this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 137 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

Yes. We are.

We are young with to have learned tech at an early age, but old enough that the tech wasn't user friendly when we were kids, so we needed to understand it better than people do in the smartphone generation.

Installing a new game on my PC in high school was a multi-hour, sometimes multi-day ordeal.

Plugging in a secondary hard drive involved putting jumpers on pins to keep the system from trying to boot off it.

Assigning ports on peripherals involved understanding how to count in binary so you could assign addresses on dip switches.

Installing a printer involved unholy alliances with formless beings.

Every 2-3 years, I still wake up wearing black robes in a strange room in Romania, blood on my hands and a lingering scent of cordite in the air. I'm fairly certain that's related to the Canon BJC driver issues I had upgrading my AST to Windows 95.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Random BSOD from changing... absolutely fucking nothing, then spending 2 days trying to recover, before saying fuck it and reinstalling windows, so you can play WC1 or D1....good old days.

Also printers can suck it. 20 years ago maintaining a fucking print server was bullshit.... I'd rather deal with BES for another 100 years.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

Sometimes I'd put a floppy disk in. It had 1.jpg crushed down to be 256 colors. Pam Anderson.

For the longest time it would crash windows 95 when I put it in the drive and opened the folder.

It had a "-" dash in the title....I took that out and no more blue screening.

Thanks Bill Gates....

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I’d rather deal with BES for another 100 years.

Cool it, Mario... oh, the menus -shivers-

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Lol I might have to take that back....BES was a pile of epic smoldering shit...even the engineers would tell me it was shit. I'm pretty sure I reinstalled that damn thing a thousand times. It was like winning the lottery when the CEO finally wanted and iPhone and then forced the reset of the company to android or iPhone... myself and my junior admin had beers in the office when we got the last user off it and got to shut it down on a Friday. Best day ever.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

The hardest thing I remember having to do to install games was if they were DOS games and you have to manually assign all the hardware ports or whatever (I remember one for "IRQ?") for the game every time you ran it and if you fucked it up, it wouldn't have a picture or wouldn't have sound or they would be fucked up.

Not quite old enough to have actually had to type in the program after buying the game on a book. That would have been rad!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Installing a printer is still often a deal with the devil

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah. I've had to return printers that wouldn't let me install drivers without also agreeing to install spyware.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

More likely from soundcard settings than printer settings. If you're channelling, its due to wrong number of channels selected.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

That's the weird thing. I used Soundblaster cards, and those blackouts were usually preceded by nightmares of an anthropomorphic goat. It was handy because you could make arrangements to feed the dog and stuff.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

I had a boot floppy I needed to use when I wanted to play Sim City 2000 because my PCs usual configuration didn't have enough free conventional memory.

I had another one for Zone66 because its memory management was incompatible with EMM386.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I’m fairly certain that’s related to the Canon BJC driver issues I had upgrading my AST to Windows 95.

I had the biggest flashback right now. I had a Canon BJC 4000 that would only print all the pages if you had two or more empty pages at the end of the document. Never figured that one out, but every so often I open an old Word Doc and find extra empty pages and remember....

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Installing a printer involved unholy alliances with formless beings.

Lol so true