...repairing floppy disks with Norton Disk Doctor, watching its blue and yellow chart in amazement as it relocated bad blocks to empty sectors and somehow rescued your school project / game disk. I still don't fully understand how data can be retrieved from bad sectors of a floppy disk.

I loved Babbage's. There was one in my local mall, and it was always my second stop after spending some time in the Sears computer section, which was huge and carried PCs, printers, software, parts, etc. I went there so often that the salespeople knew me. Even Macy's had a dedicated computer section back then.

...when we had more than a handful of GPU manufacturers for the pc?

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

do you remember when you could buy computer parts like hard drives and cd-roms in bookstores like BDalton

Wow... B. Dalton's. I haven't heard that name in 20 years. The one around here never carried computer stuff... that was all in the Software Etc. store (a subsidiary of B. Dalton) which was right next door in the mall.

Then there was also Babbage's, and Electronics Boutique, before it turned into a shitty video game store. I still use a toolkit I got from the latter...

Exactly, around here in PDX it was the same, BDalton only sold books and the occasional audio cd, I had to got to Software ETC. located near BDalton in the same mall 😁

...when video cards came with manuals that included programming instructions?

...when that one thing made me feel nostalgic. Like, wow.

Sound cards bundled with crappy speakers .... or you had to wait for magazines to learn about upcoming games and releases

When cd-rom drives all had their own interfaces. Also, when they started becoming common, we had a store open up here that only sold cd-rom apps and games, it only lasted a couple years IIRC.

When you had to deal with IRQ conflicts, DMA conflicts, address conflicts, SCSI ID conflicts, jumpers being wrong for just about any random thing?

Configure conventional memory...

... when you had to get rid of some 'large' application/game on your 20MB hard disk just to make room for another?

Companies that made and sold FPUs, dozen of sound chip/card makers.

ncmark wrote:

do you remember when...

...rock was young?

....when you had to insert DOS floppy in order to boot because your PC XT didn't have hard drive?

...when you had to reproduce by mitosis just because multicellular life hadn't evolved yet? and the great Old Ones were seeping down from the blackest gulfs of space to make thier nameless abode in the Antartic plateaus, followed by their amorphous Shoggoth abominations, and R'lyeh lay deep beneath the wav... oh sorry guys, wrong timescale.

VileRancour wrote:

...when you had to reproduce by mitosis just because multicellular life hadn't evolved yet? and the great Old Ones were seeping down from the blackest gulfs of space to make thier nameless abode in the Antartic plateaus, followed by their amorphous Shoggoth abominations, and R'lyeh lay deep beneath the wav... oh sorry guys, wrong timescale.

....and I thought I was the only remaining Old One one who treads this queerly shaped geometry of stygian dimensions which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Vogons.

Floppies were 5.25" and you could make single side double sided with the help of a pair of scissors.

...when CGA shattered the monotony of Hercules?

... monochrome displays and giant boxes of digitized catalogue in our main city library. I was too little and never had a PC at the time, so when our teacher showed us the building, the people behind the screens seemed to be blessed by some library divine. I never realized how stupid an average PC user could become in 15 years...

RacoonRider wrote:

... monochrome displays and giant boxes of digitized catalogue in our main city library. I was too little and never had a PC at the time, so when our teacher showed us the building, the people behind the screens seemed to be blessed by some library divine. I never realized how stupid an average PC user could become in 15 years...

All made worse by Facebook and Twitter, I hate the web 2.0 era and some news sites are a pain sometimes to screen shot with the floating "idiot bars". I miss how it used to be efficient on slow connections and to the point but now days without adblock so good by to any common sense.

going home after a days work with eyes burning from using a cga all day

the sadness when having to give up an xt keyboard for a modern AT model m ... got used to it eventually though 😉