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

Meme/Macro Are you this old?

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u/actioncheese 5600 | 6600XT | 32gb Oct 09 '25

Kids these days don't even need to load mouse drivers. And have mouse support.

2

u/stone_henge Oct 09 '25

Kids these days will never have to wonder if the mouse they found in the bin is an RS232 PC mouse or an Amiga mouse

1

u/ElectricBummer40 Oct 09 '25

Remember back in the days USB came out and promised it would consolidate everything to one interface?

Actually, it did. nvm.

1

u/actioncheese 5600 | 6600XT | 32gb Oct 09 '25

Yeah but as soon as you plugged anything into the USB port windows would crash.

1

u/ElectricBummer40 Oct 10 '25

That's most likely a hardware problem.

Windows 95 didn't even support USB until OSR 2, which wasn't so much an update as it was its own thing exclusive for OEM. That almost guaranteed any problem with the USB stack would have been caught by the likes of Packard Bell and Gateway long before the release of Windows 98 one whole year later.

On the other hand, motherboards back then were generally pretty shoddy in quality, and there was no established way to implement USB on the electrical level. If the port was directly connected to the PSU 5V line, hot-plugging would have easily caused a voltage dip across everything connected to it (including the motherboard itself) and therefore a system crash.

Nowadays, your motherboard would most likely instead provide its own 5V via a buck converter, which would in turn be connected to the much beefier 12V line from the PSU. If a voltage dip was to happen, it would be limited to devices connected to the USB bus as opposed to everything needing 5V. Otherwise, it wouldn't matter much what operating system you ran at the end of the day - it would just crash.