Owd Seth

Big fan of the fanzine. Not connected with it. Up the Vale.

[Owd Seth @Seth_Bottomley]

#pvfc

[Owd Seth @Seth_Bottomley]

@OfficialPVFC @TomPope69507931 Could’ve done with Popey this afternoon! Happy retirement, and let’s hope Vale do the decent thing and give you a testimonial.

[Adam @Adam_PVFC]

Hopefully the last time we see sherif… people’s standards really have fallen low if you want us to sign him. He is fucking dog shit #pvfc

[Owd Seth @Seth_Bottomley]

Sign Hernandez now. #pvfc

[exQUIZitely 🕹️ @exQUIZitely]

I know it's easy to discard gaming from the 80s, 90s, and even the early 2000s as nothing more than nostalgia viewed through rose-tinted glasses.

One aspect that often gets overlooked in that debate is actually based on facts, not just overly sentimental nostalgia.

Having a computer and wanting to get the most out of it - and sometimes even just to get it working at all - required you to be far more invested, curious, and hands-on, so maybe that's why anyone who experienced that era feels a stronger connection to it.

You had to read up on things, learn, and tinker with both software and hardware. If you had a PC in the 80s or 90s, it wasn't a "one and done" purchase. There was constant upgrading: swapping out a crappy sound card for a better one, replacing a small/slow hard drive, installing a CD-ROM drive, doubling your RAM from 1 MB to 2 MB… the list went on and on.

It meant installing and updating drivers so everything actually worked. It meant understanding compatibility issues - all without the internet in the early days - so you relied on magazines, manuals, and friends who had "been there, done that."

And that was just the hardware side. Then came the software: getting drivers, configs, and setups tuned perfectly so you could squeeze every last bit of performance out of the machine. Some games simply wouldn't run unless you freed up those final kilobytes of conventional memory.

There was even a whole industry built around "managing your PC" with tools like Norton Commander and countless others.

These days, there is...

No more fiddling with AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS files.

No fine-tuning HIMEM.SYS.

No IRQ conflicts with your sound card.

No more boot disks.

Juggling hard drive space? Forget it - drives now come in terabytes, not megabytes.

Dealing with a 5.25" floppy, a 3.5" floppy, and a CD-ROM drive all crammed into one case? What a drag.

Saving up for that shiny new VGA card to replace your old EGA? Not a thing anymore.

And yet, if you ask older gamers who lived through the 80s and 90s, most of us actually enjoyed customizing and troubleshooting our machines. It was part of the experience - part of the joy and excitement.

Sure, it involved plenty of trial and error and frustrating "OMFG, why isn't this working?!" moments… but when it finally worked, the reward was so much sweeter.

Finally freeing up those last couple of kilobytes of your 640K base memory? Glorious.

Replacing that pathetic PC speaker with a real sound card? Pure ecstasy.

To all you old-school gamers out there, I hope you experienced it the same way. I always felt that the need to tinker endlessly made the whole experience more rewarding. You were more connected to your machine and understood it on a deeper level.

These days, you just click a button and the game downloads and installs itself.

I have a modern PC, of course. It's been over 20 years since I last had to do any real tinkering. That's convenient, sure… but the magic and curiosity is gone.

[Owd Seth @Seth_Bottomley]

Darren Beckford. #pvfc royalty.

[When Football Was Better @FootballInT80s]

1982 and a packed Wembley Stadium turned out to watch England Schoolboys draw 0-0 with Scotland Schoolboys.

[pvfcprogs @pvfcprogs]

#OnThisDay 12/3/96

PORT VALE 1, STOKE CITY 0
Bogie

Ian Bogie’s goal just 12 seconds after kick off, pictured, settled this Potteries Derby clash in Vale’s favour. It completed the double as Bogie’s goal also won the game at Stoke earlier in the season. Att 16,737 #pvfc

[Owd Seth @Seth_Bottomley]

There should be a world beating rendition of Steino is a Tosser at the quarter final. #pvfc

[brad @abradshaw45]

@OfficialPVFC @EmiratesFACup Half & half scarf for Mr Williams then.

[Football Away Days Club @AwayDaysClub_]

Proper old school turnstiles for the Sunderland fans at Port Vale today.

[Tony Scott @Tony_Scott11]

Port Vale in the FA Cup!!!
I'm still having nightmares of Ian Bogie!

[Kevin Maguire @Kevin_Maguire]

Hurts but congrats @OfficialPVFC who deserved to beat @SunderlandAFC today.

We didn’t perform. They did.

[BERNIE SLAVEN @bernieslaven]

PVFC

[pvfcprogs @pvfcprogs]

#OnThisDay 3/3/93

STOKE CITY 0, PORT VALE 1
van der Laan

Robin van der Laan’s 2nd half header saw Vale beat their neighbours in the Autoglass Trophy. It put Vale a giant step closer to a first ever Wembley appearance. Att 22,267 #pvfc

[Owd Seth @Seth_Bottomley]

@memechaotic Dream on lads…this is the boss.

[Owd Seth @Seth_Bottomley]

@pvfcprogs A classic Billy Bell official attendance figure…

[Owd Seth @Seth_Bottomley]

@AJ_Wood15 I’d be happy for him to leave. As a footballer he’s very limited. Poor first touch. Can’t hold the ball up like Stockley can. If Cole isn’t scoring then we tend to be carrying him. We should free up his wage and try to invest in more players this window.

[Owd Seth @Seth_Bottomley]

@TheValiants1876 I thought exactly the same!
It was somehow a metaphor for the current state of the club and how it’s being run.

[Retro Football Network @retrofootballnw]

On this day in 1988.

This is wonderful.

As they celebrated their 40th birthday, the start of Sports Report was shown live during Grandstand.

The music.

Peter Jones.

James Alexander Gordon.

Magic.

[Owd Seth @Seth_Bottomley]

@OfficialPVFC Great side. Beckford, Porter, McCarthy and Vanders deserve honourable mentions.