Post B7bYh8Dl6rTwk9avMO by privateger@plasmatrap.com
(DIR) More posts by privateger@plasmatrap.com
(DIR) Post #B7bW6JvcQ2yKQkQeu0 by privateger@plasmatrap.com
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it is kind of fascinating how no hobby I started past age 6 has managed to stick
(DIR) Post #B7bYh823oM7m9s7a7s by argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org
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@privateger Does that mean you started a hobby at or before age 6 that *did* stick?
(DIR) Post #B7bYh8Dl6rTwk9avMO by privateger@plasmatrap.com
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@argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org computer touching mostly, yes :thumbsupcat:
(DIR) Post #B7bYipXZXAihO0fjJw by privateger@plasmatrap.com
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@argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org i was doing shit on windows xp at age 5 :drgn_woozy:
(DIR) Post #B7bhZqg0q7qjtJPbm4 by argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org
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@privateger I started at age 8 on Windows 3. Didn't take long to end up at the MS-DOS command prompt, though.Those were the weird old days when Windows wasn't quite an operating system yet. You had to boot MS-DOS first, then start Windows from there.Windows did have most of the functions of an operating system—device drivers, memory management, process scheduling, and so on—but it used MS-DOS for a number of things, most notably the file system.
(DIR) Post #B7bhZqy5kuJMnNs2xE by argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org
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@privateger It got extra-weird with Windows 95, which was marketed as a self-contained operating system and pretty much functioned as a self-contained operating system…but it still came with its own copy of MS-DOS, and although the boot loader would load Windows by default, you could still skip starting Windows and boot only MS-DOS.In that era, booting into MS-DOS was commonplace when you wanted to run a game. Windows 95 was pretty good at running games, but running on DOS was still faster.
(DIR) Post #B7bhZrBCy8nrS40WOm by argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org
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@privateger What you started on was the first version of Windows for the general public (i.e. not just workstations and servers) that did *not* have MS-DOS underneath it.The first non-MS-DOS-based version of Windows was NT 3.1, released in 1993, but it didn't have drivers for a lot of consumer peripherals and it had high RAM requirements, so it wasn't aimed at the general public.
(DIR) Post #B7bhZrNyCh0m5dyiI4 by argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org
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@privateger The first problem was solved by WDM, a common device driver interface that worked on both Windows 98 (MS-DOS-based) and Windows 2000 (NT-based). With that, consumer peripherals could be reasonably expected to work on NT-based Windows.The second problem was solved by RAM getting cheap.There was also the problem of games mostly running on MS-DOS. That was solved with DirectX, which made it possible for a game to run on Windows and still have a high frame rate.
(DIR) Post #B7bhZrbnNI4QmWRkq8 by argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org
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@privateger Thanks to all of that, NT was finally suitable for general use, and so Microsoft made XP and finally ditched DOS.Windows 2000 was also a perfectly viable gaming platform, by the way. I used it for that for several years. The two were fairly similar—similar enough that what ran on XP would probably also run just as well on 2000.
(DIR) Post #B7bheEl3FRUvjhrTOK by privateger@plasmatrap.com
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@argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org I did miss the weirdest days :niko83C:I would consider early NT to be the golden days tbh
(DIR) Post #B7bpGF8cywVtbBxW08 by JuxGD@plasmatrap.com
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@privateger what about computer
(DIR) Post #B7bpGFL2EoREDflQLA by privateger@plasmatrap.com
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@JuxGD that started at 5 :thumbsupcat: