appiah4 wrote:Caluser2000 wrote:Had a bit of a hiatus for 4-5 years due to health issues. Being back on vogons I seem to have come through some sort of time warp whereby computing history of the late '80s to early '90s had been turned on it's head with some sort of revisionist account. It'll take time but I think we can correct that.
I would love to hear what opinions you found to have changed for the more inaccurate..
I'm curious too.
I'm sure there's some rose tinting, but I remember my Win95 days being pretty solid. The first year was a little touch-n-go maybe, because IIRC, I was trying to run it on like 8MB of RAM. I visited a neighbor with 16MB and couldn't believe how quickly Explorer would open. (Just the file manager -- not IE.) But, once I had more memory, things ran pretty well AFAICR. I would leave my computer running 24/7, dialed up to the ISP and automatically reconnecting if it lost carrier, and I would reach in from school via a comprehensive mIRC script that could send files or run commands remotely.
I got a Win98 beta (no, not "first edition" heheh -- an actual beta) and it was a bit of a disaster, so I stayed away from 98 until well into 99, when I finally needed better USB support.
I used ME for a while until some time after XP was released. Contrary to most, I found the OS itself ran fine and relatively stable as well, but I did have issues with games around that period. Games would often lock up or crash.. not sure if that was driver-related, a symptom of the junk PSUs that would often ship free with cases I used, developers (game, OS, and driver) not quite having a handle on the still somewhat young Direct X thing, or just that I tended to put my hardware through some stuff back then. (I never had the case closed, tended to use a spare Molex plug to power electronics projects or the occasional car amp...)
The DOS days were a bit rough, but that was a different time. Some programs might not get around to exiting cleanly.. but you could just turn the PC off like it was a console. The driver situation was definitely dicey.. If you didn't have the disk that came with your hardware specifically, you're going to be in for a rough ride. But PCs were still kind of an experiment at that point.
So, with that bit of mental archaeology, and consideration of what I see going on around here these days... not much has changed, really. What's the delta?