keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-01-30, 20:54:

I think by the time LCDs became commonplace in offices, the modern paradigm of game programmers targeting actual 3D video cards rather than the cheap-o cards in office computers had already set in.

The impact of 3D is an observation I tackled pages ago.

The games that were actually developed alongside the launch of professional TFT desktop screens (Unreal, Motorhead, etc.) shipped with 32bit software rendering as a first-class 3D path.

At the time 3D cards were being talked about in magazines and hardcore gamers were buying them but they were not in offices, not in laptops, and not compatible enough to be a dependency of actual game development. Having a 3D acceleration in the machine didn't become necessary until after 2000. But, having 32bit 3D rendering was necessary for late 90s game developers.

The pattern that I think exists would assert that games would be adapted to work-first PC devices, that by then included TFT screens. And, the historical record is clear: 3Dfx offered a spin-off pathway for arcade-first computing and the industry stuck to backing work-first computers.

What is actually driving my argument is business dynamics, not nostalgia: Game developers target the most compatible work-first PC configuration that can plausibly run their game, and treat everything else as optional. At the end of the day, the technology that matters can be predicted from compatibility alone.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 16:38:

That's not trolling. That's honesty.

Yeah nar, I'd call it trolling. Endless word salad with slightly shifting realities and subtle changes to the goal posts, and it all seems to be aimed at getting a rise out of people. You've done it in multiple threads.

badmojo wrote on 2026-01-31, 00:53:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 16:38:

That's not trolling. That's honesty.

Yeah nar, I'd call it trolling. Endless word salad with slightly shifting realities and subtle changes to the goal posts, and it all seems to be aimed at getting a rise out of people. You've done it in multiple threads.

Bud, I'm not here to flame anyone and there is no need to get emotional. I follow a simple hypothesis-testing model where all are invited to bring their own goalposts. I'll take your feedback on board and revise the OP to make this clear. And, I'll keep my hypothesis-testing approach out of your threads! 😉

I have a hypothesis that people like you join forums with the intention of baiting people into these drawn out, slightly antagonistic discussions with semi-facts and contrary logic. Ultimately the forum grows weary of you and stops playing the game, at which point you'll wander off to another forum and get your kicks over there. Let's see if I'm right.

**Live hypothesis in progress **

badmojo wrote on 2026-01-31, 12:01:

I have a hypothesis that people like you join forums with the intention of baiting people into these drawn out, slightly antagonistic discussions with semi-facts and contrary logic. Ultimately the forum grows weary of you and stops playing the game, at which point you'll wander off to another forum and get your kicks over there. Let's see if I'm right.

**Live hypothesis in progress **

oh, is top posting because i believe the guy is a IA bot ... another hypothesis 😀

LCD was still not a good back in the day of 1993, yet I bought Compaq LTE 386s/20 which was discontinued for 1,000 for college writing and forums hosted by vaxens. The mean time of battery run time is average 3 hours for most notebooks especially 386SX, SL and 486SL.

FPS of games differences has nothing to do with eras either LCD or games, this was due to certain viable generations of video cards coming out that does this in jumps of fps for older games that was around for 3 to 5 years but the newest games that just came out, now max out the video cards that people already have for awhile. Having to buy most powerful video card was after-effect in response to this for some who can afford this.
Right now this damned 2018 through 2026 the video card prices is really big mess. I have real hard time justifying this, really needs to come down to reasonable 500 or less for high end video cards.

LCD in 2005 or so, I bought 1280x1024 LCD by Samsung, yes it is smeary mess when scrolling on web forums. Finally replaced my TV CRT and monitor in 2010 for 32" LCD and 27" LCD, both are Samsung and much better. Still using them.

Cheers,

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 21:24:

darry wrote on 2026-01-30, 21:19:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 21:10:

My friends with IBMs would come over to my Commodore to play games, until they had a NES and then we went over to theirs.

IBMs were for work.

I guess that largely depends on the games one preferred.

Many of the games I enjoyed in my younger years (early 90s) , on a 386, were Sierra and LucaArts adventures, Gateway (Legend Entertainment), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (Mindscape), Silpheed, etc could be run on a 286 as well. I did not have an NES and I can't say I missed having one.

Those are turn-based sims? Would you say PC gaming has always been shaped by what PCs were already good at, not by chasing the optimal gaming experiences seen elsewhere?

Most of these are graphics adventure games with a text based interface. Silpheed is a shooter. I also played Wing Commander 1 and 2 (arcade style space fighter sims).

As for "Would you say PC gaming has always been shaped by what PCs were already good at, not by chasing the optimal gaming experiences seen elsewhere?", that question really does not make much sense to me, as it is written, about PCs and PC gaming, nor would it really make more sense it if was about console or arcade gaming instead.

In general, games and software at large are shaped by the capabilities of the platform and the preferences and means of that platform's user base.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 20:35:

In summary, you are saying 90s TFT laptop screens are suboptimal for games compared to 90s CRT desktop screens. […]
Show full quote

keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-01-30, 19:15:

There is probably no one on this website more intimately familiar with the drawbacks of 1990s laptop screens than I am, and I sa […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 17:17:

The 1993 laptop I recently acquired has a 640x480 TFT screen.

Later 90s TFT desktop screens would have been more optimised for VGA and SVGA inputs than 21st Century TFT screens because they were being sold into different ecosystems.

There is probably no one on this website more intimately familiar with the drawbacks of 1990s laptop screens than I am, and I say that very wearily, looking across my office at the several boxes of old laptops I am trying to sort through right now, every single one of them with a TFT screen. I don't buy anything else.

I can tell you unequivocally that until the very late 90s, they were extremely geared towards business and productivity, and work well for that purpose, but a 640x480 or 800x600 laptop screen simply was never made to work well enough for DOS games as a CRT, for the very simple reason that the resolution is too low for scaling algorithms to produce a good looking image. And even if you could, no one figured it out in the 90s before the resolution of these screens increased to 1024x768 and manufacturers started adding simple (naive!) scaling algorithms that produced a slightly better, but blurry, image for 320x200 or 640x480 games.

It's unfortunate, but true that 90s laptop screens, even if they are TFT, are suboptimal for games compared to a CRT. Again, it doesn't have to be this way, but manufacturers simply didn't figure out how to present lower-than-native resolutions to laptop LCD screens in a way that doesn't look really crappy until after it ceased to be relevant.

90s desktop LCDs may be a different animal, and I am not familiar with them. But the 2000s LCD screens that I have used extensively perform the same as those later 1024x768 laptop screens that have the blurry scaling algorithm.

It works, but still not as nice as a CRT.

But again I don't think that was really a concern people had much back then. I think they thought "ooh this LCD is much more convenient, look how flat and light it is" and that was a perfectly valid reason to prefer them.

In summary, you are saying 90s TFT laptop screens are suboptimal for games compared to 90s CRT desktop screens.

I agree, and I'd like to highlight that an IBM PC1 is suboptimal for games compared to a Commodore 16.

And, a CRT monochrome monitor is suboptimal for games compared to a CRT television.

So 286/386 PC and monitor was never sold as being games-first, but they played games.

The pattern I am trying to surface is that PCs were never introduced for games, and the games adapted to whatever PCs existed.

The 286 was bad for games, and 286 games like Alley Cat compare badly with Zelda. But Alley Cat matters.

Zelda is a game that plays on a games console, which triggers a "so what?" Alley cat is a game that plays on an office PC, which triggers a "interesting!"

If the pattern holds then the TFT office monitor must exist before games are adapted to it. And, it doesn't need to be the most optimal to be relevant.

Tying back to my opening post: PC games historically adapt to whatever hardware exists in offices, not to what is optimal for games.

As respectfully as I can say it, this mostly feels like a mix of stating the obvious (and verifiable) , assuming common/trends are absolutes and simply assuming. To me, it all smells a bit of sophistry.

a) "So 286/386 PC and monitor was never sold as being games-first, but they played games."

A PC had and has many use cases, games are but one of them. Someone solely buying a PC costing thousands of dollars (of the time) solely to play games would have made little sense to most consumers. But, PC gaming was growing and some marketing material at the time did mention games. By the later 386 era, a pedestrian 386 PC with a sound card could actually be better for gaming than contemporaneous game consoles due to sheer brute CPU capability. I would argue that, even today, most anyone with a gaming PC uses it for more than gaming (unless they have multiple PCs or other devices).

b) "The pattern I am trying to surface is that PCs were never introduced for games, and the games adapted to whatever PCs existed."

It was and is obvious from the very beginning from publicly stated design goals, press releases, MSRP, etc that games were a secondary concern, but they were a concern, because the original IBM PC had a game port.

c) "The 286 was bad for games, and 286 games like Alley Cat compare badly with Zelda. But Alley Cat matters.

Zelda is a game that plays on a games console, which triggers a "so what?" Alley cat is a game that plays on an office PC, which triggers a "interesting!""

That comparison is an odd one. Comparing a PC game from 1983 to The Legenc of Zelda on Famicom (1986) and NES (1987). 4 years was a long time, especially during the 1980s. Game consoles were designed primarily for games. That good games are popular and that games that innovate or push against hardware limitations are notable applies to both to game consoles and PCs. I will leave further reasearch on that theme to you.

d) "If the pattern holds then the TFT office monitor must exist before games are adapted to it. And, it doesn't need to be the most optimal to be relevant. "

Patterns are not absolutes and this is very easily disproved with one example in the PC world: sound cards. The Adlib card was introduced in 1987 when no office PCs had a multichannel synthesizer. Furthermore, your statement also implies that games would need to be adapted to an early office TFT monitor. Would an adaptation even have be necessary or even possible ? Would game developers have deemed it worth it ? Did any game developers of the time ever make statements on the subject ? I suggest you possibly research those points and reevaluate/rework your statement.

As to your final statement : "Tying back to my opening post: PC games historically adapt to whatever hardware exists in offices, not to what is optimal for games.", that is both true and untrue and has changed to a large degree over the years.

It was and is true that market demand shapes product offerings. Office PCs and their components were initially largely identical to what consumers could buy for the home but, even at the beginning, there were home specific options that were more common (CGA color graphics, especially composite,versus MDA for example ). Games targeting PCs would have obviously needed to be designed to work what the PC userbase had access to. As time went on, and the PC gaming market grew, more game specific options appeared, not necessarily first at the office, though sometimes finding their way back into the office later. Sound cards and graphics accelerators are two examples. High refresh rate displays are another example.

darry wrote on 2026-02-01, 18:22:

As respectfully as I can say it, this mostly feels like a mix of stating the obvious (and verifiable) , assuming common/trends a […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 20:35:

In summary, you are saying 90s TFT laptop screens are suboptimal for games compared to 90s CRT desktop screens. […]
Show full quote

keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-01-30, 19:15:

There is probably no one on this website more intimately familiar with the drawbacks of 1990s laptop screens than I am, and I sa […]
Show full quote

There is probably no one on this website more intimately familiar with the drawbacks of 1990s laptop screens than I am, and I say that very wearily, looking across my office at the several boxes of old laptops I am trying to sort through right now, every single one of them with a TFT screen. I don't buy anything else.

I can tell you unequivocally that until the very late 90s, they were extremely geared towards business and productivity, and work well for that purpose, but a 640x480 or 800x600 laptop screen simply was never made to work well enough for DOS games as a CRT, for the very simple reason that the resolution is too low for scaling algorithms to produce a good looking image. And even if you could, no one figured it out in the 90s before the resolution of these screens increased to 1024x768 and manufacturers started adding simple (naive!) scaling algorithms that produced a slightly better, but blurry, image for 320x200 or 640x480 games.

It's unfortunate, but true that 90s laptop screens, even if they are TFT, are suboptimal for games compared to a CRT. Again, it doesn't have to be this way, but manufacturers simply didn't figure out how to present lower-than-native resolutions to laptop LCD screens in a way that doesn't look really crappy until after it ceased to be relevant.

90s desktop LCDs may be a different animal, and I am not familiar with them. But the 2000s LCD screens that I have used extensively perform the same as those later 1024x768 laptop screens that have the blurry scaling algorithm.

It works, but still not as nice as a CRT.

But again I don't think that was really a concern people had much back then. I think they thought "ooh this LCD is much more convenient, look how flat and light it is" and that was a perfectly valid reason to prefer them.

In summary, you are saying 90s TFT laptop screens are suboptimal for games compared to 90s CRT desktop screens.

I agree, and I'd like to highlight that an IBM PC1 is suboptimal for games compared to a Commodore 16.

And, a CRT monochrome monitor is suboptimal for games compared to a CRT television.

So 286/386 PC and monitor was never sold as being games-first, but they played games.

The pattern I am trying to surface is that PCs were never introduced for games, and the games adapted to whatever PCs existed.

The 286 was bad for games, and 286 games like Alley Cat compare badly with Zelda. But Alley Cat matters.

Zelda is a game that plays on a games console, which triggers a "so what?" Alley cat is a game that plays on an office PC, which triggers a "interesting!"

If the pattern holds then the TFT office monitor must exist before games are adapted to it. And, it doesn't need to be the most optimal to be relevant.

Tying back to my opening post: PC games historically adapt to whatever hardware exists in offices, not to what is optimal for games.

As respectfully as I can say it, this mostly feels like a mix of stating the obvious (and verifiable) , assuming common/trends are absolutes and simply assuming. To me, it all smells a bit of sophistry.

a) "So 286/386 PC and monitor was never sold as being games-first, but they played games."

A PC had and has many use cases, games are but one of them. Someone solely buying a PC costing thousands of dollars (of the time) solely to play games would have made little sense to most consumers. But, PC gaming was growing and some marketing material at the time did mention games. By the later 386 era, a pedestrian 386 PC with a sound card could actually be better for gaming than contemporaneous game consoles due to sheer brute CPU capability. I would argue that, even today, most anyone with a gaming PC uses it for more than gaming (unless they have multiple PCs or other devices).

b) "The pattern I am trying to surface is that PCs were never introduced for games, and the games adapted to whatever PCs existed."

It was and is obvious from the very beginning from publicly stated design goals, press releases, MSRP, etc that games were a secondary concern, but they were a concern, because the original IBM PC had a game port.

c) "The 286 was bad for games, and 286 games like Alley Cat compare badly with Zelda. But Alley Cat matters.

Zelda is a game that plays on a games console, which triggers a "so what?" Alley cat is a game that plays on an office PC, which triggers a "interesting!""

That comparison is an odd one. Comparing a PC game from 1983 to The Legenc of Zelda on Famicom (1986) and NES (1987). 4 years was a long time, especially during the 1980s. Game consoles were designed primarily for games. That good games are popular and that games that innovate or push against hardware limitations are notable applies to both to game consoles and PCs. I will leave further reasearch on that theme to you.

d) "If the pattern holds then the TFT office monitor must exist before games are adapted to it. And, it doesn't need to be the most optimal to be relevant. "

Patterns are not absolutes and this is very easily disproved with one example in the PC world: sound cards. The Adlib card was introduced in 1987 when no office PCs had a multichannel synthesizer. Furthermore, your statement also implies that games would need to be adapted to an early office TFT monitor. Would an adaptation even have be necessary or even possible ? Would game developers have deemed it worth it ? Did any game developers of the time ever make statements on the subject ? I suggest you possibly research those points and reevaluate/rework your statement.

As to your final statement : "Tying back to my opening post: PC games historically adapt to whatever hardware exists in offices, not to what is optimal for games.", that is both true and untrue and has changed to a large degree over the years.

It was and is true that market demand shapes product offerings. Office PCs and their components were initially largely identical to what consumers could buy for the home but, even at the beginning, there were home specific options that were more common (CGA color graphics, especially composite,versus MDA for example ). Games targeting PCs would have obviously needed to be designed to work what the PC userbase had access to. As time went on, and the PC gaming market grew, more game specific options appeared, not necessarily first at the office, though sometimes finding their way back into the office later. Sound cards and graphics accelerators are two examples. High refresh rate displays are another example.

I assure you games were a consideration in nearly every home PC purchase. If the parents didn't play games, the children did. I can only speak anecdotally from my personal experience because at the time of the 286/386 I was 15 or 16 years old. As you would expect everyone I knew at that age that had a PC had it primarily to play games.

Let's also be honest, games are the primary reason for consumer PC evolution. If you were doing the kind of productivity tasks on a computer at home at that time you really didn't need anything more than an 8088. Spreadsheets, Word Processing, printing some greetings cards...none of these tasks required much muscle.

I would say that games piracy was also a major contributing factor to the modem speed races around that time. 2400 baud was more than enough for most anything a home user could need to do, browsing BBS' , talking on the forums, sending a fax or the odd file to a business...the only large files I know of that a home user would need to download were pirated software. It wasn't until the web got going that consumers really needed anything more.

I think you need to consider that games were the main driving force behind all personal computing evolution. Even people who didn't play games bought Myst to be awed (In their Mind) by what their computer could do, driving CD-ROM adoption.

Games are a huge factor in PC evolutionary history.

darry wrote on 2026-02-01, 18:22:

It was and is true that market demand shapes product offerings. Office PCs and their components were initially largely identical to what consumers could buy for the home but, even at the beginning, there were home specific options that were more common (CGA color graphics, especially composite,versus MDA for example ). Games targeting PCs would have obviously needed to be designed to work what the PC userbase had access to. As time went on, and the PC gaming market grew, more game specific options appeared, not necessarily first at the office, though sometimes finding their way back into the office later. Sound cards and graphics accelerators are two examples. High refresh rate displays are another example.

This is very much the case - remember that in the 80s, most office computers were equipped with monochrome or perhaps Hercules graphics cards.

In fact, it might be accurate to say that it wasn't until VGA became the lowest graphics standard available in the early 90s (so that no newly acquired office PC was without at least VGA), and fast SVGA cards unified the needs and desires of both offices and gamers (for a time, until the advent of 3D accelerators), that "playing Doom on my office PC" became a cultural thing.

Until then, how many office PCs had CGA instead of MDA (would have been considered a bad choice of video card for an office computer) or EGA instead of Hercules?

In other words, what was the balance of sales of CGA/EGA vs. MDA/Hercules/etc. in the 1980s? I'd wager CGA/EGA went overwhelmingly to home users, and only VGA eventually unified the two markets, for a while.

Anyway, going back to the particular question of TFT LCDs vs. CRTs and whether games were "targeted" towards one or the other, I just don't think game devs considered there to be enough of a difference between the two from a programming perspective as LCDs were becoming popular to even think about it very much at all.

For example Doom ran at 35fps because that was the maximum a decked out 486 could do in 1993 and it was conveniently half the VGA vertical refresh rate. Same with Commander Keen and the average 286. I think moving into the late 90s then, just like in the early 90s, concerns like CPU and GPU speed were always far more important than LCD latency, which, if it were considered at all, was probably an afterthought.

Shagittarius wrote on 2026-02-01, 19:16:

I assure you games were a consideration in nearly every home PC purchase. If the parents didn't play games, the children did. […]
Show full quote

darry wrote on 2026-02-01, 18:22:

As respectfully as I can say it, this mostly feels like a mix of stating the obvious (and verifiable) , assuming common/trends a […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-30, 20:35:

In summary, you are saying 90s TFT laptop screens are suboptimal for games compared to 90s CRT desktop screens. […]
Show full quote

In summary, you are saying 90s TFT laptop screens are suboptimal for games compared to 90s CRT desktop screens.

I agree, and I'd like to highlight that an IBM PC1 is suboptimal for games compared to a Commodore 16.

And, a CRT monochrome monitor is suboptimal for games compared to a CRT television.

So 286/386 PC and monitor was never sold as being games-first, but they played games.

The pattern I am trying to surface is that PCs were never introduced for games, and the games adapted to whatever PCs existed.

The 286 was bad for games, and 286 games like Alley Cat compare badly with Zelda. But Alley Cat matters.

Zelda is a game that plays on a games console, which triggers a "so what?" Alley cat is a game that plays on an office PC, which triggers a "interesting!"

If the pattern holds then the TFT office monitor must exist before games are adapted to it. And, it doesn't need to be the most optimal to be relevant.

Tying back to my opening post: PC games historically adapt to whatever hardware exists in offices, not to what is optimal for games.

As respectfully as I can say it, this mostly feels like a mix of stating the obvious (and verifiable) , assuming common/trends are absolutes and simply assuming. To me, it all smells a bit of sophistry.

a) "So 286/386 PC and monitor was never sold as being games-first, but they played games."

A PC had and has many use cases, games are but one of them. Someone solely buying a PC costing thousands of dollars (of the time) solely to play games would have made little sense to most consumers. But, PC gaming was growing and some marketing material at the time did mention games. By the later 386 era, a pedestrian 386 PC with a sound card could actually be better for gaming than contemporaneous game consoles due to sheer brute CPU capability. I would argue that, even today, most anyone with a gaming PC uses it for more than gaming (unless they have multiple PCs or other devices).

b) "The pattern I am trying to surface is that PCs were never introduced for games, and the games adapted to whatever PCs existed."

It was and is obvious from the very beginning from publicly stated design goals, press releases, MSRP, etc that games were a secondary concern, but they were a concern, because the original IBM PC had a game port.

c) "The 286 was bad for games, and 286 games like Alley Cat compare badly with Zelda. But Alley Cat matters.

Zelda is a game that plays on a games console, which triggers a "so what?" Alley cat is a game that plays on an office PC, which triggers a "interesting!""

That comparison is an odd one. Comparing a PC game from 1983 to The Legenc of Zelda on Famicom (1986) and NES (1987). 4 years was a long time, especially during the 1980s. Game consoles were designed primarily for games. That good games are popular and that games that innovate or push against hardware limitations are notable applies to both to game consoles and PCs. I will leave further reasearch on that theme to you.

d) "If the pattern holds then the TFT office monitor must exist before games are adapted to it. And, it doesn't need to be the most optimal to be relevant. "

Patterns are not absolutes and this is very easily disproved with one example in the PC world: sound cards. The Adlib card was introduced in 1987 when no office PCs had a multichannel synthesizer. Furthermore, your statement also implies that games would need to be adapted to an early office TFT monitor. Would an adaptation even have be necessary or even possible ? Would game developers have deemed it worth it ? Did any game developers of the time ever make statements on the subject ? I suggest you possibly research those points and reevaluate/rework your statement.

As to your final statement : "Tying back to my opening post: PC games historically adapt to whatever hardware exists in offices, not to what is optimal for games.", that is both true and untrue and has changed to a large degree over the years.

It was and is true that market demand shapes product offerings. Office PCs and their components were initially largely identical to what consumers could buy for the home but, even at the beginning, there were home specific options that were more common (CGA color graphics, especially composite,versus MDA for example ). Games targeting PCs would have obviously needed to be designed to work what the PC userbase had access to. As time went on, and the PC gaming market grew, more game specific options appeared, not necessarily first at the office, though sometimes finding their way back into the office later. Sound cards and graphics accelerators are two examples. High refresh rate displays are another example.

I assure you games were a consideration in nearly every home PC purchase. If the parents didn't play games, the children did. I can only speak anecdotally from my personal experience because at the time of the 286/386 I was 15 or 16 years old. As you would expect everyone I knew at that age that had a PC had it primarily to play games.

Let's also be honest, games are the primary reason for consumer PC evolution. If you were doing the kind of productivity tasks on a computer at home at that time you really didn't need anything more than an 8088. Spreadsheets, Word Processing, printing some greetings cards...none of these tasks required much muscle.

I would say that games piracy was also a major contributing factor to the modem speed races around that time. 2400 baud was more than enough for most anything a home user could need to do, browsing BBS' , talking on the forums, sending a fax or the odd file to a business...the only large files I know of that a home user would need to download were pirated software. It wasn't until the web got going that consumers really needed anything more.

I think you need to consider that games were the main driving force behind all personal computing evolution. Even people who didn't play games bought Myst to be awed (In their Mind) by what their computer could do, driving CD-ROM adoption.

Games are a huge factor in PC evolutionary history.

Speaking of PCs, as in personal computers in general, I absolutely agree, and from the very beginning, for IBM PCs, the initial premise was slightly different.

In my previous response, I was thinking of the IBM PC at its inception and its early years, which marketing initially framed as a serious machine, appropriate for business use, despite having a game port. It didn't take long for home users jumping on the IBM compatible PC bandwagon to be doing it for more than one reason. In a family unit, parents had practical concerns in mind, like word processing, budgeting/spreadsheets, computer literacy, etc and then entertainment/games, for themselves and their kids, while kids first thought of games, generally speaking. By the 286 and especially the 386 era, the focus on gaming had grown and was still growing.

Getting back to what you said "As you would expect everyone I knew at that age that had a PC had it primarily to play games", that is close to what my entourage was doing, with some degree of variation. I would add that, IMHO, most families that bought PCs, especially in the early days, did so with the intent to use them first and foremost for more "boring" and "practical" purposes. I think we all know how that usually turned out in real life. 😀

Thanks all! I really appreciate the effort to replace flames with facts and there is a lot there for me to digest 😀

My only first comment is that.. in my narrow experience.. kids generally had consoles by the TVs while the parents generally kept IBM compatibles strictly off limits to kids. The reason was fear and it wasn't just fear of breaking the machine: parents feared kids deleting their spreadsheets, or in finding things they should not.

So we used to sneak a floppy into a parent's work PC and boot from that, intending to leave no trace of whatever game we had, and that is probably how early viruses spread..

One random recollection just surfaced. On one parent's machine I found a game where the objective was to shake the joystick faster and faster to iterate the animation of a couple locked in various poses. That was early 90s, I think.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-02-01, 22:38:

Thanks all! I really appreciate the effort to replace flames with facts and there is a lot there for me to digest 😀

My only first comment is that.. in my humble experience.. the kids had consoles by the TVs while the parents had IBM compatibles that were strictly off limits to kids. The reason boils down to cost and it wasn't just the machine: Parents could not afford kids deleting their spreadsheets!

So we used to sneak a floppy into a parent's work PC and boot from that, intending to leave no trace of whatever game we had, and that is probably how early viruses spread..

I did all the tech support for my parents. That included software and hardware. My mother didn't panic when I'd have the computer apart and be working on something, and sometimes she would wake me up at 3:00 in the AM because she got into a mode in MS Works that she didn't know how to get out of. In fact it was pretty much considered MO at that time if you had a problem with technology you should ask your kids for help. I can't recall any of my friends that weren't allowed to touch their home computers...our computer was a tool, not a status symbol for boomers.

You made floppies to leave no traces of your games? You didn't know how to take care of that? You're parents could actually figure out if you installed something somewhere? My parents didn't know anything about the computer except the step by step instructions they had written down.

You honestly sound like your talking about another time period and not the late 80s / early 90's which is the period of 286/386 in the home. This all makes sense if this is an AI, or someone using AI for info, there wouldn't be a lot of records an AI could consult about that time period, it would probably derive most of its knowledge from later time periods and cobble together a half-narrative like this.

Also, my parents were the ones who got the viruses. They were college teachers and they would sometimes bring home stuff from their students on floppies and infect the computer. I who ran a BBS and was into the scene was not once responsible for that.

Shagittarius wrote on 2026-02-01, 22:41:

I did all the tech support for my parents. That included software and hardware. My mother didn't panic when I'd have the compu […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-02-01, 22:38:

Thanks all! I really appreciate the effort to replace flames with facts and there is a lot there for me to digest 😀

My only first comment is that.. in my humble experience.. the kids had consoles by the TVs while the parents had IBM compatibles that were strictly off limits to kids. The reason boils down to cost and it wasn't just the machine: Parents could not afford kids deleting their spreadsheets!

So we used to sneak a floppy into a parent's work PC and boot from that, intending to leave no trace of whatever game we had, and that is probably how early viruses spread..

I did all the tech support for my parents. That included software and hardware. My mother didn't panic when I'd have the computer apart and be working on something, and sometimes she would wake me up at 3:00 in the AM because she got into a mode in MS Works that she didn't know how to get out of. In fact it was pretty much considered MO at that time if you had a problem with technology you should ask your kids for help. I can't recall any of my friends that weren't allowed to touch their home computers...our computer was a tool, not a status symbol for boomers.

You made floppies to leave no traces of your games? You didn't know how to take care of that? You're parents could actually figure out if you installed something somewhere? My parents didn't know anything about the computer except the step by step instructions they had written down.

You honestly sound like your talking about another time period and not the late 80s / early 90's which is the period of 286/386 in the home. This all makes sense if this is an AI, or someone using AI for info, there wouldn't be a lot of records an AI could consult about that time period, it would probably derive most of its knowledge from later time periods and cobble together a half-narrative like this.

Also, my parents were the ones who got the viruses. They were college teachers and they would sometimes bring home stuff from their students on floppies and infect the computer. I who ran a BBS and was into the scene was not once responsible for that.

No mate, that is exactly how we did it across schools, libraries and home offices: We used bootable DOS floppies to avoid loading an OS from the HDD. Ideally, one floppy that combined DOS + game such as Scorched Earth. If anyone came in, we would press the button and run 😀

Ok, what purpose did avoiding booting from the hard drive serve?

By the way the first time my high school got an IBM computer lab the first thing we did was guess the password "ADMIN/ADMIN" and then create a hidden directory on the network with games and porn. Just a fun little tidbit. No one found it, at least not while I was there, no one must have ever checked the logs, if there even were any...

Shagittarius wrote on 2026-02-01, 22:52:

Ok, what purpose did avoiding booting from the hard drive serve?

Well, that's complex because every machine is configured differently and we were kids, not an IT support crew. This was late 80s and early 90s.

School PC might not have a HDD at all. Library PC might automatically load a searchable catalogue. Home PC is owned by an angry dad who knows every hiding place.

The one thing those PCs all had in common is a FDD and power switch!

It was very mechanical. We could eject and escape even if the angry dad switched power off at the fuse box, which actually happened once!

I think I was part of a more savvy group of computer kids at that time. Not meaning to offend in any way, but I think you would have thought my group of friends were an IT support team.

Shagittarius wrote on 2026-02-01, 23:14:

I think I was part of a more savvy group of computer kids at that time. Not meaning to offend in any way, but I think you would have thought my friends were an IT support team.

As disclosed elsewhere, my first own PC was a Pentium 200MMX. That came much later. No offence taken!

My first ATX machine was a P200 MMX probably sometime in '96. Until then I'd never dealt with soft-power and it took me an evening of reading the manual at a bar to figure out that the fact that I hadn't connected the powerswitch to the MB was the reason I couldn't get my new machine to boot. I was 21 at that time.

My first "own" pc was the family computer because I was on it so much my mother decided to get another pc, another crappy 8088, though hers came with a 20MB hardcard. I took the EGA monitor that I had bought from a friend at school and my mom moved her "new" pc onto a mono monitor.

My family had no money for much most of the time so I usually got the friend discount on hardware they were done with. I met up with some kids that lived in my area through a BBS and between us we passed around old hardware to upgrade our machines when we could. That period of cobbling together a machine yourself and having to learn hardware and software configuration is what you missed out on, starting with your first PC in the Plug and Play era...or Plug and Pray as it used to be known. Not that there weren't still upgrades and things you would have performed , but at that era things started to move further away from the bare metal PC.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-02-01, 22:59:

School PC might not have a HDD at all.

Were you not in this school lab, and actually used these PCs to know what kind of PC this was, or in retrospect, realize what PCs were in this school lab you are imagining?

Library PC might automatically load a searchable catalogue.

Did you use this library PC, and know how they worked, or in retrospect, realize what these "PCs" really were doing to make a searchable catalog possible?

Home PC is owned by an angry dad who knows every hiding place.

So certainly you learned to do this from experience when your Dad caught you using the computer, but then now he could not catch you using a floppy?

The one thing those PCs all had in common is a FDD and power switch!

Uh huh.

It was very mechanical. We could eject and escape even if the angry dad switched power off at the fuse box, which actually happened once!

So he did catch you, but did not catch you? I mean, what does using a floppy matter at this point since he was on the prowl to mess with you anyway? Kind of makes as much sense as LCDs were viable and inexpensive, everyone else denies it because they are gamers.