Yeah, these days if you say something out loud in your room and the phone's wifi is on, you will suddenly see the adverts from Google about the same goods/services. Computers were damn slow back then, but still there was some miracle about them.
@@laszloposzmik5829 All this amazing shit and the sole driving factor behind it's advancement is as a tool to shovel more shit you don't need to buy with money you don't have at an interest rate to make 6 other people rich.
Those computers could also spy on you. They had something called TEMPEST back then. It enabled neighbors to recreate your screen output. It could be achieved from a distance too.
I think when a computer was a household appliance that sat in the corner, it was a better balance of technology because you got away from it and took breaks from it. Now here I sit on my phone, completely addicted.
Boot time and dial up time were also barriers. It was a real "commitment" to go on the web back then. 😂 Now if we're idle for even 2 seconds, we're going to check our phones for that instant gratification, haha.
Agreed. I have fond memories of when the internet was a physical location, like the corner of your dining room or maybe you were fancy and had a whole computer room.
Most of the ill effects of social media would likely be significantly less if we weren't able to take the internet with us in the form of smart phones.
That sound of turning on an old school PC is so nostalgic. At the time we could see there was a revolution happening, that there were endless possibilities we knew were possible. Then we ended up with Facebook and Twitter. On second thoughts, turn it off.
Yep, all that potential and all those possibilities... taken over and swallowed up by big business, government censorship, online narcissism, and Thoughtcrime laws. It was inevitable that society wouldn't be allowed to own the Internet in the long term, but I enjoyed the simpler early days of total freedom and anonymity.
I remember Windows 3.11 very well. It was back in the day when you had to spend 15 minutes trying to come up with a creative way to name your file using only 8 characters! That drove me absolutely crazy!!
Those were the days! For me, the thing that drove me crazy was having to pause the startup so I can edit my autoexec.bat and config.sys (I think those where the name of the files) so I can run my Soundblaster or just make my game run. Ahh... we needed to know a lot about how computers worked back then just to get things running. I kind of miss that in a way. :-)
@@absolutelyproprietary6896 actually at home I was using a Mac. I only suffered through the misery of Windows at work. Actually today my situation is the same… Mac at home, Windows at work.
@@JerryN7970 Mac is a really decent option but idk I kinda don't like mac. I don't like too much simplification, It's just not my thing. I used bsd and switched to linux at 2000s. I'm using arch linux right now
Wow! In my opinion i think that your pc is faster than this windows 3.11 pc. But you have 64 gb of ram? Because I think that 64 gb of RAM is too much for a 2019 pc. You don't mean 64 GB of hard disk?
I studied MS DOS. Worked on diskless pcs. Used to boot pc by floppy disk. It was surprising to use a mouse ! Windos 3.1 with monochrome monitor , wordstar ,foxpro and dBase are very famous those days.
Windows 95. It was a bitmap image. You could edit it. I did. It was my sister's computer, the first one we had at home. So I edited that picture to say that after 50 days of use it needed to be left alone for a week to allow the chips to drain. She swallowed it completely. Then when she came home one day and saw me using it, she blew her top shouting that I was damaging the computer. When she discovered how I'd fooled her, she didn't speak to me for a week.
Windows 3.1 was barely anything but an extremely basic UI. So you're comparing apples and oranges, really. Windows 3.1 would boot in under a few seconds on current hardware. That would be a more accurate comparison.
Because people do not work together any more. Previously, you collaborate to make integration... And to make sure it works. Provide the dummy hardware and use it for softwares til it break. I now noticed that isn't the case any more... We've kind of become broken too.
I loved and missed my 386, and even more so my 286. Practical, straightforward, reliable and no distractions or bells and whistles. Today I use a mobile word processor to write. I could focus better.
Ah, the old IBM PC-AT. A desktop PC that was heavier than a modern full tower, because the case was made of sheet steel. Built like a tank so you could put a very heavy CRT monitor on top of it.
It still is but people have become more practical now and want to take their pcs wherever they want even on a plane or bus. Back then they really didn't have a choice
Whoa does this bring back memories!! My first real 'computer' was an IBM 286, 1 meg of memory and a 10meg hard drive! I def rememeber getting the 386 40 meg hard drive, color monitor and feeling like I had a faster, real computer! Pushing the power button, making a coffee, waiting for win 3.1 to load and then win 95 after that
1 MB is a lot for a 286! I think I had 384 KB or 512 KB that early on. 80s PC games had memory overlays and there were paging tools like XMM and EMM that I couldn't figure out back then. Sierra games would always ask you whether you had CGA, EGA, or Hercules graphics. I couldn't figure out what Hercules was back in the day, but it sounded mystical. 😏
Back in the day I was developing some software with my boss using Nantucket Clipper as a compiler. On our PC it took so long to compile the software that we would implement as many changes as we could and then set off a compile and head into town to get fish and chips. After eating and having a cup of tea it would eventually finish. We bought a 286 machine and the first time we did a compile, we were all set to head into town for lunch when it finished compiling. Maybe 30 seconds! Such a big difference.
386 and running DOS (no Windows) was perfectly fine. You can do a lot with that set up. Having to deal with memory >640kb, graphics card, sound card were the bigger headaches. You can still do a bit of DOS commands when you run the command shell in Windows. I guess if you import some good old programs like WordPerfect, MS-BASIC you could have a bit of old memories back.
Wow, what a rush of nostalgia. I think my family's first computer had that same exact desktop casing too. That monitor, although branded as a Dell, might be from a Taiwan company called Tatung.
I had a 1995 Gateway desktop that ran on the first version of Windows 95. I read a few MS- DOS books and played around with some of the DOS functions in the command prompt. In my very first quarter in college in Fall 2001, I moved the computer to my studio apartment and used Microsoft Word 95 to type homework papers and saved the files on a 3.5-inch floppy diskette to print at a computer lab on campus.
Also had a 1995 family PC that was state of the art but by 2001 was too slow for run modern games. Regardless I made Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 run by cutting away as much of the operating system as possible. Insane I made that computer last until 2004 when I got my own first PC and soon after a case of WoW addiction.
This machine still boots up pretty fast. I remember when Windows 7 was just rolled out in our company back in the day, our xp desktops took a whopping 45 minutes to become fully operational after booting and heaven help us when we need to reboot for any reason during the day. One day after knocking off my boss asked me to do something urgent and i was literally out the door already but it had to be done. Had to explain to the wife why i got home so late that night and of course it sounded like a likely story and she didnt buy it even though i told the truth lol
If your computer takes 45 minutes to boot up then something is definitely wrong with your hard drive. Not even a dirt cheap computer with an installed OS that takes the entire RAM when idling should take that long. Perhaps your system administrator is an incompetent idiot and doesn't take case of his machines like periodic defragment.
@@StonerSquirreleither that or a stack of bloatware set to launch at startup. Or every user having their own local instance of something that should really, 'really' be running server-side. Or the page file going absolutely crazy on the cheapest slowest HDDs penny- pincher's money could buy at the time. Like HDDs & CPUs from 1998 on PCs that don't even meet XP's minimum requirements.
Taky jsem z Česka, zdar! I still remember qbasic in DOS coding my very first calculator, norton commander as most advanced user DOS interface and I was a small kid, even more backwards when I begged my dad to buy me commodore 64 for a fortune. He did. I spent days in English vocabulary with user manual for C64 to learn how to play a freaking game from an audio type. All I can say is - thank you dad. I am sure if you didn’t do that when I was a kid back in time, I wouldn’t be doing what I am doing these days and I am really grateful you believed in me ❤.
I'm started on MS-DOS 3.30 !!! that time we has not windows yet in Brazil. When we received Windows for the first time we change some monitors to .28 (dot 28) so exciting !!!! after this my sweet memory brings me Prince of Percia.
I remember my first PC. I think it was summer of '96 or '97. My cousin built it for me, you know, those "clones". But man he hooked me up with an AMD chip, 166Mhz, 32 MB RAM, 20 Gb HD, 28.8 modem, Nvidia graphics and Soundblaster audio, 17" monitor, Windows95, MS Office Suite. I rocked that computer my first few years of college.
At some point Intel released the Pentium. It consumed a whopping 15 Watts! What were they thinking? This was crazy, where would it end? This was not progress.
Nice. Our first PC was a 486/66 running Windows 3.1 and shortly thereafter Windows 95. I can’t remember how much memory was on board. Our prior computer was an Apple IIGS which dad upgraded to 1 MB. Dad was ticked when Apple decided to pull support for the GS and swore never to buy another Apple product.
I was running Windows 3.1 on my Atari Turbo XT back in 1992. I started off my computing journey with a Commodore 64 and Apple 2c for computer art in high school in 1985. I still have my original Commodore 64 in working order today.
Man, I miss dialup BBSes now, and I miss Turbo Pascal 7, and I miss not having superfluous Windows updates, and I also miss being able to Exit to DOS. Computers were so much funner back in the early 90s. I keep thinking lately I want a modern DOS OS that handles 64-bit and modern drives and other modern hardware. Not Dosbox within Linux I’m saying, and not FreeDOS because it seems way behind, and not Linux itself, but a new modern DOS.
Boy, that brings back memories. I started using PCs with an 8086 machine (64K RAM and a 12MB hard drive!) in 1981 running MS-DOS. Windows 3.11 was the first version of Windows that got my attention. I'd been steadfastly using DOS and saw Windows as a gimmick. 3.11 made me start to see what the future held for PCs. Continued to mostly use DOS out of familiarity until until Windows 95 came out, then using a 486SX laptop. I miss those machines!
I also used to have a 386 computer with Windows 3.11. In 2002, however, I took the computer to a recycling company because a component was broken and the spare parts were so expensive that I could have bought a new one with Windows XP. The computer has helped me a lot with writing letters and keeping a diary. Unfortunately, I can no longer access my diary entries from 1990 to 2002 because they are on a 5.25-inch floppy disk.
Every morning I would arrive at the computer room at college early just to start up all the CPU'S. I would then boot-up the mainframe and load FORTRAN COBOL C programing language. Circa 1989. Great days indeed.
Oh, man. Early 80s in aerospace company...we first got 286s. My small cubicle ended up with a 386, a Mac with a teeny screen and a tape punch, a plotter that took up the whole table, file cabinets and a desk. I even had space to squeeze in & out. Thankfully it was a cubicle so no need for the arc of the door. Wowsers the memory when we first got "the internet" --you had to apply for it & be approved. Proxy filters...
@@ilyasg2108 On older PCs, you had to run a program to "park" the hard drive before turning it off. This would move the hard drive read/write head safely away from the discs so that the PC could shut down safely. If you didn't do this, you risked damaging the drive.
Whaddya mean? PCs back in the early 90s had a bunch of beeps, lines of DOS code, etc. Today, you get a nice loading screen and startup sound, its been that way since the late 90s. I think you mean Windows XPs startup sound
@@tacosatlarge well said. The Compaq I grew up with was amazing. It's not begging for attention but was enough for my family to get what needed to be done, well, done, while also standing out a bit with it's silver front and blue power button
I miss this so much. I remember when i got my first sound card. The children jumped out of bed because they heard me starting up the Carman Sandiego game. ❤
those "knocks" of relays on the power unit, when starts... scary today. and i forgotten that we wait few seconds to monitor "warms" to display something :D my first pc was a samsung 386sx 16mhz, with an 80mb hard drive, a gorgeous white phosphoric screen, and dual floppy drives
Mine was a generic 486.AMD with 4MB RAM, 240HDD and a Tatung monitor No CD drive but I later bought a SCSI drive, along with the card, of course And back then I didn't know I needed to have MS-DOS in order to install Windows 3.11, so when I had to reinstall Windows had to wait a day to get the MSDOS boot disk. I still have that one.
Wow, this brings back lots of memories for me with my 386sx-25 cpu desktop with 40mb HD and 2mb RAM and MSDOS V5 and Windows 3.1. Hard to believe it was 30 years ago, half of my lifetime ago.
I had a 286 that wasn't supposed to be able to run Windows (though ran DOS 6.22 just fine), but my best friend's mom, who would later be my programming teacher in high school, got it loaded with Windows 3.1. This 386 in the video started up WAY faster! Nice.
we had those and 486/66s in our computer lab back in the early 90's. everyone preferred the 486 and when the pentium came out it was a revelation. this was pre gui as well, so we used the msdos to navigate the web which was all text based.....
