Going from game port to USB with “plug and play” was a huge deal man. Not having to manually assign IRQ to get your audio working too lol. That said, there is still one thing that was cursed in the old days and remains cursed now: printers. Fuck printers.
I’m convinced that in the late 90s/early 00s, the printer companies got together to form a cartel, and have purposefully neutered all consumer-grade printers from that point forward. They knew it wasn’t profitable (unless they charge an arm and a leg for the ink, which of course they eventually did), so they decided to just not play the game at all.
Yes they did exactly that actually
Iirc from a YouTube video I watch long ago they trade mark all the ink printer technology and abused it for years until we made laser printers
Yea and some fucking cards only had IRQ selection jumpers for irq 5 or 7. Had a situation where I had to swap cards depending on if I wanted to use my twain scanner or play games with sound.
I remember studying for my first A+ cert. So much of it was dealing with IRQ assignments and conflicts.
I would argue that for the humble serial or parallel port printer, things just worked. Yes, the ribbon needed replacing sometimes, and the tractor feed could snag or jam. But that’s all a see-it-and-fix-it situation - zero tools required. These things took raw serial data, a straight dump of ASCII characters on the wire. Nothing to confuse and nothing to get wrong. No wacky software drivers either - just tell the software what hardware port to talk to and you’re printing. You got boring text, tabs, spaces, newlines, and zero frills.
For whatever reason, the moment we started to emulate professional printing on a consumer budget was when things started to get hairy.
And you got to remove the perforated strips on the side of the paper after printing!
Printing nowadays is so boring.
Nah, most of that was resolved decades ago too. The problem is greedy companies making printers who just seem to forget what printers are for
I’m pretty sure that Brother is the only printer company that didn’t sign a contract with the devil.
Still only on the laser printers though. In my experience Brother inkjets have become trash like all the rest.
You’d plug your mouse into the serial port and your scanner into your printer port. Wild times.
C:\>type autoexec.bat
@ECHO OFF
PROMPT $P$G
PATH C:\DOS;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM;
SET TEMP=C:\TEMP
REM -- HDD cache:
SMARTDRV.EXE 2038 512
MODE.EXE LPT1:,,P >NUL
SHARE.EXE /F:150 /L:1500
MOUSE.COM /Y
DEVICE=C:\sb16\DRV\CTSB16.SYS /UNIT=0 /BLASTER=A:220 I:5 D:1
DEVICE=C:\sb16\DRV\CTMMSYS.SYS
CD \WINDOWS
WIN
And don’t forget to set the jumpers correctly!
You forgot to load EMM386 or even HIMEM.SYS! You might as well not even bothered installing that expensive 4MB SIMM stick for all the use you’re gonna get out of it.
Oh man the memories this brings back. I remember being sat down in front of a 386 by my dad when I was ~6 years old. I asked him how to use the mouse, he gave me an instruction manual and told me to figure it out.
We often criticize boomer dads but they were right about this point: kids have unlimited curiosity, feed it.
My daughter recently turned 6 years old. She saw a game called Wobbledogs and wanted to play it. I sat her in front of an old PC and told her to figure it out. She spent a few hours playing last night and narrated the entire experience to me lol. Glad she is enjoying herself. Even if this doesn’t set off a lifetime of experience in IT she will develop some problem solving skills, and if nothing else she is learning something useful as opposed to being handed a tablet.
Not only was I somehow given the card to upgrade my Apple IIe to 128k in the 80s when I was elementary school age, my parents trusted me to install it because they didn’t know how. And I did!
I remember having to configure the sound card within games. IRQ and DMZ settings. I had no idea what I was doing so a lot of the time I just played without sound.
The modem used to echo the tormented screams from the crypts of hell every time it tried to connect. It’s ok to be confused, grandma.
The modem used to echo the tormented screams from the cripts of hell every time it tried to connect.
And if someone picked up the landline phone it would sever the connection.
Ha, my best friend had ISDN, so no severed connections when somebody dared placing a phone call while we were traversing the murky depths of rotten.com.
Of course, in style of the meme, we also had the internet at home. Cable internet, which was slow enough it would actually hang up the Windows 98 network stack, taking down the entire system with it.