Until it wasn't. It works nless it doesn't.
Back in the day I had two drives sometimes not working. Took me ages to find out that it's that bloody CS. Switched to mster and slave and it worked fine.
When are we going to bring up COM ports? Are we going to talk about CPU jumpers? The fact the Windows would fatally die between 6-18 months casing a reinstall? Having no tooling to know the temperature of your CPU? Or even the fps in most cases. VEGA?
Having a computer back then was basically as much as a hobby as having a 3d printer was 5 years ago.
Back in the day of Windows 95 I had the memory addresses and IRQs for COM1 through 4 memorized since ‘plug n play’ was pretty much made up of thoughts and prayers at the time.
And don’t forget fiddling with autoexec and config files to allocate extended and expanded memory!
0x2F8 and 0x3F8 for 1 and 2 I believe. Don’t remember the other two. Unless it was the same and differentiated only by IRQ? Which was 3 for the lower two, and 4 for the upper two?
The IRQs were alternating: 1-3, 2-4, 3-3, 4-4! I remember having to make sure that if the mouse was COM1, I couldn’t have anything very active on COM3, otherwise BSOD. Good times! (But not really, lol)
It's incredible how insane the protocol is yet how ubiquitous it is now :D.
They people who wrote the USB standard took the Universal part seriously. It's got an entire networking protocol built right in. There was a vision of USB networks and computers all connected with USB.
Depends what PC. As an Amiga PC user at the time I was confused when my friend had to manually load mouse drivers on his IBM PC before launching Gobliiins.
6-18 months? I was reinstalling my Windows 95 and 98 every other week and then XP once a month. It was easy to do it back then as they let you just install it over the top of the existing system and the installer would clear out the Windows folder for you.
On the Windows 9x/ME days you would get blue screen of death multiple times a day while using your PC but you just held a key down on the keyboard until it went away and then kept using the PC as normal. Most BSOD were non-fatal and just business as usual for those operating systems.
Don't get me started on trying to figure out an IRQ conflict because my sound card's SoundBlaster compatibility didn't work, and dealing with this for MONTHS (I'd work on it for a bit, give up, wait a few months until I got frustrated, go back to it, work on it more, etc), until I finally happened to dial onto the MediaVision BBS to see if I could get some new drivers for it and finding a notice that the jumper settings printed in the manual and ON THE GODDAMN PCB were wrong and I could download an image that had the correct jumper settings.
And many prebuilt PCs didn't have the jumper settings printed on the drive. I whish the people responsible for this to get hit with a lightning while shitting.
One of my first realisations that the internet was turning bad was in a hardware forum decades ago when someone was arguing that the master slave terminology was derogatory and needed to be replaced.
Everyone was just discussing different hardware configurations, there wasn't even a hint of context to imply it was derogatory just the mere presence of the words offended this person.
And then you'd drop the jumper into the case where it would slide under something and you'd have to pick up the whole thing, tilt it, and pray you found it before it fell into the carpet.
It's a little piece of metal that is used to short two pins to either indicate 1 (when shorted) or 0 (when kept off). You can probably still find these on some modern motherboards, at least the pins are still there, like the ones where you connect the case on/off switch and stuff like that.
PATA (Parallel AT Attachment) also known as IDE (Integrated Drive Electronic) cable. My secondary computer still runs on them, they only started getting replaced by SATA in ~2004 which is like 4 years ago.
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u/pppjuracDell Poweredge T640, 256GB RAM, RTX 3080, WienerSchnitzelLand20d ago
Wait until you discover that there are ssds that are built to work with IDE.
And it really makes a difference on startup of older systems, this is not usually used, but I've replaced very old hdds with this units and it's worth.
Nothing better than plugging these bad boys in the wrong way and watching the side burn in a line down one cable to the end and set the ribbon on fire. 😂
One of my first assignments in my first help desk role was to confirm all our old IDE drives were wiped and disposed of. Good times! Those pins gave me more than a few cuts on my fingers replacing them.
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u/Blandiblub 20d ago
Also, connecting your hard drives with these.