ethnianmandarin:

jadagul:

Reminded for various reasons tonight about how back in the nineties, sometimes you’d buy a computer game, and install it, and it…just wouldn’t work.

Not “run slowly” or “be kind of buggy”, but just “your computer will not run this game.” Whether it was like Master of Magic where it needed a shitload of conventional memory (Bill Gates’s famous 640k), or like Quest for Glory that just kept crashing on my computer. You just can’t play them.

And there wasn’t really anything you could do. There was no internet to download patches from. There was no high-intensity support. Video games weren’t a big industry so this wasn’t a news item. And if you’re eight, your resources are pretty limited too! You just had a game you couldn’t play.

wtf just edit config.sys and autoexec.bat n00b

woof, I haven’t heard those filenames in years. that and winsock.dll, the text files you had to manually edit with new applications to make your PC actually function in the 90s

and better back your stuff up, in case it screws everything up, though it was actually kinda normal to reformat and reinstall the OS every few months otherwise things would seem to decay

this wasn’t my experience, I had Macs