And I also remember studying Basic on a book on the beach during summer because I didn’t have a computer yet.
Did you ever get a magazine like Enter where they had fairly lengthy BASIC programs in the back for you to copy down line by line?
Yes, but later, you know… when i actually had a computer
Oh boy. I’ll never forget the amount of fun I had copying them by hand as a 12 year old.
There was one with coordinates to a wireframe of a sports car and drawing it on screen. What blew my mind was the next section where we perform trigonometry magic to rotate the whole thing in 3D space with arrow keys.
The parallel port scanner that made your entire computer able to do absolutely nothing while scanning. No mouse input, no display update. An absolute time warp for your CPU.
Reminds me of a story: I ordered a soundcard for an engineers workstation. Had problems with accounting about this. What does he need a Soundblaster for? Well, he actually needed a joystick for his CAD package!
I’m just trying to block out trauma from winsock.dll and figuring out IRQ conflicts.
There was this game I wanted to play that required a lot of memory. My dad didn’t want to spend more money on the computer so I spent a few days hacking the bios, config.sys and autoexec.bat to make sure only the bare minimum was met with drivers for the sound blaster and the mouse loaded and enough RAM left for the game to load.
Making the game play was engineering at the time.
Absolutely is/was. It’s how most of the engineers I know, including myself, got started with computers that led us to the career we have today in tech.
Anyone else remember Memory Commander?
I suspect that all this program did was push stuff to the hard drive or faked how much free RAM you had to games.
I used to have to unplug the printer from the parallel port so I could plug in my first MP3 player and transfer MP3s I had totally legally acquired in 1999.
I had to rewind my games and WASD was QAOP.
Typewriters… ratatatatatatatatap click ding whirrr
Most technology would objectively be improved by the addition of click ding whirrr
C:\>type autoexec.bat @ECHO OFF PROMPT $P$G PATH C:\DOS;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM; SET TEMP=C:\TEMP REM -- HDD cache: SMARTDRV.EXE 2038 512 MODE.EXE LPT1:,,P >NUL SHARE.EXE /F:150 /L:1500 MOUSE.COM /Y DEVICE=C:\sb16\DRV\CTSB16.SYS /UNIT=0 /BLASTER=A:220 I:5 D:1 DEVICE=C:\sb16\DRV\CTMMSYS.SYS CD \WINDOWS WINAnd don’t forget to set the jumpers correctly!
What, no mscdex.exe?
Oh man the memories this brings back. I remember being sat down in front of a 386 by my dad when I was ~6 years old. I asked him how to use the mouse, he gave me an instruction manual and told me to figure it out.
We often criticize boomer dads but they were right about this point: kids have unlimited curiosity, feed it.
My daughter recently turned 6 years old. She saw a game called Wobbledogs and wanted to play it. I sat her in front of an old PC and told her to figure it out. She spent a few hours playing last night and narrated the entire experience to me lol. Glad she is enjoying herself. Even if this doesn’t set off a lifetime of experience in IT she will develop some problem solving skills, and if nothing else she is learning something useful as opposed to being handed a tablet.
Not only was I somehow given the card to upgrade my Apple IIe to 128k in the 80s when I was elementary school age, my parents trusted me to install it because they didn’t know how. And I did!
That could have gone so horribly wrong lol. It’s like the times my dad asked me to set jumpers for anything, I think he was more spooked than I was but he let me do it anyway. Every badly set jumper is a learning opportunity I guess lol.
So happy to feel the other old people here.
You forgot to load EMM386 or even HIMEM.SYS! You might as well not even bothered installing that expensive 4MB SIMM stick for all the use you’re gonna get out of it.
I was more a QEMM kind of guy. Also, multitasking Windows in DOS, using Deskview.
That’s done in config.sys, not autoexec autoexec.bat IIRC
Also anyone remember that joke?
;fastest mouse driver available DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRV\CAT.SYS
??? The DEVICE= lines go in the config.sys file.
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Add-in sound cards. Sound Blaster 16 baby!
I’ll go with what’s on CompTIA’s A+ certification exam for $100 Alex.
Mines collecting dust somewhere.
I took the part 1 test right before they turned it into a 3 year expry certificate. Should have taken part 2 also but I have a problem with being a perfectionist and printers were never my favorite subject.
Going to do Security+ and Network+ soon because I’m going back into IT. Not even going to entertain A+. Going to do ITF+ just because it never expires.
I got it as part of my degree program them I ended up getting a job not in IT. Security+ was not too hard to get as well. Even though I don’t plan on getting back in I still wish I never lost my free Net+ voucher.
Mine is expiring and I get a discount if I renew it. But I won’t, since I literally used 0% of my knowledge.
I am not sending CompTIA money so they can now “prove” my cert is valid again
Stop with the euphemisms Jessica. I told you, I’m not interested.
Thrustmaster?
Warcraft II Human Footman: Your Sound Card Works Perfectly!
Baa-ram-ewe. [Kaboom.]
Human knight in the demo: In the real game i am much funnier.
I remember getting the full game and seeing all the new units. A whole fleet of 9 battleships! Come at me Deathwing!
Battleships cannot shoot up tho…
It’s been a few decades 😁 Dwarven Flying Machines then!
Your sound card works perfectly!
Your sound card works perfectly!
Your sound card works perfectly!
Enjoying yourself?
Your sound card works perfectly!
Your sound card works perfectly!
Your sound card works perfectly!
It doesn’t get any better than this!Stop touching mEEE!
That brings back memories of the most cursed sound check I can remember…
Wing Commander III’s Captain Eisen: God I love that boy’s spunk! 🫤
DOS games had the best installers. Don’t forget to insert disk 4 to continue!
Going from game port to USB with “plug and play” was a huge deal man. Not having to manually assign IRQ to get your audio working too lol. That said, there is still one thing that was cursed in the old days and remains cursed now: printers. Fuck printers.
Using a brother laser printer through cups on linux, it just works.
I’m pretty sure that Brother is the only printer company that didn’t sign a contract with the devil.
Used to be Lexmark was really good, too. Simple printers that weren’t too fancy, but they worked. Guess they’re still around, but I haven’t used one since the very early ‘00s.
Still only on the laser printers though. In my experience Brother inkjets have become trash like all the rest.
Ah, I’ve only owned one of their laser printers. It’s like 13 years old and still works great. We’ve only had to replace the cartridge 2 times.
And managing/freeing upper memory so you could play games in DOS like DOOM.
Remember when you had to configure the IRQ with DIP switches?
Yes! Remember when you had to set your HDD to master or slave using jumpers? Then channel select came along and made that easier.
I would argue that for the humble serial or parallel port printer, things just worked. Yes, the ribbon needed replacing sometimes, and the tractor feed could snag or jam. But that’s all a see-it-and-fix-it situation - zero tools required. These things took raw serial data, a straight dump of ASCII characters on the wire. Nothing to confuse and nothing to get wrong. No wacky software drivers either - just tell the software what hardware port to talk to and you’re printing. You got boring text, tabs, spaces, newlines, and zero frills.
For whatever reason, the moment we started to emulate professional printing on a consumer budget was when things started to get hairy.
And you got to remove the perforated strips on the side of the paper after printing!
Printing nowadays is so boring.
If you think printing nowadays is boring, you don’t have a printer
Nah, most of that was resolved decades ago too. The problem is greedy companies making printers who just seem to forget what printers are for
They’re for throwing ink expired warnings and automatically ordering you new ink on a subscription plan. Right?
I’m convinced that in the late 90s/early 00s, the printer companies got together to form a cartel, and have purposefully neutered all consumer-grade printers from that point forward. They knew it wasn’t profitable (unless they charge an arm and a leg for the ink, which of course they eventually did), so they decided to just not play the game at all.
Yes they did exactly that actually
Iirc from a YouTube video I watch long ago they trade mark all the ink printer technology and abused it for years until we made laser printers
I bought a laser printer for my job in 1990. They’ve been around
Yeah but they cost like thousands of dollars back then. Upwards of five figures for professional grade printers I believe. They were out of reach for most consumers.
Do you mean patents? Trademarking ink wouldn’t do anything.
Getting your modem not to conflict with your mouse. Yes, this was a thing.
Agreed. Assigning IRQ ports was so annoying.
Yea and some fucking cards only had IRQ selection jumpers for irq 5 or 7. Had a situation where I had to swap cards depending on if I wanted to use my twain scanner or play games with sound.
I’m glad I was never in that bind. That sounds hellish.
I remember studying for my first A+ cert. So much of it was dealing with IRQ assignments and conflicts.
For me, it was about learning the anatomy of the laser printer. I do remember a lot about IRQ and memory addressing, but I don’t remember it being that much of the test.
If you started a call with your cellphone close to a loudspeaker you could hear the connection being initiated through the speaker. Something like a tat-ara-tat sound.
I think they made a song with that noise, something dance or techno or house
Barcode Brothers - SMS
“They” probably made a bunch, but I’d recommend you to check out Venjent - Calling for You (ft. Oktae) (and anything else from him tbh).
Mario Piu - Communication?
https://youtu.be/CGHKb5LSKE0?si=zGhmQNtJoLRcaDyp&t=55
GTA IV uses this sound when you’re about to receive a call while driving. I remember being confused (and subsequently blown away by the attention to detail). I’m a little nostalgic for the sound so I’m glad it’s preserved in that game.
Oh yeah. I totally forgot about that. Why did that stop? Phones started using different frequencies or something?
It’s actually a change in audio equipment. If you have old speakers you can still hear it.
IIRC transmission power was higher back in the day and the shielding of electronics wasn’t quite as good. So if you put your phone by a speaker the RF interference would be enough to be able to hear over the speaker.
It never went away.
I can still hear incoming calls, texts, and tower pings with my headphones.some GSM phones would reboot PCs if a call came through and was situated near the PC.
I didn’t know, that’s fantastic!
I remember having to configure the sound card within games. IRQ and DMZ settings. I had no idea what I was doing so a lot of the time I just played without sound.
The sweet sound of bowling balls
DMA, direct memory access. DMZ is a networking thing.
DMZ is also between North and South Korea.
They also stand for the same thing (demilitarized zone) oddly enough.
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Not oddly enough. Exactly as expected. DMZ in networking forwards all ports to a specific IP address behind the firewall. That address is demilitarized. It has no firewall defending it.
I’ve seen it backronymed into “data management zone” in a few places, but it will always be “demilitarized zone” to me.
Irq was always 8
It was 5 for me, and 220 for I/O Address.
5 -1 or 7-1, who the hell uses 8
