Yah late 80s to mid 90s a lot of the "online" support was actually BBSs or faxback services, some was on newsgroups, some companies had conferences on compuserve, then it maybe went to FTP, but there were also some Gopher sites around as well. Web support slowly began to take over, but even if it was there in 1997, it had to survive until mid noughties before archive.org got enough disk space to begin to be comprehensive. They had to prioritise, like first it was the top 1000 sites, then the top 10,000, then 100,000 etc as storage expanded. Then still some just had links off to ftp, or a server side scripting system to internal database which can't be archived from http. A lot of the stuff prior to early 90s and half of what was around to mid 90s never actually was online in the first place and it was well into the 2000s we began to see a lot more appear for the first time. I guess the ubiquity of digital cameras and scanners has helped that, rather than being the rarer things they were in the 90s.. also you probably weren't eager to upload a 5MB PDF file over modem, or where would you put it when free web storage might only be a couple of megabytes.

SaxxonPike wrote on 2021-12-10, 21:55:

But it turns out there's this huge gap in hardware knowledge. Reviews for tech are hard to find pre-2000 or so. Driver sites have disappeared rapidly especially in the last couple years. Archive.org has been a good place to stick these things, but they don't have nearly all the driver software that has ever existed. Sometimes, finding old utilities is also near impossible.

In summation, I used to think knowledge and downloads would be available forever. So much has already been lost.

So it isn't me when I look for stuff I knew existed and can't find it 😀
Thanks for sharing this, now I have one item crossed out when I go to see my shrink 🤣
It really isn't me... 😀

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-12-10, 21:39:

Heh, just thought to mention that it was probably only last year that I really realised that Intel never made a 486DX-40... I thought I'd seen them, but they must have been Cyrix or AMD. I had to check 5 different CPU sites before I believed it. I think some ancient 486 motherboard manual with bad English must have got it stuck in my head, by listing them speculatively or erroneously.

They did make a DX-50 though?..

Hoping wrote on 2021-12-02, 12:49:

It was the only one good Celeron

I bet the Tualerons (Tualatin-256) would have something to say about this!

Baoran wrote on 2021-12-02, 11:44:

I thought ati cards dont support 8-bit paletted textures but then I realized that 2 ati rage cards that I own both support it.

What was the last ATI card to support 8-bit textures?

appiah4 wrote on 2021-12-11, 09:26:

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-12-10, 21:39:

Heh, just thought to mention that it was probably only last year that I really realised that Intel never made a 486DX-40... I thought I'd seen them, but they must have been Cyrix or AMD. I had to check 5 different CPU sites before I believed it. I think some ancient 486 motherboard manual with bad English must have got it stuck in my head, by listing them speculatively or erroneously.

They did make a DX-50 though?..

Yup and I've had my mitts on one., a straight 1x bus 50Mhz part. They did a WTF and had a DX2-40, DX2-50 was somewhat understandable. I guess you'd want one if your board had soldered crystal for 20Mhz bus and 25ns cache or something.

pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-12-11, 10:28:

Hoping wrote on 2021-12-02, 12:49:

It was the only one good Celeron

I bet the Tualerons (Tualatin-256) would have something to say about this!

Indeed. Mine just powered itself on to say that's right!

I used to think BitBoys Oy had a chip fab in their basement and that Glaze3D was right around the corner. Turns out they were just an IP company spouting vaporware. Demoscene junkies. 200 FPS in Quake III max everything, my ass!

WDStudios wrote on 2021-12-12, 09:05:

Baoran wrote on 2021-12-02, 11:44:

I thought ati cards dont support 8-bit paletted textures but then I realized that 2 ati rage cards that I own both support it.

What was the last ATI card to support 8-bit textures?

Rage 128 I believe. Radeon onwards don't have it for sure. Rage Pro has it for sure. Rage 128.. I think has it.

IIRC, Rage128's palette support is driver-based emulation and it's slower when enabled - at least it was on my Fury Pro 2000.

I thought Voodoo 3 3000 was crap because it had only 16 megs of ram compared to TNT2 32 meg

Back in the past I thought that BIOS upgrades were safe...

ViTi95 wrote on 2021-12-15, 11:48:

Back in the past I thought that BIOS upgrades were safe...

🤣

ViTi95 wrote on 2021-12-15, 11:48:

Back in the past I thought that BIOS upgrades were safe...

One of the first things I learned about PCs was "If it ain't broken don't fix it."

Of course I proceeded to breaking a lot of unbroken things by trying to fix them. It's the nature of the beast.

I'm always screaming "Noooooo!!!!!" in my head when ppl say "well the first thing you gotta do is flash the latest BIOS" ... I) identify if you have an actual problem in your here and now use case ii) identify if a particular BIOS will fix it through release notes iii) Identify through user experience if upgrade causes different problems iv) Identify how you are going to fix things if flash goes wrong v) decide which set of problems you can live with. vi) consider flashing the BIOS.

edit: and for completeness, realising the older flash memory didn't survive many programmings, that number got higher as the decades passed, but I'd still hear of people in the noughties with recent boards having their flash part fail after frequent flashings (like if they changed the splash screen art they wouldn't review it thoroughly in the image editor, they'd flash it, then decide it needed one more change, oh plus one more, ah nearly got it....). However it was not unheard of for numbers to be as low as ten on p54 era board, and suspected to be only in the low hundreds by end of 90s, that was for guaranteed genuine new parts, while some manufacturers were suspected of using recycled parts. Recently however, but maybe not applicable to all flash types, it was found that controlled heating seems to restore flash cells to new performance (though kills all the data on it, like a low level format) so potentially your failed flash chip may work again if you can't replace it.

Reading the readme is always optional.

My 12 year old self flashed the bios of the family's only computer to a Chinese language. Somehow I managed to enter windows and download a new bios and luckily succeeded with the flash.. all before my dad came home from work. Quite the little n1nj4.

DOS is dead.....

Long live DOS!!.

No matter the pieces, stability is 100% great all the time.