Hello,

Don't consider this as a critique but without experiencing what physical software means and what no Internet is, you cannot recreate 80s or 90s. Example, insert all those 20+ Windows 95 floppies and live through the installation. Of course, you've copied them from a friend on all the second hand floppy disks you could muster. Every fifth floppy fails, so you reuse good ones that had already installed. Of course, your friend's family now have post launch nap and you have to wait for hours to get to him, your computer is just there in Setup, pray power doesn't go down, you didn't have 40MB to spare to move install to disk first, it's all from floppies. Spend a day back and forth to get it installed. And then drivers BSOD, half of your DOS stuff doesn't work. Revert back to DOS/Win3.x where everything works. Win95 just using space on HDD and floppies. Decide to remove from HDD and reuse floppies to get some good game on them from a pirate. Now Windows 95 opportunity is gone for good and either significant time or money is needed if I wish to try it once more.

None of this can be recreated if you go for virtual machines.

When it comes to working at the computer, nothing has changed. You sit down in front of screen with keyboard and mouse and perform work. When it comes to getting stuff, and then getting the stuff working together, it's completely different story.

The only thing I can recommend is getting a real PC and trying to perform work on it. But seeing that you can't do it, I see no point in installing DOS after DOS and then Windows after Windows. It's all the same. DOS is a console OS, Windows are stacking GUI and they've been around before them and they're still used as primary means of interfacing with the computer.

zb10948 wrote on 2024-07-25, 12:48:

Hello,

Don't consider this as a critique but without experiencing what physical software means and what no Internet is, you cannot recreate 80s or 90s. Example, insert all those 20+ Windows 95 floppies and live through the installation. Of course, you've copied them from a friend on all the second hand floppy disks you could muster. Every fifth floppy fails, so you reuse good ones that had already installed. Of course, your friend's family now have post launch nap and you have to wait for hours to get to him, your computer is just there in Setup, pray power doesn't go down, you didn't have 40MB to spare to move install to disk first, it's all from floppies. Spend a day back and forth to get it installed. And then drivers BSOD, half of your DOS stuff doesn't work. Revert back to DOS/Win3.x where everything works. Win95 just using space on HDD and floppies. Decide to remove from HDD and reuse floppies to get some good game on them from a pirate. Now Windows 95 opportunity is gone for good and either significant time or money is needed if I wish to try it once more.

None of this can be recreated if you go for virtual machines.

I get your point, which is why I'm using 86box for the virtualization of older hardware. It is fairly accurate in terms of performance to older PCs, and I can say I've had a fair bit of hassle installing Windows 95 on it (i.e. multiple failed attempts at installing due to the installer not reading the CD drive correctly, or the BIOS straight up not recognizing the hard disk controller). And I am fully aware that this will not be a 100% accurate experience.

But that is why it is going to be a video series. I am aware of how unreliable older systems were, as even the older PCs I grew up with that ran Windows XP had their own host of issues. But that is not what I'm trying to show. What I am trying to show is the limitations of older software and hardware, and how the average person would have worked on them.

I feel like it would be a useful thing to show to modern audiences, as it's a great way of showing how far technology and software has come in the past 40 years. It's not for my personal experience, but to show to others a general idea of how using a PC in those times would've looked like.

zb10948 wrote on 2024-07-25, 12:48:

Hello,

Don't consider this as a critique but without experiencing what physical software means and what no Internet is, you cannot recreate 80s or 90s. Example, insert all those 20+ Windows 95 floppies and live through the installation. ...

Yes. There was no text box you just bung some words into back in the day. Software and hardware came with thick books, and you had to read them. But that's fine, you have the time during the very slow installs. And having to fix and check the filesystem periodically, which also could take hours. Plus maybe some restoring, or more likely because storage was expensive, re-do your work as there were no backups.

Do all this on too little RAM, because RAM was extremely expensive, and shops would use low-RAM as a stick to sell whole new machines (also with too little RAM) when customers come in to query why their PC is so slow.

A slightly more reasonable comment... I got this picture off reddit as an example of a thing from games when I used to play them: system requirements.

Doom might have run on a 386, on the lowest settings and screen size, and technically that is better than no Doom.... but system requirements were always rather optimistic.

Maybe have a look back at that example of IT biz lies from the modern era 😀

Ommex wrote on 2024-07-25, 13:41:

I get your point, which is why I'm using 86box for the virtualization of older hardware. It is fairly accurate in terms of performance to older PCs, and I can say I've had a fair bit of hassle installing Windows 95 on it (i.e. multiple failed attempts at installing due to the installer not reading the CD drive correctly, or the BIOS straight up not recognizing the hard disk controller). And I am fully aware that this will not be a 100% accurate experience.

But that is why it is going to be a video series. I am aware of how unreliable older systems were, as even the older PCs I grew up with that ran Windows XP had their own host of issues. But that is not what I'm trying to show. What I am trying to show is the limitations of older software and hardware, and how the average person would have worked on them.

I feel like it would be a useful thing to show to modern audiences, as it's a great way of showing how far technology and software has come in the past 40 years. It's not for my personal experience, but to show to others a general idea of how using a PC in those times would've looked like.

I get the general gist of your idea, but the limitations part is not that clear to me. When you had a cutting edge system back in the day, there were no limitations. Let's say with networking, 1Mbit connection was godly, as the typical data downloaded from the internet was very small compared to now. Nowadays a driver is 100MB+, back then a driver was 1MB. As there were no 100MB drivers back then, 1Mbit was not a limitation.

With Windows 95 came next, next finish, the first appearance of Microsoft's "Wizard" dialog model for installation and configuration. Given the context of time and some hardware combo where Windows 95 performs very stable, difference in workflow between it and Windows 11 is next to none. Personally I used 95 as late as 2008 on a secondary PC and performed a subset of 'desktop workflow' tasks normally, browsing the internet, reading, some light programming and so on.

If you want to show hurdles of users from the past, the biggest thing was original PC and DOS memory model. That was a real limitation. If you're not aware of this read up or watch a video. This was real PITA, as most DOS driver stuff was.

Also average person wasn't average back then, their subset of knowledge was on the expert level considering what we have today. See the Doom letter posted above, you got that with a purchase, you need to type the commands in, you need to perform some workarounds if it doesn't work at first, today you install a game with a single click, and that's the levels of average for both eras. Average PC user back then knows to operate DOS console and commands, knows what a filesystem is, what files and directories are, knows several most important file extensions and what they're for.

Maybe that would be a better direction for your video, to show differences in "average" then vs now. You can use VMs or emulators for that. Going through OS installation manual and all the manuals for applications you want to run, typing all the commands in, debugging and making sure everything is ok - and then showing the almost-automagical installation of Windows 11 and modern software.

zb10948 wrote on 2024-07-26, 12:47:

I get the general gist of your idea, but the limitations part is not that clear to me. When you had a cutting edge system back i […]
Show full quote

I get the general gist of your idea, but the limitations part is not that clear to me. When you had a cutting edge system back in the day, there were no limitations. Let's say with networking, 1Mbit connection was godly, as the typical data downloaded from the internet was very small compared to now. Nowadays a driver is 100MB+, back then a driver was 1MB. As there were no 100MB drivers back then, 1Mbit was not a limitation.

With Windows 95 came next, next finish, the first appearance of Microsoft's "Wizard" dialog model for installation and configuration. Given the context of time and some hardware combo where Windows 95 performs very stable, difference in workflow between it and Windows 11 is next to none. Personally I used 95 as late as 2008 on a secondary PC and performed a subset of 'desktop workflow' tasks normally, browsing the internet, reading, some light programming and so on.

If you want to show hurdles of users from the past, the biggest thing was original PC and DOS memory model. That was a real limitation. If you're not aware of this read up or watch a video. This was real PITA, as most DOS driver stuff was.

Also average person wasn't average back then, their subset of knowledge was on the expert level considering what we have today. See the Doom letter posted above, you got that with a purchase, you need to type the commands in, you need to perform some workarounds if it doesn't work at first, today you install a game with a single click, and that's the levels of average for both eras. Average PC user back then knows to operate DOS console and commands, knows what a filesystem is, what files and directories are, knows several most important file extensions and what they're for.

Maybe that would be a better direction for your video, to show differences in "average" then vs now. You can use VMs or emulators for that. Going through OS installation manual and all the manuals for applications you want to run, typing all the commands in, debugging and making sure everything is ok - and then showing the almost-automagical installation of Windows 11 and modern software.

I am aware of the way DOS handles memory, I did do my research on that. And your last paragraph is exactly what the focus of my video series is going to be. How computers went from something you'd need a lot of trouble and research to work on, to a modern system where everything works with the click of a button. (Except for Windows 11, which seems to have regressed in some ways by making you use regedit to make changes 🤣).

Still, I have begun work on the first video, which would focus on the original IBM PC and DOS 1.10. Especially the interesting quirks of it booting in BASIC and how primitive early DOS was.

...Well, guess there's gonna be some failures in it. WordStar failed to install, due to the types of disks I have. The manual implies that there's a single disk, but the collection I got had multiple disks in it. Was still able to show it off, by running off the Program disk. Even got 'printing' working, as 86box lets you 'print' documents as PNG files.

Visi-On was not possible to install, as it's copy-protected, and I didn't have a proper disk file that could get mounted in 86box.

I did finish the first video in this series, so let me know how you guys think this looks.

The video is amateurish, as I don't have the means to record voiceovers or do any complex editing, so it's all PowerPoint.

https://youtu.be/9ody8HJGRwI?si=lV5YZWowE5ni_DRb

progman.exe wrote on 2024-07-25, 14:07:

A slightly more reasonable comment... I got this picture off reddit as an example of a thing from games when I used to play them: system requirements.

Doom might have run on a 386, on the lowest settings and screen size, and technically that is better than no Doom.... but system requirements were always rather optimistic.

Maybe have a look back at that example of IT biz lies from the modern era 😀

Deus ex, crysis, half-life, vampire bloodlines etc.

The system requirements were a complete joke.

Hi there,

congratulations - my first post here since 14 months.

Quite an expansive topic, but just some randome anecdotes:

Hardware:

My parents got a used, generic AMD 386-40 PC rig back in 1993.
(I was in my mid teens back then.)
Desktop including kb, mouse, joystick, 14" screen and dot matrix printer for 2000 DM.
(Deutsche Mark, roughly half that in € or $, without inflation).
A 386 chip was still considered "adequate" and the 486 "excessive", at least on a budget.
Certain legal issues made that chip very cheap and abundant, once available.

Abysmally slow VGA card with 256 kb RAM that ran Windows 3.1 @ 640x480 and 16 colors.
Two hard drives of 50 and 40 MB, much later upgraded to a Quantum Fireball 512 MB.
(System won't take more than 512 MB without some workarounds, but 0.5 GB was still plenty.)

We later added another 4 MB of RAM (150 DM), a Soundblaster 16 pnp VE (220 DM) and 4x CD-ROM-Drive (150 DM).
CD-ROM forced us to remove the 2nd hard drive, as there was only one IDE channel.
Those things were not required for an office system, but for gaming.

The screen wouldn't really do 800x600, neither would that card.
We were quite impressed, though.
Previous office machine had been a Schneider Joyce (Amstrad CPC), a whole different era, mid 80s.
At that time, by basic performance, that IBM compatible PC could do a lot more than most contemporary "home computer" that people actually had back then, like Commodore C64 / Amiga 500 or Atari ST.

The mouse was an early "Genius" and insanely unergonomic, bulky, hard edges.
It also clogged up all the time, the metal rollers actually started to corrode, eventually. Fabric topped mouse pad ended up looking like shit. Rural Family PC. I figured out one day that washing one's hands before booting up might be a good idea, but no one took heed.
Later replaced by a 1st gen Logitech Pilot, still mechanical, of course. But huge leap in function and shape. Still insanely unergonomic by todays standards, so do the math.

Keyboard: Had to be replaced some years later. Pricey if bought retail, yet still shite: Cherry MY2000 keys. Avoid.
If gen X and actually still trained on type writers, you don't care much, though.

Software:

MS DOS 6.22, on copied floppies. We actually had and used a 3rd party manual for it.

Windows 3.1 ran just fine.
MS Word 2.0 made for a decent word processor.
Spreadsheet was still MS Multiplan on DOS, for legacy reasons.
Paint was a somewhat popular toy, apart from the native Windows games, minesweeper or solitaire.

We actually took that machine on line via analogue 33.3 kbps modem dial up in 1997, with netscape navigator as browser. Yes, that worked and was already quite amazing. Expensive, though, as it counted as a local call and those were still a few Pfennig per minute back then. We later upgraded to ISDN dial-up (64 kbps), still on Win 3.1 until a new machine with Win 98SE in 2000.

Obviously, 16 colors for any graphics is a joke. Windows worked around that limitation by mixing different ones pixel-by-pixel.
AFAIR, the resolution of 640x480 didn't impose too much of a limitation for web browsing. Most content won't use more.

Games:

Obviously, my brother and I were much more interested in that.
Games back then required DOS, those for Windows were rare and arcane.
So, booting to prompt, now what?
My brother figured out to navigate the file system, change directories and start games.
There were some on the hard drive it came with.

Microprose Silent Service II was the only one of interest.
We spent endless hours on that, with very basic English and sans manual. Complex hotkeys. Amazing IBM beeper sound!
We even had to figure out the copy protection on our own, identifying random ship types.

We got most later games by borrowing the original floppys from a friend, of note:

- Master of Orion: A milestone of a game.

- "UFO - enemy unknown" aka. "X-COM": blew our mind.
Side note: Was issued in three or four languages, to chose from upon start. The German translation was really bad.

- Sid Meyer's Colonization: We never played "CIV" but COL was the number one addictive time killer.

- UFO sequel "Terror from the deep": Hence the CD-Drive.
Turned out, it could be installed to run without the disk as a copy protection, with some workaround.
First game to show the limitations of the VGA - more complex battlescapes scrolled very slowly.

- STAR WARS: TIE-Fighter: The previous "X-Wing" had been a hit and I saw that at a friend's. So I actually bought Tie-Fighter when I saw it in a department store. In a cardboard box, including six 3.5" floppy disks and a lot of paper.
Think, back then, a new 1st tier title was around 120 to 140 DM.
Good investment. Awesome game. But again, the more crowded battles would overwhelm the VGA.

- Adventure games, rarely. Never quite stuck. Manic Mansion I and II, Indy 4.

The "hardware requirements" back then were a mixed bag.
On paper, almost anything said "386, VGA graphics, 4 MB RAM" but not all would run smoothly.
Silent Service II was fine on a 286.
DOOM, on this one, not a chance. Wolfenstein 3D, yes.
Main issue was the slow OTI VGA chip, there were no real standards for that back then, in the consumer realm.
By numbers and memory, any DOS game would feel fine on that card and the tiny screen. Some very early ones were 640x480 like Warcraft II, but also in 16 colors to stay within the VGA specs.

Major challanges with games back then:

Memory:
DOS had 640 kB. Some games wanted all of that.
Figure out where to put the OS and the mouse and sound drivers, etc.
Later games required designated RAM segments called XMS or EMS.
There was a native DOS tool called "mem maker" but mostly, getting games to run meant hacking the start files config.sys and autoexec.bat in endless try n error sessions via the DOS editor.
Later, more sophisticated games ran in a DOS extender, ignoring that limitations.

Sound drivers:
Even the very common Creative Labs Sound blaster could be a mess.
Do I need to load that driver or will the game just work? And which one and how and will the remaining memory suffice?!?
About a third of this site is about that.

DOS, btw: We were proud to edit batch files. I learned some basic Pascal at school on very similar machines.
Of course, we had the Norton Commander installed.

User experience:

Back then, the "IBM compatible PC" was still considered a pure office machine, a gloryfied type writer.
We had to ask the pro who sold it to us why it wouldn't make anything but IBM beeper noise and learned the term "Soundkarte".
Any other use in private and for kids still felt a lot like "off label" and required some skills in tweaking and tinkering.
"Plug and play" was being mocked as "plug and pray" and would be for quite some time.
"Multimedia" was the mid 90s buzzword and late 90s PCs could not be trusted to play DVDs out of the box.
Some games in 1993 still considered that some users won't have a mouse.
I played DOOM in early LAN parties and was the only one in the group of four to use a mouse.

Windows applications were decent enough and worked. MS Word 2.0 gave access to things that, only a moment ago, seemed reserved to professionals in the print business.

Games for DOS in the first half of the 90s tended to be fairly complex, balanced and well thought out. Hardware was very limited, they had to make the best of 320x200 pixels at 256 colors. But by script and content, I like to think that the average quality reflected the somewhat limited, likely a bit more educated audience back then.

So much for the time period from roughly 1990 to 95, depending on the depth of your pockets.
The German ALDI discount chain introduced a very agressively priced first PC based on a 486-133 in 1995 which took things a lot more mainstream around here.

I got my own pretty high end Pentium 133 system with Windows 95 in 1997, which was a whole other world again.

But, obviously, nothing will ever beat the magic of that first somewhat "modern era" system I got my hands on. And the music of Nirvana, of course.

So, most thereafter is boring, but feel free to ask.

Cuttoon wrote on 2024-08-03, 19:10:

- STAR WARS: TIE-Fighter: The previous "X-Wing" had been a hit and I saw that at a friend's. So I actually bought Tie-Fighter when I saw it in a department store. In a cardboard box, including six 3.5" floppy disks and a lot of paper.
Think, back then, a new 1st tier title was around 120 to 140 DM.
Good investment. Awesome game. But again, the more crowded battles would overwhelm the VGA.

I loved X-Wing and TIE Fighter as a kid 🤣. I was into air combat games and Star Wars, so when I saw that on Google, I had to figure out how to get it. Learnt how to use DOSBOX and mount ISOs to get it to work. Even had to emulate a joystick using my mouse for TIE Fighter.