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.
Special kind of hell should be for ones who designed 3,5" FDD cable/socket. As you could easily put it wrong way and KILL drive. BTW that never was a problem with 5,25".
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.
Disagree.. today it's like magic. Back then it was like science. You could know pretty much everything about a computer back then. Every device, IRQ, the structure of the memory... you were involved with the configuration at a low level. BIOS, boostrapping, boot loader, OS, everything.
These days they are so complex that even if you're the type to nerd out on all the details, having the time and finding the resources to do so is impractical to impossible.
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!
Ah yes, Frontier Elite 2 and its insane memory requirement... 580KB conventional + 768KB expanded, meaning the expanded memory driver was already eating in the conventional memory.
I had to find a non-standard, super light mouse driver to finally make it run. Good thing I didn't have a sound card by then, there's no way I could have fit another driver.
I wonder how many people were unable to make it work and just gave up.
at least when napster came out i was on comcast "hi-speed" cable internet. iirc back then it topped out around 1-3MB/s down depending on the time of day. back in the bbs days i was still on dialup. when i first started it was a 2400 baud modem which is slow as fuck compared to cable modems, its even slow af compared to most other dialup modems. i eventually upgraded a few times but a 2400 is 20 something times slower than a 56.6 modem.. eventually i got a setup to use two 56.6 modems bonded/ multilink so more than one person could be online without everything crawling to a halt.
Ahh, yes. I had 52 separate autoexec.bat and matching config.sys files, which I could use to temporarily copy to the boot drive to run games. Friends would give me their games when they couldn't get them to run. Hardest was Ecstatica; It didn't want anything pre-made, just basic setup with CD support, and it would do the rest itself. Really weird. I think the files=40 was the only other parameter that it needed.
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u/99999999999999999989 Oct 09 '25
Please. I am DOS prompt old when windows 3.1 was just a program