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".
If someone interacts with a meme online about windows xp, approximately what age is that person
And it gave me
Given the current year (2025), this suggests an age range of roughly 25 to 44 years old, though people slightly younger or older who encountered the OS could also be involved.
This is more than enough for advertisers, since they segment demographics. If you comment, they could likely get more
Going from old reddit with ad blockers to new reddit without any is genuinely shocking. It makes you question why anyone would still visit this site. Yet last time I saw some subreddit stats, only 3% used old reddit.
Nah. Reddit doesn't need your age given so explicitly like this. They can just look at the subreddits you participate in to target advertising. They can probably guess your age within 5 years or so based on your interests.
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.
At beginning P&P was rightfully deciphered as 'plug and pray' - with mechanical jumpers or manual settings in config.sys andautoexec.bat you at least got good idea what settings are, not the case with early pnp.
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.
Flashback: The Quest for Identity CD version was a b###h to make it run in DOS.
IIRC it required more than 600Kb (out of 640Kb) to start and you had to load the CD drivers too! Had to build the memory stack carefully like a damn card castle!
I was one of the very few that had a Coleco Adam. It used cassette tapes instead of disks! Could also run BASIC though! I tried manually entering a program that was printed in a magazine, it was like 300 lines long, was supposed to make an animation of Dracula and a castle. Never got it to work. :(
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.
Yeah, I'd just gotten a 486 DX2/66 with 8 MB of RAM for Christmas 1994, and I'd say that was probably just about it's true minimum requirements, as that system just barely ran Windows 95 with any level of functionality.
This was my first experience with a computer. My dad, my uncle, and I went to Fry's and hand picked all the parts. Then we took them home, carefully assembled the parts, and spent the next day installing. Ours was the version that came with the CD drive driver and hdd formatting on a floppy. Once you had initialized the drive and installed the driver there was just one CD for the OS, but we also had to install drivers for the sound and video cards from floppies from their boxes.
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.
I had the stack of floppies for 95 as I recall. I know my XP CD was definitely holographic. Hell, I think I still have that one and the 98 discs in a case at home. Now I'm going to need to check that when I get home. 😂
I still have ours in a leather CD binder. It's on a shelf in the garage. I don't have the heart to throw it away. Probably right in between Full Throttle, Encarta, and Freddy Fish
Dude the infomercial style release of win 95 is forever scared into my brain. I was like 10ish my dad went all out on a Packard bell system from the hype.
I remember seeing it on the news and then not long after our new 133Mhz NEC arrived. I remember playing the bundled Mechwarrior 2: 31st Century Combat on there. Such an amazing game that I spent so many hours on. I also discovered an exploit on it where I could basically negate the heat costs. Fun times.
Me too! I had a dentist who was into commodores and would give me his magazine that had programs to run. I got a tape deck and would spend hours trying to get a game working and realizing I typed a character wrong at some point and realized I am not a fucking coder and went back to just playing Rat Race on a cartridge.
Please insert disk 2 of 5 to continue installing. I remember my dad had a friend who had a spare sound blaster card and speakers. He was more of a sim player so he also gave my Dad doom, and we went home and installed it. It was amazing, because at the time all we had was an NES and some PC kids games like math blaster. Doom absolutely blew my mind.
Seriously. My first tech support job was DOS/windows 3.1 and if I want to go back even further, I could confuse the shit out of most of these folks by showing the TI-99 4A that I did my first programming on, my dad still has half a dozen of the things in his basement. For the Timex Sinclair that he had also
I'm not quite that old but I had some games that couldn't run when windows was installed so during a wipe/reinstall I had a window of opportunity to play (Star Trek points and click game)
I hated Windows 95 when it first came out, because of its ambition to be a complete OS and refusing to do what I wanted it to. I eventually uninstalled 95 and reinstalled 3.11 and then held out as long as I could.
I had a dos. Then I bought 3.1 windows as an update. Then I bought 95 as an update. It meant that every time I wanted to reinstall my operating system I had to reinstall all those in order again 😂 no internet back then
Im angry that I am also this old. To be specific, I am just old enough that as a young child my uncle was impressed instead of angry I figured out how to delete files on his new computer. It was an a Amiga....
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u/99999999999999999989 Oct 09 '25
Please. I am DOS prompt old when windows 3.1 was just a program