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I absolutely love these write-ups! Every time one comes out I read it immediately. This doesn't jive with my recollection, though: > The monochrome cargo van
by zeveb 7y ago
I absolutely love these write-ups! Every time one comes out I read it immediately.
This doesn't jive with my recollection, though:
> The monochrome cargo vans of 1985 had improbably become the multimedia sports cars of 1993, all whilst sticking to the same basic software and hardware architecture.
I don't really believe that this was true until after the adoption of Windows 95 (and remember, Windows NT retained the older Windows 3.1 look for longer; well into the late 90s my college labs' Windows machines looked ancient). At the time, the Mac was the closest thing to a multimedia sports car (with Amiga being the hand-crafter multimedia Rolls Royce, to carry the metaphor too far): it was attractive and ran well. Those of us who used Macs back then look at Windows 3.1 and thought it was a joke; we didn't even think DOS was worth noticing.
In retrospect, I actually have a lot more respect for DOS now than I did then: given what it was, it wasn't actually bad, and it enabled some neat programs. If I were teleported back in time, I might get a DOS box. But there is no way I'd want to use Windows 3.1 again — give me a System 7, 8 or 9 Mac anytime!
- ido 7y agoNT4 used the win95 interface, it came out about a year after win95.
- empath75 7y agoSoundblaster and vga cards came out before windows 95 did. You had games like Wing Commander and Doom and such that came out well before windows gaming existed.
- bluedino 7y agoPeople forget that originally, Windows 95 was a resoure-hogging, performance-robbing, disaster of a gaming environment until Windows 98 or so. 3D accelerators and internet play finally killed off DOS. Even in the days of Windows 95, you had to drop down to 320x200x256 to get any decent performance on the average PC.
- bluedino 7y agoI can't remember if Macs came standard with things like sound cards back then. They were an option on a PC. Playing a game in 1992 like Wolf3D or Duke Nukem II was a very, very different experience using the bleeps and bloops of the PC speaker compared to even an 8-bit sound card, much less the great music you could get on a 16-bit card with wavetable synth. We had an IBM Aptiva at school that cost $3500 (ours was free from Campbell's soup labels), it had a 640x480x256 screen, 2X CD-ROM, and a sound card with speakers. It had a few kid-oriented games where you basically pointed/clicked at stuff, our teacher wouldn't let us install any 'cool' games.
- ido 7y agoEven the very first Mac from 1984 had decent sound by default - sound cards were not required on the Macintosh.