested?): we are equal opportunity haterz.
We hate you too, for the 'early 20s' thing alone

What a nasty lot of playground cows. Cos, yeah, there's nothing that anyone on an internet safety forum might want to ask is there.

derek me too!

Horace goes skiing - yup and Horace and the spiders

Such great sound effects. Modern computer games

Or it would be if you were advising against the dragon butter.

Other top internet advice is to think before you post.

Might need to grow a penis, can you help?

Maybe one of those 3D printers?

We had a BBC-B computer in the early 80s, that plugged into the TV in the living room as it didn't have a dedicated monitor, and was complete with screechy tape recorder. Wrote our own text-based adventure, although DB must have sabotaged it as I kept getting eaten by a monster .

Telnet, gopher, mosaic, and I remember when Netscape was the absolute be-all-and-end-all. And I can code html from scratch, none of this web page editing software malarky.

Do you know what a sock puppet is?

-sock puppet--

Derek, get thee to a dating site. I believe penis attachments are all the rage amongst young people :)

I'm so relieved there's a man here. I was beginning to panic a bit.

I first used a computer directly in 1977. I accessed it via one of those scary modems that you had to actually plug in - it was a mainframe running Colossal Adventure and a Star Trek game where you had to kill Klingons which I had to use a terminal to access.

Before that, I used to play with punch cards that my dad brought home from work.

Not long after that, I got a BBC B and started to write code of my own (I'd already played around with a Research Machine 380Z for a while. My mother taught computer science and brought it home at weekend while I was still at primary school. It had a great program on it for learning Finnish (still remember some of it).

I wrote a decent adventure game based on a 4 by 4 grid at the age of 9. When I was 9, in 1977, Mr Blacklight wasn't even a twinkle in his mummy's and daddy's eyes.

I would like him to either say something interesting or useful, or alternatively fuck off.

I find his assumption that mothers don't know anything about computers annoying, prejudiced and weird. Also, you know, blacklight, maybe it's just YOUR mum that's a bit ignorant of computers? The rest of us are doing just fine.