PCs and Computing in the 1990s

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I miss activedesktop. I had that Xmas fire movie as a background (played it through a HTML page with the movie embedded), and i just loved it.

Does anyone have fond memories of that 3D maze screensaver that came with Windows 9x, NT 4, and 2000? I remember spending so much time watching this screensaver run again and again on the classroom computers we had at my elementary school.

Yupp, and i also remember this:

My first was a Microbee kit computer my dad bought. Orange screen, no hard drive, 2 Mb ram. Had to load things off a cassette tape or type in machine code lol.

Edit: hmm 2Mb may have been an exaggeration according to Wikipedia they had way less than that. Can't remember.

Sounds like 2K. I thought the MicroB was the BBC Micro i heard of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBee


This was my first box that had similar hardware specs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20

I felt like the only one who grew up on Apple. First computer I ever used was Apple2E, with an interface a little like Dos. Anyone else always manage to crash '90s computers? I sure did, especially Windows 95 and Mac OS 7. My father would say it was my fault and yell at me. I suppose I was going too fast for the old computers.

I loved Oregon Trail too, and a bunch of interactive fiction games. In the late '90s, when I never had anyone to hang out with after school and wanted to be social, I spent loads of time on IRC. Anyone else notice that there are/were more intelligent people on IRC than on other platforms?

I gave up on my ability to ever be a programmer in the '90s too. I tried learning Microsoft Basic and VXML. I modified existing code for my purposes but was never able to write much. Too many syntax errors, and I have trouble thinking so far ahead. Am I the only one?

First game I every played, in early 1994 at the age of 5.

The first computer game I ever played was around 1974 on a college computer system via a teletype (paper based terminal). The game was called 23 matches and the game stuck in my head and I've since programmed various incarnations of it in various programming languages on various computers.

I remember playing the text-based game Adventure on my dad's thermal paper terminal; not sure where the mainframe was. I was surprised to find that he had drawn a bigger map of the terrain than I had.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

xyzzy y'all

When I moved in late 1998, we upgraded to Windows 95, despite using a computer that ran @ 60Mhz; it wasn't until the end of 2000 we moved up to a 1Ghz compy.

I also do remember Windows 98...... aah, memories.

All the time. The first time I tried to install Linux, I made the choice of trying Slackware. When I did FDisk to reduce the Windows partition on a 3GB Drive I managed to completely wank the drive and render myself w/o a functioning computer for most of a day while repairing corrupted data with a Norton's CD. I managed to re-install Win98 on it, but half of the software that was supplied with the computer was no longer there, or on any of the other CD's supplied with the system. --Apparently this system had a hidden partition that it used for suspend/sleep modes, and when I resized the FAT32 partition, I managed to completely ruin it.

Several months later, I wound up inadvertantly wiping out the Windows partition again when I installed another Linux Distro (Caldera) that functioned for the most part, but the 0.9 KDE wasn't fully functional, and the CD wouldn't properly mount. Furthermore, Netscape 4.5 would continually lock up the entire system with Asyncronous Transfer errors.

After a few days, I got sick of it, and reinstalled Win98, which after about 5 minutes after first boot crashed with a BSoD. --A warm welcome back to Windows.

Lots of things change but some stay the same LOL. Partitioning still sucks and is far from magic, if you get the reference. I remember the BSODs all too well and got them through what I considered to be normal usage. I suppose I was going too fast for the machines I used, and I unfortunately managed to come across bugs that were a real nuisance. But it couldn't have been that bad right? No matter how much I've cursed and banged the desk, I love technology.

Yeah, both Windows 9x and classic Mac OS were ridiculously unstable. I'm even surprised Windows 9x ran at all. Microsoft was basically trying to turn Windows 3.1 into a 32-bit preemptive multitasking OS and be compatible with both Windows NT applications and classic Windows applications. There's just so much thunking and switching between 16-bit and 32-bit code in the OS.

Windows 98 is fairly stable on my Pentium 4 machine. I guess they had Driver Verifier when they made the drivers for it, and porting WDM drivers from Windows 2000 and XP to Windows 98 is fairly trivial.

I had so much fun with CD-Rom games during the 1990s.

In the 90s I used to love playing Terminal Velocity at school.

I remember Terminal Velocity! Well, I remember loading it up on a '468 or maybe a Cyrix '586 and getting something like 3 or 4 fps for 30 seconds...and then my system would crash. That system was so amazing unstable, but it taught me how to really dig into the guts of how VLB worked.