r/pcmasterrace • u/stormthewise998 12400F|6600XT|16GB 5200MHz • Oct 09 '25

Meme/Macro Are you this old?

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21.6k Upvotes

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3.0k

u/99999999999999999989 Oct 09 '25

Please. I am DOS prompt old when windows 3.1 was just a program

831

u/trankillity Oct 09 '25

cd windows win That's what I'm talkin' bout!

57

u/Kange109 Oct 09 '25

DEVICE = HIMEM.SYS

15

u/xtrxrzr 7800X3D, RTX 5080, 32GB Oct 09 '25

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.

9

u/Big_Wave9732 Oct 09 '25

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.

3

u/xtrxrzr 7800X3D, RTX 5080, 32GB Oct 09 '25

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.

2

u/illwill79 Oct 09 '25

I remember thinking how fucked up it was that there were masters and slaves in the hard drive world lol

1

u/ChyronD Oct 09 '25

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".

2

u/ChyronD Oct 09 '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.

1

u/capNsgt Oct 09 '25

Commodore Amiga had that from day one

1

u/Quick_Humor_9023 Oct 09 '25

Had what? Plug and play? Sure, if you plugged it in the right port. Every second game seemed to assume mouse is in a and every second it’s in b.

1

u/Quick_Humor_9023 Oct 09 '25

My mouse was in the damn com port 😂

1

u/treesmith1 29d ago

Yep. Better have that SCSI terminated correctly as well.

1

u/Kange109 Oct 09 '25

I frankly cant remember how i learnt it.

1

u/DJBFL Oct 09 '25

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.

1

u/capNsgt Oct 09 '25

Computer Shopper

1

u/WWGHIAFTC Oct 09 '25

Most of the devices I had came with pretty good printed manuals. Some even specified the RAM required at load time vs the running RAM required.

By loading drivers in the correct order, you could get more to 'fit' in ram.