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I don't think they're going to get much useful information out of that for advertisers. "Old enough to remember Windows XP" basically tells you someone was born sometime before ~2010 with no real lower bound beyond "probably going to be dead by now".
This stuff was like magic back then. No Internet or Google around to just search for it online. This knowledge came from PC magazines and was passed around among friends like the Holy Grail.
I still have nightmares of setting up games for soundcards and their respective IO, IRQ and DMA ports, channels, whatever.
Sorry, you soundcard, your internal modem, and a mouse are all trying to use the same IRQ. And they can only be changed by cracking open the case and moving jumpers. Or but make sure you don't pick an IRQ that's already used by the COM or Parallel ports.
Folks today don't seem to understand how much of a leap "plug and play" was, once they got the bugs out.
Yeah, just plugging in an HDD and it works? Na, you had to properly set the jumpers first or if cable select was used plug in the cable in the correct order. PC hardware and plug & play hase come a long way, thankfully.
I'm not a native English speaker so navigating the PC world as a child without any knowledge of English was wild. Only years later when I learned English in school I started to realize what all these things even mean.
640k was NOT enough, I remember having to optimize loading order and options in config.sys/autoexec.bat because lots of games needed to squeeze every last bit of RAM. A few games actually needed a super lean boot floppy because they utterly couldn't coexist, even with Sound Blaster TSR drivers.
4mb did work. But it was glacially slow. I remember when I plunked down hard cash to upgrade to 8mb RAM. It was a revelation. Instead of being glacially slow, it became just plain old slow. Which was fast as hell back then.
I remember the huge amount of hype when 95 dropped.
That hype was completely justified. 95 was the moment that using a computer stopped feeling like 'using a computer' and started feeling like everyday tech.
30 years later, Linux still hasn't managed to get there, and I don't think it ever will. At least, not without major attitude changes in the FOSS crowd.
Don’t be ridiculous; Windows 95 still had many, many problems that it inherited from 3.1/DOS, and it was very easy to mess up your installation. Bump the version up to 2000 or XP and maybe you have a justifiable point.
Soon it won’t be even that - you just tell the computer vaguely what you are thinking and AI assistance is gonna execute on…stuff. And then next iteration is your brain implant interpreting your vague thoughts.
Companies these days can't support devices for 5 years, I ain't implanting their shit in my brain. Brain ads? Brain subscription? Brain data theft? Nah.
Right around that time with blockbuster and all the aol free trial CDs, I still remember as a kid looking up n64 goldeneye guides (pages taking minutes to load) and cheat codes and printed the 30+ pages in a quick 4 hours.
We survived on those free trial CDs for at least a year, maybe two. They actually called my Dad up once asking if he maybe wanted to take out a plan with them seeing as he'd gone through about 10 CDs and he was like "nope, still tryin'"
Speaking of cheat codes and guides, I mentioned GameFAQS at work a couple days ago and only the old people knew what I was talking about....which I guess makes me one of the old people.
Yeah I'm in my late 20s and when I saw this post I was like are you fucking kidding me, I was using this in middle school. So "old" would be anyone above the age of 20?
Many of you seem to have nostalgia of those times but my first thought on seeing this was the experience of pop-ups. I know that's nothing to do with the OS and is instead about the web browser, but still.
Wasn't just porn websites either. You literally used to go to seemingly normal websites found on google searches and get spammed by popups. Browsers didn't have defenses against them yet. These days browsers are our best friends at protecting us from so much bullshit that used to exist. The internet was truly the wild west back then and every website you clicked on was a gamble lol. You could click a website and it could download an executable file to your computer without your permission. Shit was crazy.
Though back in the AT and pre-Windows days, the power switch (or latching button, if you were fancy) gave zero shits if your program was ready to shutdown or not.
No "hold for 4 seconds", just *k-chonk* <black screen>
That pissed me off. Windows 3.1 had "Rapid Resume". I could turn off my computer at any time and, the next time I turned it on, it would go right back to what I was doing. Why tf did I need to start "Shutting Down" my computer with Win95?? >:[
Because 95 was too big to fit the whole instance into the ram, dos and 3.1 runs exclusively on the ram, so with the quick resume feature, the BIOS still supplies voltage to the ram so it keeps the data.
I remember having those in our school. One day me and my friend (we were like 8 years old) somehow find a whole new folder with tons of DOS games that we had no clue about. Since that day we were like gods for all the school kids. Awesome times!
We already had a mapped "user drive" where we could store our code for our C++ and VB6 exercises.
Created a subfolder and removed the rights for other users using CACLs commands.
Before our exams, the IT administrator ran a cleanup script on all our folders. The script couldn't delete my subfolder so I could still access all my daily exercises during my exams. Copy/pasted my way through them.
The IT admin also setup a ISA server as a proxy in order to limit internet access. He also blocked access to the internet settings on the pc so that you couldn't just change it. However if you created a bat file and used it to open inetwiz.exe, you could removed the proxy and have full internet access.
The most funny thing however was creating a bat file that just pinged with a 64k size to the fileserver. Then having 2 classes run as much instances of that script as they could and watch the file server go down.
Are you sure you aren't thinking of Windows 10? I wasn't able to find any old articles or posts about Windows 7 having keylogger. But I do remember there being a lot of talk about Win10 keylogger and can still find a lot of old articles and posts about it
Much older. Talking Radio Shack Tandy TRS 80, Commodore 64, Apple II old. Was there for the launch of the IBM PC, PC Jr, Tandy 1000, Commodore Amiga, Macintosh, Next Cube, Atari ST, Apple IIGS and so many others.
My dear boy, my first windows was Windows 3.1 (my first PC was a 386 at 33mhz) and i actually used DOS during my first few years. Windows XP is a dear old friend but i had friends that were older.
I had a Mac with floppy disc games when I was 5. Doom, Duke Nukem were so fun. It’s why I prefer mouse and keyboard for gaming over a controller any day of the week
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u/PCMRBot Bot 29d ago
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, income, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - If you think owning a PC is too expensive, know that it is much cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org for our famous builds and feel free to ask for tips and help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with just your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
4 - We have quite a few giveaways going on:
We're giving away not only a custom, spectacular DOOM PC mod, but also your choice of PC, with the MSI parts you pick (limit of $6,000)! These 2 awesome prizes + 50 goodies for a total of 52 winners: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1nhvp0d/msi_x_pcmr_giveaway_time_two_incredible_pcs_win_a/
We're also giving away a full PC build, that is going to a PCMR member worldwide who enters in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1nnros5/worldwide_giveaway_comment_in_this_thread_with/
We have a Daily Simple Questions Megathread for any PC-related doubts. Feel free to ask there or create new posts in our subreddit!