[HN Gopher] Thirty Years Ago: MS-DOS 6.00
___________________________________________________________________
Thirty Years Ago: MS-DOS 6.00
Author : ingve
Score : 164 points
Date : 2023-10-06 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcjs.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcjs.org)
| tomatocracy wrote:
| I'd forgotten MS-DOS 6.0 included antivirus. I have fond memories
| of VSAFE (I think) buzzing the speaker and warning me more or
| less at random about something or other (it never was an actual
| virus).
|
| Friends who used other antivirus solutions of the time (Dr
| Solomon and F-Prot were two of the other popular ones amongst
| friends from what I remember) ridiculed it for having so many
| false positives but somehow for me it was reassuring to see it
| was "working".
| NikkiA wrote:
| I think I was on DR-DOS at that point from MS 5.0 until MS
| released 6.20, and ISTR feeling that dblspace was a huge step
| down from the DR equivalent SuperStor.
| jbandela1 wrote:
| Don't forget one of the most important new utilities in DOS 6:
| Memmaker
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DOS_commands#MEMMAKER
|
| It would help you change your configuration so that you maximized
| the amount of conventional memory. This was useful in getting
| games to run.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And DriveSpace, turning my 20 MB disk into a 40 MB, greatly
| appreciated as I couldn't afford buying a new disk at the time.
| Narishma wrote:
| That's discussed in the article.
| ggambetta wrote:
| There was Stacker years before that :)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which I used in DR-DOS before moving into MS-DOS.
| stonogo wrote:
| Microsoft tried to license it, failed, and wound up
| licensing DoubleSpace instead. As usual, the utility being
| built into MS-DOS 6 pretty much destroyed competition in
| that space. Stacker's ace in the hole was their coprocessor
| card, which I coveted pretty hard..
| alkonaut wrote:
| I remember being the only kid who knew how to hand-craft your
| config.sys/autoexec.bat to play some games, and random people
| would call me saying they got my name of some friend of a
| friend.
| rburhum wrote:
| You just brought me back to my childhood!
|
| If you had included MultiConfig options that added
| Soundblaster8/Soundblaster16, with CDROM or without it... AND
| their complementary AUTOEXEC.BAT options that would trigger based
| on the CONFIG.SYS, then that would have been my system config!
| Without being able to squeeze every single kb of memory possible,
| there was no way to play Sam and Max or Indiana Jones and the
| Fate of Atlantis, while still having a system that can boot
| Windows 3.1 :-)
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Yeah, it was great having a menu instead of a collection of
| different boot floppies. Though at this point I forget how much
| I did with MultiConfig versus once I had enough RAM what I was
| doing with OS/2's boot manager. OS/2 Warp 3 was wild, but
| mostly because it was a better way to configure DOS and/or run
| some DOS and Windows 3.1 apps.
| elteto wrote:
| Woah! I remember my dad setting up a MultiConfig menu! Very neat.
| mike_hock wrote:
| > LZ77 compression was fine, and hashing was fine, apparently the
| combination of the two became a patentable innovation
|
| lolwat
| acqq wrote:
| Regarding the DoubleSpace context, Wikipedia helps (1):
|
| Sept 1991: Digital Research releases DR DOS 6.0 with AddStor's
| SuperStor disk compression.
|
| March 1993: Microsoft introduces MS-DOS 6.0, the first with
| DoubleSpace disk compression
|
| June 1993: IBM announces PC DOS 6.1
|
| November 1993: Microsoft MS-DOS 6.2, leapfrogging IBM's PC DOS
| 6.1 and with improved the stability of DoubleSpace.
|
| February 1994: Microsoft found guilty of patent infringement, and
| Stac Electronics guilty of trade secret theft. Microsoft MS-DOS
| 6.21, removing DoubleSpace.
|
| June 1994: After a judge ordered Microsoft to recall all unsold
| infringing products worldwide, Microsoft settled its dispute with
| Stac, and released MS-DOS 6.22, bringing back disk compression
| with internally developed DriveSpace, which is about 5% slower
| than DoubleSpace.
|
| An interesting detail:
|
| In the MS-Stac trial, "Stac's lawyers showed a videotape of
| Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates" "at the unveiling of MS-DOS 6.0 in
| which he wore a T-shirt saying, "We came, we saw, we doubled," to
| underscore the importance of the compression feature." (2)
|
| A second detail, the "trade secret theft" was:
|
| Stac was found "to have committed a trade secret violation by
| reverse engineering features of a beta version of MS DOS that
| they had gotten in confidence and then using the information they
| gained in making their own product." (3)
|
| 1)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_syst...
|
| 2) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
| xpm-1994-02-24-fi-26671-...
|
| 3) https://lwn.net/Articles/134642/
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Crazy that this was only 2 years away from Windows 95.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Not only that, it was a couple of months _after_ the first
| usability testing sessions of the original UI of Windows 95[1]
| (the one with a literal "tray" under the "desktop"[2,3]).
|
| [1]
| https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_Usability_Testing_Build...
|
| [2]
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42...
|
| [3]
| http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20030910_053_...
| accrual wrote:
| > In early builds of Windows 95, the taskbar originally
| wasn't a taskbar; it was a folder window docked at the bottom
| of the screen that you could drag/drop things into/out of,
| sort of like the organizer tray in the top drawer of you
| desk.
|
| The image is really fascinating to me. The whole taskbar
| paradigm we're familiar with today started life as what
| sounds like a quick hack. Draw a bar that draws the contents
| of a folder in a narrow bar format. Later extend it to hold
| running applications instead.
| atombender wrote:
| The image in links 2-3 doesn't load for me. Is there an
| archived copy somewhere?
| cesarb wrote:
| The trick is to know that the _true_ address of that blog
| was at blogs.msdn.com. Here it is, complete with comments
| (which were lost when the blog was moved): https://web.arch
| ive.org/web/20050924221736/http://blogs.msdn...
| mseepgood wrote:
| Time passed slower back then.
| accrual wrote:
| A silly pet idea I have is that while time didn't literally
| pass slower, there was less overall entropy in the world back
| then. There were fewer people working on fewer things, so
| less new things happened overall. Today there are more people
| working on more things, so the rate of new things happening
| is higher, and thus the perception of time passing faster.
| saulpw wrote:
| And we are all connected, so there are not only twice as
| many people on the planet, and more people with computers,
| but also people in China, India, Brazil, and Russia are
| able to collaborate instead of being completely isolated in
| their own locales.
| bluedino wrote:
| And 1 year after Windows 3.1 (which was _Pretty Good_ )
| galangalalgol wrote:
| For work maybe? As a gamer I never used 3.1 for anything.
| Even the gui apps I used were dos based. Seemingly a lot of
| them were ported from amiga. Trying to imagine a modern os
| with no window manager, just applications that all used gl or
| vulkan directly with some unmaskable keyboard combos to allow
| switching.
| M95D wrote:
| > Trying to imagine a modern os with no window manager,
| just applications that all used gl or vulkan directly with
| some unmaskable keyboard combos to allow switching.
|
| Can I have that? Please!
|
| Firefox won't open full-screen if started in X without a
| window manager.
| anthk wrote:
| Just use cwm.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Firefox won't open full-screen if started in X without
| a window manager.
|
| firefox -geometry 1024x768+0+0
|
| does not work ?
| [deleted]
| jlarocco wrote:
| I could be missing the gist here, but don't StumpWM,
| EXWM, and possibly others do this?
| btrettel wrote:
| The easiest approach would be configuring Linux to do
| this.
|
| I have a Linux laptop without X or Wayland. It's mostly
| for CLI and TUI applications, but I do have some
| framebuffer applications like fbpdf.
|
| There are a lot of little annoyances, many of which could
| be fixed with a proper Linux configuration, though others
| require improvement to the applications.
|
| The framebuffer versions of graphical programs are
| unfortunately clunky compared against the conventional
| versions. And I'm disappointed that they don't work when
| called from tmux or Midnight Commander, or at least I
| haven't figured out how to make them work.
|
| Some key combinations don't seem to work and I haven't
| been able to figure out why for all of them yet.
|
| I miss having a unified clipboard.
|
| I've also become more adept at Midnight Commander and its
| built in editor, diff tool, and viewer. Though this
| exposes some issues, for example: If a file is edited
| with F4 configured to be mcedit, then I can switch
| between the editor and file manager with the screen list
| (Alt-`). But if I open mcedit from the command line or
| user menu, then the screen list will only be for that
| mcedit run and not include any other screens open. I
| rarely use the Midnight Commander screen list outside of
| this specific computer.
|
| (As for why I have this computer, it's to have a
| distraction-free setup. It works nicely for that
| purpose.)
| treve wrote:
| You're right, it took a while for Windows gaming to really
| take off, even in the Windows 95 era. But Windows 3.1 was
| great for other kinds of productivity-related tasks.
| livrem wrote:
| Yes, crazy that something this good could turn so bad in just
| two years. In hindsight I am happy their move to Windows pushed
| me to switch to Linux though.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Was it really ever good though? I came to dos after us having
| an amiga and it mostly seemed like garbage except that there
| was more software. Having to jave different autoexec.bat and
| config.sys files for every game I wanted to play, and
| laboriously solving the knapsack problem forneach one to get
| all the drivers I needed into ram.
| livrem wrote:
| In MS-DOS 5.0 and later at least you could make a menu at
| start-up to pick what to activate. I looked at my old
| config.sys and autoexec.bat recently and it was amazingly
| simple. 100% of system configuration in maybe 1-200 lines
| of text, in two files. Not so bad compared to hunting for
| were to configure something in any modern OS?
|
| DOS did what it had to do. For coding you could start up
| emacs (and ctrl-z somehow magically could drop you in a
| command.com shell that you could exit from to go back to
| emacs; I think there was a DOS interrupt to allow
| applications to start sub-shells like that?). And otherwise
| (i.e. most of the time for most of us) you just booted and
| started a game and then when you were done playing turned
| off the computer.
|
| Anyway I must admit, many years later, that many games (and
| some applications) around 1990 were definitely better on an
| Amiga. DOS games for some time were rarely the best ports.
| But I never used an Amiga enough to learn if I liked the
| operating system much. I did buy Amiga Forever some year
| ago and that comes with a few pre-configured disk images
| with AmigaOS and various applications, but I am barely able
| to use that at all since I have no idea how to use it. It
| would be fun to play with some day.
| zwieback wrote:
| Oh, wow. I remember when it came out. My multi-configs were epic.
| At that time I was actually an OS/2 programmer but we also had a
| DOS product so some time reluctantly spent in DOS.
| charles_f wrote:
| Interesting that a lot of the updates were actually licensed
| software.
|
| Deciding to (re)build a system level disk compression system the
| month before a major release, in an era when distribution of
| patches was done through floppies, was a balsy move.
|
| It also somewhat explanatory of the reputation regarding bugs of
| MS back then.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Playable Dune II, Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D??? See y'all
| in a week
|
| https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/
| marban wrote:
| Don't forget the nice Lucasarts Code-wheels.
| lubesGordi wrote:
| There's a manual for Dune II in there too. I miss having
| manuals for videogames.
| nekoashide wrote:
| Some of those games were unplayable without the manuals or a
| map! Looking at you Star Control II! You needed a map for the
| coordinates to play that one.
| qubex wrote:
| I remember losing the manual for Star Trek 25th Anniversary
| (Interplay, 1992) and that was a disaster. I eventually got
| a photocopy from a friend.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I can almost smell them. Forget new car smell, whatever
| carcinogens were in those things were premium ones.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Worked in IT in the mid-90s, was a great time and I became a
| sought after "expert" to free conventional memory for lab PCs
| connected to equipment. Did it all by hand at first with mem.exe
| and edit.com?, but I think in 6.0 I started also using a TUI to
| visualize the upper area--the helpful msd.exe:
|
| https://i.postimg.cc/2jX8LpF0/memorymap.png
|
| More recently in the XP era, I used the DOS multi-config menu in
| a classroom environment. Combined with ghost the partition
| imager. There was a menu that defaulted quickly to booting the
| current OS partition. But hit the right key at boot and you could
| restore the computer from a pristine pre-configured XP image.
| Since the images were on a primary partition it would be hidden
| from the end-user and not mounted for them to prevent issues. You
| could also update the current image and save it back to the menu
| partition for next time. This happened once in a while to apply
| windows/app updates.
|
| Worked incredibly well, until the whole classroom was dismantled
| around 2015ish.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Interesting, and good reminiscences
|
| I wonder what email system it was being used at the time (I mean,
| was it even over TCP? SMTP/IMAP?)
| Narishma wrote:
| Probably over IPX/SPX instead of TCP/IP. Novell Netware
| networks were all the rage back then in the PC world.
| jmclnx wrote:
| If it was not for DRDOS 6.0, that would never have happened.
| DRDOS 6.0 was excellent, one thing that never got to MS-DOS was
| the ability to password protect files, preventing someone else to
| access it. Granted, that was very easy to get around, but back
| then the times were simple.
| finneganscat wrote:
| [dead]
| livrem wrote:
| DR-DOS also had some kind of limited multitasking or at least
| switching between tasks. I do not remember using it much or
| know how stable it was. I do not think MS-DOS ever copied that
| either?
| jmclnx wrote:
| Correct, DR-DOS had a Task Switcher, but still single
| processing. It was much better than the DOSSHELL Microsoft
| had because you could switch at the command line as opposed
| to having to run a bloated shell.
| da_chicken wrote:
| MS-DOS had TSRs (terminate and stay resident) programs, but
| those aren't exactly the same thing. I do recall some basic
| multitasking utilizing them in some way, though. My memory is
| too fuzzy.
|
| MS-DOS 4.0 had a multitasking release, but it was not popular
| and only available through retail channels. IBM didn't want
| it so there were OEM MS-DOS releases of 4.0 that _didn 't_
| have multitasking, and that's what you got when you bought an
| IBM PC. This meant it didn't get a lot of support and was
| discontinued after MS-DOS 4.1. If it sounds like a mess, it's
| because this was all when IBM and Microsoft were not very
| happy with each other, which is kind of why everyone mostly
| jumped from MS-DOS 3.3 (IBM and MS mostly cooperative) to MS-
| DOS 5.0 (MS independent).
|
| DOSSHELL supported task switching, but only one process could
| execute at a time, and all tasks had to fit in memory.
| EgoIncarnate wrote:
| DOSSHELL creates a swap file DOSSWAP.SWP, so all tasks
| don't need to fit in memory.
| da_chicken wrote:
| I guess I could be wrong, but I thought that was only for
| DOSSHELL itself, not for the tasks you were launching.
| Perhaps it would work but only if the other tasks
| supported it?
| SeenNotHeard wrote:
| You're thinking of what is sometimes called "European MS-
| DOS 4.0" which did indeed have limited multitasking
| features, including shared memory and pipes:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_4.0_(multitasking)
| https://virtuallyfun.com/2013/03/17/european-ms-
| dos-4-00-aka...
|
| It should not be confused with the mostly unrelated DOS 4.0
| later released.
|
| A Microsoft executive later said the multitasking DOS
| should probably not have been named "4.0" because it
| created a lot of confusion.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Indeed, and I was a ViewMax fan, but eventually Microsoft
| managed to work around them as we all know, and like with other
| DOS clones compatibility never was 100% assured.
| glonq wrote:
| It's 30+ years later, but I'm pretty sure that I could still use
| "copy con" to craft a decent config.sys and autoexec.bat
|
| Having done it so many times, those things are burned into my
| brain forever.
| block_dagger wrote:
| What about PC-DOS (the good DOS)?
| timw4mail wrote:
| Which reminds me...I was thinking about smashing MSDOS 6.22 and
| PC-DOS 2000 together.
|
| I wonder how well it would work to copy the MSDOS 'DOS' folder
| into the PC-DOS one, just keeping the programs with different
| names.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I grew up with PC-DOS and I always felt slightly like a second
| class citizen for missing goodies that others had, like qbasic,
| and also there would be subtle differences when it came time to
| set up stuff like CD-ROM drives and sound cards.
|
| What were the good parts of PC-DOS?
| older wrote:
| REXX interpreter.
| velcrovan wrote:
| Thirty years ago, I was twelve, and just coming to the IBM PC
| from the Tandy CoCo 3.
|
| The Rainbow magazine
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rainbow_(magazine)) ceased
| publication that year, which I was very bummed about.
|
| At that early age, coming from the CoCo (which booted straight
| into a BASIC interpreter in less than a second) the thing that
| wierded me out the most about DOS was that it was not a REPL or
| interpreter for any language. It felt really weird to have to
| start up GWBASIC or QBASIC separately. I did eventually get used
| to it though.
|
| Not long after this I called Microsoft on the phone somehow,
| deepened my voice as far as it would go to sound older, and got
| myself signed up as a beta tester for Windows 95.
| qubex wrote:
| Greetings fellow human born in 1981. I skipped the straight-to-
| BASIC machines (my first PC was an Amstrad 1512) and I didn't
| sign up for the Windows 95 ('Chicago') beta but I remember
| queuing for it when it was released on 24th August 1995.
|
| (I later signed up to be a beta tester for Windows 2000. That
| was truly impressive when compared to Windows NT 4.0 that
| preceded it. By then I had a multiprocessor dual PIII-450
| system, so gaining USB support was a great deal.)
| wdrw wrote:
| I remember actually looking forward to new OS versions as a
| teenager. DOS 6.00 was genuinely exciting! What a contrast to the
| forced updates of today.
| 31337Logic wrote:
| I suspect this topic is going to generate a very long thre....
| Oh. Nevermind. It already did. ;-)
|
| Cheers to my fellow old-farts in keeping these memories alive.
| :-)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Contemporaneously you could have bought a NeXT computer running
| what would eventually become Mac OS X, instead of that pile of
| hot garbage.
| kjs3 wrote:
| I can spend several (2-3x) as much for a computer that doesn't
| run the software most people need? From a company with no track
| record? Well, at least it's pretty.
|
| You can always tell the replies from someone who only read
| about it on the interwebs.
| anthk wrote:
| Compare what you had for DOS against what you had for NeXT and
| 10x less the price.
| mikestew wrote:
| And how many multiples over a machine capable of running MS-DOS
| would I have had to spend to get a NeXT? I'll let you do the
| math on that one, because I already did it 30 years ago.
|
| (Note: I have never owned a NeXT machine.)
| layer8 wrote:
| For at least double or three times the price. And good luck
| running Wing Commander on that.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It wasn't a mainstream gaming platform, true. But the
| productivity and development tools available would absolutely
| run rings around what was available for DOS. Easily worth the
| price if you needed it.
|
| Also, https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NEXTSTEP
|
| Anyway my main point was that DOS was nearly as primitive
| then compared to state of the art as it would be considered
| today.
| anthk wrote:
| And compared to Irix the NeXT was nothing, but by the price
| of a basic -functional- SGI machine you could get a car.
| rwmj wrote:
| Fun MS-DOS fact: The MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS & COMMAND.COM files had a
| timestamp that matched the version number (as you can see in the
| screenshot in this page). The file time is 6:00a [am]. In MS-DOS
| 6.22, the last version before it was integrated into Windows, the
| timestamp of those files was 6:22a.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Other random MS-DOS fact, if your filesystem is badly corrupted
| and it attempts to read sector 0 as a directory, you will see
| what looks like a file named "d<EMSDOS.5.0"
| accrual wrote:
| I happened to have a folder containing DOS 6.22 on my desktop
| and indeed, all the files in the DOS directory are dated
| 1994-05-31 06:22. Thanks for the interesting knowledge, I never
| noticed that! Maybe it was touch-like command run as a part of
| the release process.
| neilv wrote:
| I used MS-DOS since 1.25, but I kinda wish I'd instead been using
| Unix all that time.
|
| MS-DOS had much better video games, but I didn't much play those.
| Overall, the things I did do would've been better on Unix, and I
| would've gotten plugged into that scene earlier. (When I finally
| got access to Unix workstations, I sold my PC, and never again
| used another MS box at home.)
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Unix was very expensive at the time of course, meaning only
| used by big business. I remember asking a computer/IT teacher
| what it was, in the early 90s. Sounded interesting and somehow
| we found out about Minix and downloaded it from somewhere to
| tinker, maybe a BBS?
|
| Luckily this happened, because when I later got an IT job in
| the mid-nineties at a aerospace company I was good to go. At
| which point I discovered Linux and then BSD.
| neilv wrote:
| Also, engineering-ish small businesses, and universities, and
| the occasional non-profit saving money with dumb terminals
| where they'd otherwise need a PC on each desk.
|
| I once paid ~$100 for Coherent (Unix-like) for my '286, then
| sent it back due to the 64KB process limit, while I used Unix
| workstations at an internship. My next home computer was to
| buy a used Sun-3/75 from the local Sun office for a fraction
| of a what a PC would cost.
| hed wrote:
| I really enjoyed this post.
|
| As a kid I used the MultiConfig (based on a guide in PC
| Magazine!) to have different menus. When all you were trying to
| run was games, maxing your conventional memory was key. I had
| different combos for sound, no sound, CD-ROM, boot to windows,
| moving stuff between EMS/XMS so older games could fit.
|
| I would meticulously try different combos and seeing that `mem`
| command return something above 600KB was a reward in and of
| itself.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I never ran 6, but under 3.3 and 4 we (my pals and I) had all
| created a complicated array of batch files to create multiple
| booting options (autoexec/config combos).
|
| It was originally borne of a need to allow us all to have our
| own preferred setup on shared PCs in the computer lab we worked
| in, and just grew from there. My pal Dave may have given us the
| idea with his scheme of multiple boot profiles on his Amiga,
| come to think of it.
|
| >moving stuff between EMS/XMS so older games could fit.
|
| Oh god this. My pal Mike and I -- who, I note fondly, I was
| visiting with last weekend, 30+ years later -- spent a LONG
| time basically becoming subject matter experts on DOS memory
| allocation and manipulation. It was my first experience with
| hard-won knowledge that was nevertheless useless relatively
| quickly; I remember NONE of it now. But holy cow we futzed
| around with this SO MUCH -- initially to accommodate various
| games or other heavyweight programs, and then out of momentum.
| omnibrain wrote:
| > and seeing that `mem` command return something above 600KB
| was a reward in and of itself
|
| I remember Tornado needing 612kb. That took me some serious
| optimizing.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'm always amazed of times when kilobytes would be life
| altering
| npongratz wrote:
| I was stuck with MS-DOS 5.0 as a child, and was mildly envious
| of 6.x's MultiConfig that I read about in magazines; it seemed
| so much better than using boot floppies for nonstandard
| configurations. So I rigged autoexec.bat to present a menu of
| various configs and rename the related config.sys files so that
| the one I chose was used after autoexec.bat ran. Worked quite
| well; the only minor downside I encountered was having to
| reboot again when choosing a different config than the one
| config.sys currently held.
| mike_hock wrote:
| I thought config.sys ran _before_ autoexec.bat ...
| jhoechtl wrote:
| It did for sure
| arnvidr wrote:
| I did the same thing. I didn't have internet back then, so I
| assume I also got the knowledge to do this from magazines.
| Also, lots of time on my hand back then, so probably dove deep
| into various weird manuals.
| rep_lodsb wrote:
| I used the "help" command that is included in DOS. Though
| today is the first time I learned you could have multiple
| "[common]" sections!
| accrual wrote:
| > I had different combos for sound, no sound, CD-ROM, boot to
| windows, moving stuff between EMS/XMS so older games could fit.
|
| A great retro YouTuber, Phils Computer Lab, has a similar menu
| available for download. It's a pretty slick menu kind of like
| the one you've described.
|
| https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ms-dos-starter-pack.html
| usrusr wrote:
| A part of me still feels like I could still jump right in, like
| it would be the most natural thing for me to quickly juggle
| around some config.sys and autoexec.bat lines to get that
| balancing act between conventional and extended right for a
| given game. Iirc for wing commander the amount of one or the
| other was even key to adjusting simulation speed relative to
| CPU, more memory allowing more debris particles, slowing down
| in-game time?
|
| The other part of me is fully aware that I have forgotten just
| about everything, even the filename of config.sys was only
| resurfaced by other posts here.
| saulpw wrote:
| I'm guessing you were between the age of 10-20 at that time?
| Whatever tech minutiae you learned as a tween/teenager will
| be with you the rest of your life. I still can code in real-
| mode x86 assembly even though I haven't done so in years.
|
| That said, the other reason you could still jump right in, is
| that these systems were _accessible_. Small enough to be
| understandable by a child 's brain, a couple of text files
| you edited by hand, tinkering among a small number of
| parameters each of which you could test within a few minutes
| at most, so that worst case you spent a day dinking around
| with your setup. And without the distractions of the internet
| or thousands of free ad-supported dopamine pumps to displace
| your main purpose of getting this game to work.
|
| Contrast this with today: you buy a game on Steam for $30, it
| doesn't work. What do you do? You have to search the internet
| or go to the forums, and try any number of random things that
| are in no way contained or enumerable and the knowledge isn't
| transferable. Our systems are 100x bigger than any single
| person can conceivably know.
| RandomGuy456 wrote:
| I totally agree! I was 15 years old at that time. Just edit
| and reboot until the game run the way I like it. No
| internet, no distraction. As much a phone call (line phone)
| to a friend to discuss possible configurations. Golden
| days!
| usrusr wrote:
| Second paragraph is gold, both parts. First unfortunately
| not true (the rest of your life part, not the numbers)
| singleshot_ wrote:
| I learned Logo in elementary school, and some scraps of basic
| in junior high, but I have no doubt that my baseline computer
| systems engineering knowledge came about because if I wanted to
| play video games, I had to get my drivers and my EMS and XMS
| squared away.
|
| When I hear people today ask, "how do I get into security?" My
| immediate answer is that you're going to need a very
| underpowered 486 and a copy of Wing Commander 3 if you really
| want to do it right.
| stuaxo wrote:
| I think with NDOS I could get about 617k but that was it.
| gavin_gee wrote:
| damn these were the good old days
|
| The people the leaps in tech the simplicity the naivety
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