• CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
    88·
    8 个月前

    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.

    • prole@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      24·
      8 个月前

      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.

      • Aurora_TheFirstLight@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        121·
        8 个月前

        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

          • prole@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            8 个月前

            Yeah but they cost like thousands of dollars back then. Upwards of five figures for professional grade printers I believe. They were out of reach for most consumers.

        • frezik
          3·
          8 个月前

          Do you mean patents? Trademarking ink wouldn’t do anything.

      • VieuxQueb@lemmy.ca
        7·
        8 个月前

        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.

    • hactar42@lemmy.world
      7·
      8 个月前

      I remember studying for my first A+ cert. So much of it was dealing with IRQ assignments and conflicts.

      • boeman@lemmy.world
        4·
        8 个月前

        For me, it was about learning the anatomy of the laser printer. I do remember a lot about IRQ and memory addressing, but I don’t remember it being that much of the test.

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
      7·
      8 个月前

      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.

      • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        8 个月前

        And you got to remove the perforated strips on the side of the paper after printing!

        Printing nowadays is so boring.

      • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
        3·
        8 个月前

        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

    • frezik
      5·
      8 个月前

      Getting your modem not to conflict with your mouse. Yes, this was a thing.

        • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
          1·
          8 个月前

          Used to be Lexmark was really good, too. Simple printers that weren’t too fancy, but they worked. Guess they’re still around, but I haven’t used one since the very early ‘00s.

        • villainy@lemmy.world
          1·
          8 个月前

          Still only on the laser printers though. In my experience Brother inkjets have become trash like all the rest.

          • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldMEnglish
            1·
            8 个月前

            Ah, I’ve only owned one of their laser printers. It’s like 13 years old and still works great. We’ve only had to replace the cartridge 2 times.

  • al177@lemmy.sdf.org
    501·
    8 个月前

    You’d plug your mouse into the serial port and your scanner into your printer port. Wild times.

  • elvith@feddit.de
    42·
    8 个月前
    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!

    • evranch@lemmy.ca
      20·
      8 个月前

      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.

      • elvith@feddit.de
        12·
        8 个月前

        That’s done in config.sys, not autoexec autoexec.bat IIRC

        Also anyone remember that joke?

        ;fastest mouse driver available
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRV\CAT.SYS
    • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
      9·
      8 个月前

      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.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
        5·
        8 个月前

        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!

        • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          8 个月前

          That could have gone so horribly wrong lol. It’s like the times my dad asked me to set jumpers for anything, I think he was more spooked than I was but he let me do it anyway. Every badly set jumper is a learning opportunity I guess lol.

  • Gork@lemm.ee
    411·
    8 个月前

    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.

  • Lemminary@lemmy.world
    372·
    8 个月前

    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.

    • SerotoninSwells@lemmy.world
      9·
      8 个月前

      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.

      • Aganim@lemmy.world
        4·
        8 个月前

        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.

  • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
    34·
    8 个月前

    If you started a call with your cellphone close to a loudspeaker you could hear the connection being initiated through the speaker. Something like a tat-ara-tat sound.

    • SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world
      34·
      8 个月前

      Sound cards used to take up one of the few slots so they’d also have a joystick port since the people buying sound cards were often doing it for games.

      I remember buying the Sound Blaster card and “upgrading” my ram for a pretty penny so I could play wing commander.

    • Damage@feddit.it
      10·
      8 个月前

      Oh shit th CD drive connection! If you didn’t plug that in, Audio CDs wouldn’t have any sound.

    • Kethal@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 个月前

      Did joysticks actually use MIDI or they just use the same port? You can program so many buttons with MIDI. You could set up an entire cockpit on one device.

        • Kethal@lemmy.world
          3·
          8 个月前

          That’s nifty. If I understand this, the advantage of a joystick using game port instead of MIDI is much simpler hardware. The game port seems like a sort of ADC which means the joystick needs only very simple analog components. A midi joystick would need those same analog components, plus its own ADCs and some digital logic for midi comms. Without the need in most games for dozens of axes and buttons, the extra cost and complexity wouldn’t be worth it.

          I did find this though, if someone has midi stuff and wanted to go wild. https://github.com/c0redumb/midi2vjoy

          • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
            2·
            8 个月前

            A midi joystick would need those same analog components, plus its own ADCs and some digital logic for midi comms.

            That’s the gist of it, yes. Consider that the most silicon peripherals of the time had were things like shift registers in NES controllers. The rest was all switches and pots (joystick), the latter of which had to be calibrated every time you fired up a game.

            In another timeline, embracing MIDI in the 80’s and 90’s for game controllers would have been amazing. I feel like Japan would have really run wild with something like that.

            • Kethal@lemmy.world
              2·
              8 个月前

              Do you know how that compares to USB today? I assume those need ADCs and some sort of digital logic, which overall is similar to midi. I assume that whatever USB is doing is much simpler though, still making midi more expensive. Maybe not though, and we’re missing out on some crazy joysticks?

              • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
                2·
                8 个月前

                Do you know how that compares to USB today?

                I know enough to be dangerous.

                I assume that whatever USB is doing is much simpler though, still making midi more expensive.

                Basically we live in a silicon rich world compared to back then. Your vision of putting the ADC circuits in the peripheral is exactly what’s done now with every game controller on the market. And no, USB is technically much more complicated since MIDI is just a serial data protocol whereas USB is a full-on bidirectional packet network. Yet silicon-wise, it’s kind of same-y since the guts of these devices are one or two purpose-built chips for either USB or MIDI. Heck, they even use the same number of wires!

                If you’re wondering why MIDI devices today seem expensive despite rocking a 40+ year old communication standard, its because the cost is in everything else. As far as I understand, musical instruments (and anything else in that ecosystem) need rich, repeatable, and reliable tactile input with a decent duty cycle. They often need to be roadworthy, or put up with being run hard in a studio. But also there has always been kind of a premium attached to music stuff in general. Maybe lower production numbers of devices compared to game consoles? Maybe they’re mostly professional or “prosumer” goods? I honestly never understood the big picture here.

                Also, there’s a trend of musicians going back to “control voltage” style synths, which is basically analog signal processing from the 70’s and earlier (e.g. Moog). And feature-for-feature, that stuff is even more expensive. Go figure.

                Maybe not though, and we’re missing out on some crazy joysticks?

                I mean, people have demolished Dark Souls using a Guitar Hero guitar, and also using MIDI drumkits. So there’s that. Anything’s possible with the right silicon glue in play.

      • Laser@feddit.de
        1·
        8 个月前

        I mean the MIDI port was where you would plug in a MIDI keyboard, which is just a fancy joypad anyways. So I guess they did use it. I don’t think it supports any other protocol.

      • DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        4·
        8 个月前

        I took the part 1 test right before they turned it into a 3 year expry certificate. Should have taken part 2 also but I have a problem with being a perfectionist and printers were never my favorite subject.

        Going to do Security+ and Network+ soon because I’m going back into IT. Not even going to entertain A+. Going to do ITF+ just because it never expires.

        • DrPop@lemmy.world
          2·
          8 个月前

          I got it as part of my degree program them I ended up getting a job not in IT. Security+ was not too hard to get as well. Even though I don’t plan on getting back in I still wish I never lost my free Net+ voucher.

  • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
    12·
    8 个月前

    Why are you surprised? The only ADCs in you computer were on the sound card, and a joystick was just two potentiometers and a couple of push button switches.

  • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
    11·
    8 个月前

    And I also remember studying Basic on a book on the beach during summer because I didn’t have a computer yet.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      10·
      8 个月前

      Did you ever get a magazine like Enter where they had fairly lengthy BASIC programs in the back for you to copy down line by line?

      • GroteStreet 🦘@aussie.zoneEnglish
        4·
        8 个月前

        Oh boy. I’ll never forget the amount of fun I had copying them by hand as a 12 year old.

        There was one with coordinates to a wireframe of a sports car and drawing it on screen. What blew my mind was the next section where we perform trigonometry magic to rotate the whole thing in 3D space with arrow keys.

  • Zier@fedia.io
    10·
    8 个月前

    Stop with the euphemisms Jessica. I told you, I’m not interested.

    • hansl@lemmy.world
      7·
      8 个月前

      There was this game I wanted to play that required a lot of memory. My dad didn’t want to spend more money on the computer so I spent a few days hacking the bios, config.sys and autoexec.bat to make sure only the bare minimum was met with drivers for the sound blaster and the mouse loaded and enough RAM left for the game to load.

      Making the game play was engineering at the time.

      • Tyfud@lemmy.world
        4·
        8 个月前

        Absolutely is/was. It’s how most of the engineers I know, including myself, got started with computers that led us to the career we have today in tech.

      • CosmicTurtle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        8 个月前

        Anyone else remember Memory Commander?

        I suspect that all this program did was push stuff to the hard drive or faked how much free RAM you had to games.