Tfw you never got to experience 90s computing

>tfw you never got to experience 90s computing
Looks comfy as fuck. What was it like?

It was like a blue graveyard.

Blue screen of death everywhere. Also playing games required booting to DOS with a specially made autoexec.bat and config.sys to load EMS memory and shit.

A lot less soy boy software

The most memorable thing was how slow everything was. Reading a compact disc, dialing up to AOL, defragmenting FAT16, it was all so tedious.

>nailed it

You have no fucking idea how bad the reliability of Windows 9x was, OP

You'll also never know waiting minutes to copy 1MB of data to a floppy disk only to have it corrupted because some dipshit set the phone down next to the disk

it was crap, op

>real player
>windows media player
>quicktime

Remember these? they were god-awful. i can't imagine living without mpv

back then the only thing you could do is download shit quality videos in .rm format with dial up
i remember downloading 45mb southpark episodes. the quality was so bad

Fortunatly a Fin named Linus came up with Linux, a much better alternative to winblowz.

>muh BSODs
Shouldn't have bought garbage hardware.

Annoying, required more effort o make things work. Windows 95 was a bloated shit. Windows 98 was a bloated shit that occasionally worked. Dos was a program launcher that barely gave any functionality we expect from an OS.

Hung program meant hard restart, because preemptive multitasking didn't really exist in the world of MS until windows XP.

Other then that - it was pretty cool. Although hardware progressed so fast that your "new and cool" processor was obsolete in a matter of a year.

My first processor was 60mhz, my second was 233, my third was 400. They were spaced 2 and 1 years - respectively.

this, though they weren't necessarily all fatal
even just removing a CD while reading from it would cause a BSOD
you had to be patient, hardly anything was instant

technical issues and limitation aside though, using 9x was really comfy, the UI was (and still is) excellent. they fucking nailed the 95 GUI (appearance and usage wise, again, aside from technical issues, it wasn't exactly rock-solid)
i guess they fired the 95 UI team after 95 came out, since imo it's just been steady downhill since then

It was pretty fucking shit until right to the end of the 90's. Everything was slow as fuck and jenky. Viruses, worms and .bat brickers were actually a cause of concern.

I remember reading the head dev for win9x architecture saying in an interview that it was liable, likely to BSOD doing nothing running 24 hrs.

I remember the first time I saw windows xp and I was shocked and amazed that a program crashing didn't immediately kill the OS and require a reboot. That's how it was.

Oh come on. 32 bit apps were mostly killable on win98. Old, legacy shit and bad drivers was what was ailing the system.

You're right, on second thought it might have been an issue with a CD drive and something freezing.

I do distinctly recall Warcraft 2 and Fallout both crashing the OS, though.

windows was actually trash back then

Not as good as you think. Win9x didn't have very good memory protection, so buggy programs could take down the whole OS. Filesystems weren't journalled so a crash at a really unlucky time could nuke your whole disk. Every time it bluescreened scandisk would run to make sure the filesystem was intact and it would lecture you about shutting down improperly. Memory management was shit, so after running a heavy program sometimes it worked better to reboot than to wait for everything to swap in when you touched it next. Drivers were shit. Plug and play was plug and pray. IRQ conflicts were a thing, and you had to read books to learn how to resolve them because the internet was in its infancy. Downloading a 1 MB program took a while. 100 MB was wait overnight and hope the connection wasn't dead by then.

Don't listen to the haters, 90's programming was awesome.

> Being able to use god-tier softICE debugger to debug your code and crack software
> Software protection all utter shit that can be keygen'd in 5 minutes
> Delphi was actually a thing
> Javascript was a fucking joke to make text scroll on your website. People used PHP or PERL
> No database compatibility issues between NoSQL, Graphs and what's not, everybody just uses SQL.
> Everybody uses C++ or Java
> Not having to worry about front-end, android apps or mac-compatibility. Windows executables are the only thing that matters if you're coding commercially.
> Coding in assembly is super straightforward with MASM or TASM. I doubt any of my assembly code from back then would still run on a recent windows.

well, there was NT through most of the 90's as well, it just wasn't the consumer version
they basically waited for DOS to die out before replacing dos-based windows with nt

Yeah, only reading shit, you will never experience the truth.

Some versions of Windows were unstable inherently to encourage people to upgrade

This takes me back. Thanks for the comfy memories

It was never good you stupid fucking winkid. Stop pretending you were ever around back then, windows was always trash

Great.

It's weird thinking we have people here legally who weren't even alive in the 90's.

Crashy, insecure, but less hardware intensive than now. 64MB was enough for Windows 98. By comparison, Windows XP SP1 required 256MB at minimum and up to 1GB for SP2.

Kind of the opposite of now: you could more-or-less do as you pleased without Microsoft trying to jam their way down your throat, but it was pathetically unstable with constant crashes and legit needed periodic reinstalling of the OS to get basic functionality working again.

Besides that:

Are all correct.

Just like pretty much all other operating systems like Mac OS (dogshit "extensions" and compatibility layers), linux (it was mostly a toy OS) and muh unix workstations (outdated garbage software)
To what? NT?

I don't know what you guys are bitching about, it always sucked, still does.

I'd happily go back into the 90's if I could, I can't even give a fuck about HD videos/porn, I was perfectly happy back then too.

>I doubt any of my assembly code from back then would still run on a recent windows.
Please try this though because it sounds like a great YouTube video

It was never good you stupid retarded nostalgiafag

OP here. What the fuck. I keep hearing on Sup Forums about how computers and shit were based back then and every so often you get threads about people wanting to go back. Why is everyone trashing it ITT?

>I keep hearing on Sup Forums about how computers and shit were based back then
Have you ever heard of a meme?

Anyone who says that is a retard. I would rather shoot myself than go back to writing code in Borland.

They're romanticizing and exaggerating something they just can't let go of.

Say what you want, but VB6 is still the best for muh prototyping
.net is garbage

Protip: 90% of current Sup Forums likely never even used Windows 98

It. Was. So. Fucking. Slow.

1. this thread is pretty much just talking about win9x, since that's what OP hinted at. there were a lot more OS's being used in the 90's than just win9x
2. the 9x UI was comfy as fuck, i doubt anyone wants the 9x arch back, but the UI is still very nice to use and look at
3. at least some are probably just "anything but what we have now will do"

Bitch, I cut my teeth on an Apple IIe.

When anons nostalgiafag over Windows 98, they're more likely than nostalgiafagging over the UI design, not the actual functionality.

bsod was a real thing back then, it seemed moving the mouse wrong could crash your whole system, things started to change for me with a dell my mom bought me with xp, started playing counterstrike and i was in heaven since then

Who /Vista+7childhood/ here? Vista was shit and even at 8 years old, I knew it was shit.

This. Aero is pretty lame desu.

get out newfag

/thread

It's like politicians who want to change things back to how they were decades ago: if they were actually alive at all at the time, they were kids who were insulated from most of the bad stuff and in any case people tend to hang onto their fond memories of things and gloss over the bad things of the time. Anyone who seriously wants to go back was never truly there to begin with.

Security was much worse and viruses would fuck your shit up with ease.

I'm just providing an explanation. It's easy to look at Windows 98 screenshots and say "hey this looks pretty good, why can't UI look like this today" but you can't comment on the actual functionality like OP is asking.

>To what? NT?
No, I think it was after then. Sometime between NT 4 and 2000/ME, if I remember correctly

I'm 19 years old... Most people on Sup Forums are around my age bro.

>Still creating applications in 2018

>even at 8 years old, you believed what you were told
ok kid
vista got shat on because it bumped up the hardware reqs and shook up compatibility again in a world where we had 5 years of getting used to XP
funny thing is, XP got shat on for exactly the same reasons, it was a big step up in requirements over 98/ME, and being NT-based, messed up compatibility quite a lot
the only reason i can think of that XP got past it is due to the lack of retards on the internet shitcanning it back in 2002

No they aren't

it was kind of limited, but fun

it crashed a lot, but what do you expect from a GUI OS that's been in development for only 3 or 4 years? can't compare with something that's out for 25 years like 2018 NT or 2018 GNU/linux.

I think because it was simpler, you learned a lot more. for instance you had to install drivers manually, because windows update doesn't have everything. you didn't worry about updates as much because remote exploits were rare. you spent time browsing the directories and files and kind of understood where things were because it was still only a few hundred files instead of nearly 100,000 nowadays.

oh, and game demos ruled. you didn't need a big brother account for everything. just download on download.com and have fun with your programs (there were lots, instead of just a few dominating ones now).

and you didn't have a 24/7 life-sucking app like facebook. gamers were an exception, but they haven't changed much since then. irc and IM were fun in a way that cell phone texting and face apps aren't. people knew how to type full sentences (it definitely improved my english skills)

P.S: it's amazing what skilled people can do with 256 colors in icons, vs what they do now with the bells and whistles in graphics design.

>Stop pretending you were ever around back then
Read the OP again, dumbass.

Vista got shat on because it made more fundamental changes to the UI and most of the hardware that claimed it could run/was designed for Vista couldn't run Vista well.

XP got dunked on a bit for the hardware requirements and a few aspects of the UI, but in both regards wasn't that big a deal.

3 words: debugging on Win9x

Null pointer reads silently read bad data from the kernel. Null pointer writes silently corrupt kernel data.

i did experience win 98 in my early years. shit was comfy but i remember my keyboard and cd drive failing because of a driver fuckup.

I am far too old to have not known it first hand. Shit sucked but my hardware was lame

There are tons of threads here about people in first or second year CS courses.

>family computer came with Vista
>slow as fuck
>update to windows 7
>runs fine

>and you didn't have a 24/7 life-sucking app like facebook.
you listed usenet, irc and IM, all of them sucks the shit out of your life just like Sup Forums and facebook.

>.rm
how come subtitled jav is only available in .rmvb still

People make fun of Norton, but back in the day Disk Doctor CleanSweep and CrashGuard were pretty much lifesavers

>Thread creators == all posters
>All people in CS courses are teens or early 20s

Yeah but it was just proto-pajeet software. Better, yes but let's not kid ourselves.

>update to windows 7
probably went from the oem vista with tons of shitware installed to a clean 7. just installing a clean vista would have done the same job

I had a book next to the computer just to give me something to do while web pages loaded.

>crashes
I didn't have any problems dualbooting Redhat and NT 4.0

>back then

freax was a kernel not an operating system

It was slow as hell but we were literally watching history unfold with the internet, bbs boards, chat rooms and shit. the whole point and click GUI thing was def an adjustment coming from DOS.

it was all we knew brother. we loved every minute of it.

>tired of win98se, decided to try linux
>installed slackware (3 or 4)
>boot into glaphical interface
>remember being blown away by the fact I can copy data to/from the floppy drive while still being able to move the mouse

>This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.

>If the problem persists, contact the program vendor.

>because preemptive multitasking didn't really exist in the world of MS until windows XP.
>what was NT 3.5/4.0/2000

Up to vista I didnt feel the need to use linux. its great man.

I think it was done through Windows update. I'm not sure though as I wasn't PCMR back then and didn't know much about computers.

>I doubt any of my assembly code from back then would still run on a recent windows.
If it's DOS code, then it might.......on i386 Windows 10 (must install VDM)
Other 386 ASM will run fine
>what are x264 fast code-paths

>Actually making use of local compute power for something that's not a bloated JS web app

What am I not seeing here? Or is that actually the bill for that hardware?

Nevermind i'm fucking retarded, holy fuck.

It's my computer from Dec 1996 with the Linux 5.0 install media. Also lists NT 4.0 workstation media which I still have.
I used that computer from my JR year in High School until Sophomore year in college when I "upgraded" to a Sun Ultra 5. Those PPro's were in use as a FreeBSD/squad router for my house until 2005 when the mobo finally died. Good times.

>Not experiencing 90s computing in the early-mid 2000s because you grew up poor.

git gud

>Not being able to run your code on your phone
Why live?

Have a few more free feels on the house, fellow nostalgic bro:
> tfw coding an AOL punter in Visual Basic
> tfw editing your game with an hexadecimal editor is enough to give you both a full licence and infinite lives
> tfw distributing your mIRC script to your online bros
> tfw when nobody uses git for version control but it doesn't matter because you use IRC's DCC to share your code with your coding bros.
> tfw creating Macromedia Flash games about Monica Lewinski and Bill Clinton or Bill Gates
> tfw using GetRight to resume downloading that porn after your 28.8k connection fucked up because your mom tried calling her friend while you were online.

mIRC was the shit. I remember elaborate filesharing scripts like Polaris and Invision that made it super easy to pirate warez. It's still fun to check out bookwarez on Undernet from time to time

Cramped. Like, there was never enough room on the screen. I had 800x600 for years though until about 2007 and I got 1280x1024.

After that went 1080p and been there since 2012.

Reminder that normies literally thought they were going to be arrested for illegal operations

Technically true but Windows 2000 fixed most of that

Same reason why Japanese games are 4:3 in aspect ratio. They are just behind in small things like that.

>800x600 up to 2007
that was extremely unusual
i got a 1280x1024 monitor in 2000, and that just one that came with a prebuilt, totally common
at that point 1024x768 was basically bare minimum

It was bretty comfy desu

that computer needs to have its colors configured

they are chink casino rips tho

It was slow. But workable.
You spent a lot of time deliberating as things compile. C++ has to some extent brought that back by killing compile times but it doesn't feel the same.

As for user functionality it was extremely limited op. You're really just better off. The web had more personality though.

and less idiots whining too

I don't agree. They're more visible now though. Since 'user engagement' is what everyone aims for.

I have a Amiga 500 with a Gotek floppy drive emulator (so I can play games with a flash drive, instead of swapping a million floppies), monitor, and 1MB of ram.

everything was fucking slow as fuck. I've never stopped feeling grateful for these days now that entire OS boots only take seconds, full DVD rips can download in less than a minute, and page loads are nearly instant.

the only thing I miss is the feeling of how much there was to explore online back then. felt like there was no end to cool shit you can get into. these days all I think is left out there is a trillion fake download sites and a bunch of facebook clones.

I was using win98 until 2004-05. Somewhere in there, family didn't have a lot of money.

Someone my dad knew was getting rid of an old Compaq Presario that had Windows XP on it so that was my "upgrade." It was the family computer but almost 100% mine since almost no one ever used it because reasons. Only for the occasional work thing or emails.

However in 2007 after saving money like crazy I got a Dell that had Windows Vistaâ„¢ Home Premium. However I was like... 14 or 15 and I somehow dodged the fuck out of the problems with Vista like how it was shipped with computers that were not ready to run that shit at all. Thanks Intel. So performance was awful. However I had a nice Core 2 Duo and 2GB of memory and it wasn't that bad desu. That's what gave me my 1280x1200 screen. (It was almost the first non-CRT screen my family had owned)

Anyway had a bit of a nostalgia trip with that. Point being it was a bit unusual, I was just poor and got used to having old shit.