Post B0Bl9AWnXZ30KOpDBw by foone@digipres.club
(DIR) More posts by foone@digipres.club
(DIR) Post #B0BkWD623dgd02jEga by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:15:26Z
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spinning off the Steam Cube rant, look how useless the MPC-3 standard was, for 1996:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC
(DIR) Post #B0Bka5Ww87oMgzA6wS by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:16:22Z
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you need at least a 75mhz Pentium, 8mb of ram, half a gig of hard drive, MPEG playback, and... windows 3.11 or above.in 1996, on a system that powerful, you're not running 95? REALLY?
(DIR) Post #B0BkczoBrMZ7occQpE by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:16:46Z
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the windows 95 denialists who thought it was worse than 3.1 baffled me back in windows 95 and they still baffle me today.
(DIR) Post #B0Bkwizq4nZJSuTVHE by alda@topspicy.social
2025-11-13T02:18:50Z
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@foone It's the same kind of people who dislike whatever the current iteration of Star Trek is.
(DIR) Post #B0BkwjriqSfcA1gXGS by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:19:45Z
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@alda the new thing has to be bad, because it's not the old thing!
(DIR) Post #B0BkzP98Kpdalo6GoK by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:20:57Z
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(as I've talked about many times, when I went to buy win95 on release day, the radio shack cashier told me that it was crap and everyone was going back to win3.11. I told him "sure... I still want it though". he refused to take my money and told me I needed an adult (I was 11). So I went a few stores down to Walmart and got it, no questions asked, 10$ cheaper)
(DIR) Post #B0Bl2P6kvyFnWIPzvc by whophd@ioc.exchange
2025-11-13T02:21:02Z
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@foone To be fair, if it was less than 6 months from the August launch, you’d be sympathetic for reasons of upgrade pain … compatibility, reallyAnd things were slower then, right?
(DIR) Post #B0Bl68EXcAjmLKpydM by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:21:48Z
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he got the last laugh though:Walmart sold me bad disks, and I had to send off to Microsoft to get them to send me a new disk #2 of 13 (they sent a copy of disk #1 as well, for some reason).and then it ran like shit on my packard bell 486
(DIR) Post #B0Bl9AWnXZ30KOpDBw by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:22:37Z
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@whophd oh yeah it was slow as hell for computers at the time, but MPC-3 is already requiring a P75 and 8mb, which should be able to run it just fine.
(DIR) Post #B0BlJNtigeV4gnPxIm by whophd@ioc.exchange
2025-11-13T02:24:05Z
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@foone I’m here for THIS discussion!I certainly disagreed with them — 3.1 was far less polished, but beloved by business. A lot of corporate SOEs (before they used that term?) stuck with it for years.But if it was just a home user? Then it felt no less valid than a “DOS is for real men” vibe that we got in the GUI wars or even the DOS-vs-Mac arguments for many long years.Win3.1 was the first of that “real men” GUI, and Windows NT 3.1 probably added a slice of authenticity to it — except I knew that none of them were running it. Much higher requirements.
(DIR) Post #B0BlM3KLckq9lA93DM by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:24:17Z
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@sif yeah!
(DIR) Post #B0BlTFvJBrPWqwrrkG by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:25:43Z
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@BestGirlGrace I think this was the first time I ran into the "adults are going to try to control what you do with your computer" problem and my anger at that is heavily influential on what I've done with computers since
(DIR) Post #B0BlVk7hsWpf5zqwS0 by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:26:38Z
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more RAM and a CPU upgrade mostly solved that, then sometime around 97-98 we got a new computer that could actually run windows 95 on purpose
(DIR) Post #B0BlW91BJvT2IzzaFc by lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me
2025-11-13T02:27:11.748728Z
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@foone @whophd Yeah, in fact my brother had a P75 and I don't think I've seen any windows on it but Win9x
(DIR) Post #B0BlZUroXjZ2wBD2Wm by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:26:51Z
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@snowfox never
(DIR) Post #B0BlbqoJvbWJZchJLs by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:27:15Z
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I did a lot of lawnmowing to upgrade that PC
(DIR) Post #B0BlkR19CBsyBSn4Cm by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:29:27Z
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I can estimate when I bought what upgrades for that PC by taking my monthly allowance and dividing the rough prices I paid for things.like it was 8 months of lawns to get my first soundcard
(DIR) Post #B0BltC5W4Z1OUG0iu0 by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:31:02Z
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then about 9 months later, windows 95. ten months later (so feb 96?) added another 4mb of ram, getting up to 8 in total. another 9 months for the CD-ROM drive
(DIR) Post #B0Bm7vo4t89gKqshcG by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:33:42Z
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it took 10 months to afford the Evergreen 486 80mhz upgrade, but I don't think that came out until 1998, so there may be some slop in my calculations here
(DIR) Post #B0BmNePfKExJ1TxTQe by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:36:30Z
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@thomasfuchs eh, that's fine.
(DIR) Post #B0BmnNOlCwx7mYnlxY by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:41:06Z
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@sif ugh. having to multiboot (especially in that era, pre-grub) was such a pain. I've got ADHD, if I have to reboot to do something, it takes so long I forget what I needed to reboot for
(DIR) Post #B0BmywT99jURjnMtqC by zzt@mas.to
2025-11-13T02:41:33Z
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@foone I have an odd level of nostalgia for the entire type of 90s guy who worked at electronics stores and refused to sell products he didn’t like, so buying like a boxed copy of Slackware became a weird negotiation with someone with Windows Opinions
(DIR) Post #B0Bmyxoo8gPXvGViF6 by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:43:14Z
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@zzt yeah! I used to work at a PC repair shop and we had to sell stuff upfront and my boss spent a lot of time trying to talk people out of bad decisions, like "I don't need a UPS, in this mountainy region know for lighting strikes and ancient electrical infrastructure"
(DIR) Post #B0Bn4qmzBepXrJSuZs by whophd@ioc.exchange
2025-11-13T02:43:41Z
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@foone wow
(DIR) Post #B0BnrhlHXWFK3Axox6 by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:53:09Z
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@tehstu @thomasfuchs no, 25mhz is a lower end 486. (you can get them as low as 16mhz, but 25mhz is the lowest I've seen out in the wild)
(DIR) Post #B0BoCeNRJo19dOncdU by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:56:55Z
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@sif you probably set up an autoexec.bat with a chooser in it. you can change your msdos.sys (which is an INI file) to make windows 95 boot into MS-DOS instead of 95, then explicitly launch win3.1 or win95 by running C:\win31\win.exe vs C:\win95\win.exe.Takes a little doing, but definitely something you'd see PC magazines explain how to do
(DIR) Post #B0BoL3p6asiUs4kZai by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T02:58:28Z
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@sif you could also just use the "reboot to ms-dos" option and run win3.1 from its directory, or hit f8 on the splash screen. But it seems like something you'd set up a menu for, being a Cool Computer Toucher and all
(DIR) Post #B0BoZIKpR8A3vsNMUS by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T03:00:58Z
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@sif even cooler!
(DIR) Post #B0Bp60iLyDysq6ymiO by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T03:06:50Z
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@sif you didn't have the paper overlay for your keyboard? my grandma's company had that on every keyboard, even well into the 90s and 2000s
(DIR) Post #B0Bp8Kvnm8Ii7WNYfY by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T03:07:04Z
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@sif but still a very neat tool
(DIR) Post #B0Bpeo0hCDIxZd9OGu by philip@mastodon.mallegolhansen.com
2025-11-13T03:11:41Z
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@thomasfuchs @foone I thought that said MCP Level 2 and boy was I about to lose my shit.Phew.
(DIR) Post #B0BpepT5m7c65zRaAi by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T03:13:12Z
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@philip @thomasfuchs after a 29 year hiatus, the Multimedia PC Marketing Council reforms to release Multimedia PC level 4: * Computer must have some AI bullshit going on
(DIR) Post #B0BqBmswOrCldmFZbM by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T03:19:08Z
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@sif that was probably a better way to go with your career, yeah. x86 assembly rapidly became of limited utility since the mid-90s
(DIR) Post #B0BtUbHS4Njz0vNRjM by lp0_on_fire@social.linux.pizza
2025-11-13T03:53:57Z
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@foone, https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/software/games/advanced-lawnmower-simulator-your-sinclair
(DIR) Post #B0BtUcQhnSjkZuiLnE by foone@digipres.club
2025-11-13T03:56:09Z
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@lp0_on_fire I remember discovering a similar c64 lawnmowing game on my c64, which I bought using lawnmowing money, and finding it ironic
(DIR) Post #B0C09lJcGS3DjbOsUq by whophd@ioc.exchange
2025-11-13T05:10:54Z
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@foone for me it was tied to the dawn of “multimedia PC” and CD-ROMsI can’t believe it was barely 4 years since the launch of QuickTime 1.0 in 1991 … but that lead time felt like a huge gapOne of the standard party tricks with Windows 95 was to play the Weezer music video off the CD-ROMAh, Sorenson video era