Eh, it was fine once you got your autoexec.bat configured with the proper IRQs and whatnot, and telling DOS to load in high memory, and set up to ask you on boot if you wanted extended or expanded memory (and knew which one the software you wanted to run needed, but, I mean, just RTFM like a normal person, we at least had good manuals back then!), and which drivers you really needed to waste memory on…
Comment on Whatever happened to the days when shit just...worked?
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 5 weeks ago
I’ll dissent here: early technology didn’t just work. Computers in the 80s and 90s (at least early 90s) required quite a bit of technical know-how to use competently.
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
CentipedeFarrier@piefed.social 5 weeks ago
We had a computer sitting for like 3 years, totally unusable. It was assumed it had some sort of major virus because everything seemed to be working and making the right noises, but no interface. We didn’t have the money for repair services, and nobody knew how to fix stuff yet, so there it sat.
Until one day, when someone hooked the tower up to the monitor for a newer computer, to see if they could figure out why it wasn’t working, or at least reformat the drives and stuff.
Turns out, someone messed with the resolution, and set it to something the original monitor couldn’t display, and this was before automatic rollback, so it just didn’t display it. That’s all it was. Unusable for 3 years because we didn’t have another monitor to use to roll back the changes.
It never “just worked”.
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
Wait, what? From what I remember CRT monitors might display something weird when set to an unsupported resolution or refresh rate… scrolling partial lines and whatnot… but they wouldn’t go black…
CentipedeFarrier@piefed.social 5 weeks ago
Wow is that ever a pointlessly nit-picky challenge of a story from when I was a kid, over 30 years ago………. Almost like memory isn’t perfect or something, omgno!
I don’t know if there were some little lines or something; I remember it being a black screen. But little lines would give the exact same impression of a dead/infected machine so it barely matters outside of pedantry. It didn’t display an interface, that’s the important part. As for the boot up, maybe, but also very possibly not. They had some Monty python suite of software (themes taken to an extreme, very 90s) that may have made the system function differently than you, some random techbro with absolutely zero information about the computer itself, expect. It replaced literally everything with Monty python stuff and was installed from iirc 12 2.5 floppy discs! Did it replace the boot images, causing them to not display properly when booted in the wrong resolution? Maybe, idk. Wouldn’t be surprised. But even if it did go through the boot sequence and then land on a black screen, the result is the same. Non-functional-looking computer, because no interface. As for DOS boot, we never ran dos on it so genuinely don’t know.
The only sign of life we had from it as far as I can recall was when the screensaver would go on after 5 min, it would play the Klingon national anthem, which is a big part of why they assumed virus (we didn’t know until much later that was what was happening, or that my sibling changed the screensaver and maybe other stuff, which is probably what caused the problem in the first place), but the other software may have covered up those signs you are talking about, or maybe we all just still didn’t know what to do with it with the boot images and stuff showing up, which… idk if you know this, but even today most people don’t know how to troubleshoot or fix their computers… My parents were not tech inclined, my sibling and I were around 10-11, and it’s not like they could just look up how to do these things when their computer wasn’t working.. which is exactly what my sibling did when they got a computer of their own.