Windows Turns 30 Today

[Wrecked Em]

God damn. Norton Commander for win10 is an actual thing.

 

[ccman]

Windows 10, it's like Windows 1.0 with the decimal shifted one place to the right.

Now With Spying.

 

[StaticShoes]

Jesus Christ I'm so glad I don't have to wear glasses that huge anymore. Damn things slid right down my nose and off my face. I was too busy watching MTV back then to care about winblows 1.0, most games I played were outside except for a few minutes of Atari once in a while, and many games of Monopoly.

 

[Hornet]

Wow, didn't realize I'm as old as Windows.

 

[rezerekted]

In 1985 I only cared about wine, women and song.

 

[VanDiesil]

Pre-Windows 95..... Ahh the good old days where you actually had to have knowledge of how a computer worked to have it running! If we had DIP switches, Jumpers, manual IRQ & DMA settings, etc, the industry would be a much better place!!!! Try getting a "tech" nowadays to resolve AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS problems or to install a multi-device SCSI setup! They would be tearing their hair out!!!!

 

[Commander Suzdal]

Pre-Windows 95..... Ahh the good old days where you actually had to have knowledge of how a computer worked to have it running! If we had DIP switches, Jumpers, manual IRQ & DMA settings, etc, the industry would be a much better place!!!! Try getting a "tech" nowadays to resolve AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS problems or to install a multi-device SCSI setup! They would be tearing their hair out!!!!

I set my IRQ's manually and I liked it! And I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time.

Actually, I have no nostalgia for primitive obscurity. It didn't feel empowering, just felt like a waste of time.

 

[michalrz]

God damn. Norton Commander for win10 is an actual thing.

I'm surprised you're surprised

Wow, didn't realize I'm as old as Windows.

Neither have I. I was 3 months at the time. However, I got to use Windows 3.something in 1992 on a black&white monitor and we even had a laser printer. I really liked non-volatile memory but my parents only let me play with the Commmodore 64 :<

 

[Dr. Righteous]

Pre-Windows 95..... Ahh the good old days where you actually had to have knowledge of how a computer worked to have it running! If we had DIP switches, Jumpers, manual IRQ & DMA settings, etc, the industry would be a much better place!!!!

Correct! This was before the days of "plug and play" and automatic IRQ settings etc.
Like you said you actually had to know how they worked to do this kind of work.
I remember OEMs like Packard Bell would only allow certain IRQs for certain devices in an effort to FORCE you buy optional parts (sound cards, etc) from them.
In most PC compatible computers you could buy a sound blaster card and pretty easily get it to work. Not with a PB.

Try getting a "tech" nowadays to resolve AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS problems or to install a multi-device SCSI setup! They would be tearing their hair out!!!!

HA!
I was the king of setting up SCSI interfaces and devices back in the day. Yeah, you talk about dealing with a lot of counter intuitive settings.
I remember setting up a lot of system of video capture and editing. They wanted RAID0 for sustained throughput. Couldn't drop below 5mb/s.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I was the king of setting up SCSI interfaces and devices back in the day. Yeah, you talk about dealing with a lot of counter intuitive settings.
I remember setting up a lot of system of video capture and editing. They wanted RAID0 for sustained throughput. Couldn't drop below 5mb/s.

Yeah, its almost surprising how difficult this used to be,considering how easy it is today.

I set up RAID 0 on my desktop with two 100gig 7200rpm WD IDE drives back then (College ~2001) for this purpose.

Data was recorded on a handheld analog camcorder. Recorded it to disk through my Hauppage TV tuner card, while real time applying the lossless HuffYUV codec so that my drives could keep up.

That little exercise took everything my enthusiast rig could throw at it back then, all the ram, CPU pinned and bot h drives furiously writing as fast as they could go.

How things have changed

 

[malingjc]

Pre-Windows 95..... Ahh the good old days where you actually had to have knowledge of how a computer worked to have it running! If we had DIP switches, Jumpers, manual IRQ & DMA settings, etc, the industry would be a much better place!!!! Try getting a "tech" nowadays to resolve AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS problems or to install a multi-device SCSI setup! They would be tearing their hair out!!!!

Why can't I fdisk a partition larger than 32MB? I need DOS 4.0+? Crap!

 

[Dr. Righteous]

Yeah, its almost surprising how difficult this used to be,considering how easy it is today.

I set up RAID 0 on my desktop with two 100gig 7200rpm WD IDE drives back then (College ~2001) for this purpose.

Data was recorded on a handheld analog camcorder. Recorded it to disk through my Hauppage TV tuner card, while real time applying the lossless HuffYUV codec so that my drives could keep up.

That little exercise took everything my enthusiast rig could throw at it back then, all the ram, CPU pinned and bot h drives furiously writing as fast as they could go.

How things have changed

System I dealt with was a dual Pentium of some kind If I recall; but this was in '96 or 97. The sytems were Win 95 and WinNT.
This was for capturing from a FAST electronics capture card. Fast was a German company that produce the card for the European (PAL I believe) TV standard. Then they decided to port it to the NTSC system. The board was called the DVMaster. Whoever wrote the drivers for this did a piss poor job because typically it ran smooth and was rock solid in a PAL install; but was buggy as heck and crashed constantly in a NTSC install. The real tech guys behind the device were all German and the American component to their company were nothing but a bunch of salesmen that knew nothing. Every time I called for support because their junk didn't work they pointed the finger at me. I got paid for the first lot of PCs I built for them and washed my hands of it since I was roped into free tech support which wasn't part of the deal. Later revisions of the device driver improved but were never completely stable.

Several months later I got a call from a professor at UT (Tennessee) and they told me they purchased 2 of these systems and they crashed constantly. I told them it was the poor device drivers and I didn't expect them to get any better. They asked me if I could "fix them". I told them YES: the answer was to get away from that brand capture card and move to a better system called the Canopus DVRex. He asked for a quote. ( Dang! I was suddenly in the NLE computer business. )
So I did; I got both machines upgraded to the better capture system and they worked great. They used them for several years teaching NLE editing to film students. Thought that was pretty cool they were learning on machines I built.
I never formally started a business with it though. The buyers of that kind of thing were people that knew nothing about computer and were were trying to move from old A-B roll system to NLE. That is quite a steep learning curve and I really didn't want to be the one to have to hold their hand because you usually end up doing all that for free.

 

[PhaseII]

I was a junior in high school still using my Apple IIe at home and Trash 80s at school. Messed with DOS, Macs, and Silicon Graphics in college. Didn't actually hit Windows until years after I graduated, and that was NT. But now all I work on are Win PCs and haven't spent quality time with a Mac in 15 years.

I do remember my Warcraft CD was a dual-system install disk. The instructions for Mac was two sentences, and the instructions for Windows was two paragraphs. It wasn't much incentive at the time to make me switch.