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Wow, what a flashback! This was the OS I actually grew up with. I remember being 3 or 4 years old and playing Carnivores 2 on my Dad's Windows 98 PC. Even the s

Wow, what a flashback! This was the OS I actually grew up with. I remember being 3 or 4 years old and playing Carnivores 2 on my Dad's Windows 98 PC. Even the slowness and unresponsiveness is there, just like I remember! Yeah...this was the golden age. So much hope and so much optimism for what could be in regards to technology and what it would allow for the general population. I still think we're not there, but we can get there still, perhaps.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
This was really interesting to read. Thanks for sharing your memory. There was a big difference between win98 and win98 “second edition”. Do you know which you used?
- FillardMillmore 6y ago
  Unfortunately I don't remember. :( Back then, I wasn't so much interested in the computer itself as I was in what I could do with it - as a four year old, that meant hunting and killing pixelated T-Rexes.
intruder 6y ago
Yep, it makes me so nostalgic. If you like this, there's a channel on twitch streaming old episodes of Computer Chronicles [1] and the optimism and excitement in it is something I just don't feel anymore nowadays. [1] https://www.twitch.tv/computerchronicles https://www.twitch.tv/computerchronicles
cobalt 6y ago
was Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 & later 2 for me
hnlmorg 6y ago
> this was the golden age. So much hope and so much optimism for what could be Funny that because I grew up in the 80s and for me the golden age was 10 to 15 years earlier and I saw Windows 98 as the decline. There was so much variety and experimentation in the 80s, and so much excitement too when GUIs first started appearing on home computers. There was also much more diversity in the computing landscape with different hardware architectures and operating systems. In fact back then DOS machines were some of the least interesting hardware and early Windows (pre 3.x) was just terrible compared to what Acorn, Atari, Amiga and Apple were doing. Then came the mid-90s and everything had converged into x86 running Windows. I remember at the time feeling rather let down by just how boring and crummy desktop computing had become considering all the interesting things that preceded it. Things picked up again once I discovered BeOS and Linux -- I guess even in the 90s I didn't like Microsoft Windows and to be honest little has changed over the years. That's just my opinion though. The "golden age" is a very subjective thing that I suspect is largely driven by the age of the observer.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I grew up using Windows XP/Vista and browsing the early days of the interactive web, mostly based on Flash. For me of course that was the golden age, and now we’re stuck with huge walled gardens and invasive adtech…iPhone had come out and it was amazing watching the mobile market rapidly advance. I remember seriously suggesting Windows Phone to my parents…Google Docs totally upended how we did assignments in late elementary school.
  - FillardMillmore 6y ago
    I don't think Google Docs was a thing until I was in high school. Still, don't think my schools adopted it quickly. I do have many fond memories of flash games too (and of course, viruses I inadvertently introduced to my parents' computers). Back when I was learning computers in elementary school, we were taugh to use Yahoo! as our search engine and most of our 'computer' assignments for the day involved drawing butterflies in Microsoft Paint or seeing how many words we could type per minute.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I belong to a similar generation and for me actually only Windows and macOS map to the feelings that I enjoyed while using those 16 bit machines and small flirt with BeOS and QNX demo floppies. For many years I looked forward to GNU/Linux settling into one stack and offering a multimedia experience like the Amiga, Atari and Acorn, but that was in vain in the kingdom of CLI and forking projects.
- dm319 6y ago
  I'm like you - that the Windows era was a low point in computing for me. I used Workbench 3.1 before, and Linux afterwards, and both of those kindled my interest in computers far more than Win 3.1 - XP ever could. On the otherhand I do have some nostalgia for those Windows days - it wasn't all bad, just a little on the boring side. I remember those themes from Win98 with the associated screensavers fondly. I also posted here about running old versions of microsoft office, and I enjoyed playing around with them and had forgotten that they were actually pretty decent pieces of software.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

This was really interesting to read. Thanks for sharing your memory. There was a big difference between win98 and win98 “second edition”. Do you know which you used?

FillardMillmore 6y ago
Unfortunately I don't remember. :( Back then, I wasn't so much interested in the computer itself as I was in what I could do with it - as a four year old, that meant hunting and killing pixelated T-Rexes.

intruder 6y ago

Yep, it makes me so nostalgic. If you like this, there's a channel on twitch streaming old episodes of Computer Chronicles [1] and the optimism and excitement in it is something I just don't feel anymore nowadays. [1] https://www.twitch.tv/computerchronicles https://www.twitch.tv/computerchronicles

cobalt 6y ago

was Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 & later 2 for me

hnlmorg 6y ago

> this was the golden age. So much hope and so much optimism for what could be Funny that because I grew up in the 80s and for me the golden age was 10 to 15 years earlier and I saw Windows 98 as the decline. There was so much variety and experimentation in the 80s, and so much excitement too when GUIs first started appearing on home computers. There was also much more diversity in the computing landscape with different hardware architectures and operating systems. In fact back then DOS machines were some of the least interesting hardware and early Windows (pre 3.x) was just terrible compared to what Acorn, Atari, Amiga and Apple were doing. Then came the mid-90s and everything had converged into x86 running Windows. I remember at the time feeling rather let down by just how boring and crummy desktop computing had become considering all the interesting things that preceded it. Things picked up again once I discovered BeOS and Linux -- I guess even in the 90s I didn't like Microsoft Windows and to be honest little has changed over the years. That's just my opinion though. The "golden age" is a very subjective thing that I suspect is largely driven by the age of the observer.

saagarjha 6y ago
I grew up using Windows XP/Vista and browsing the early days of the interactive web, mostly based on Flash. For me of course that was the golden age, and now we’re stuck with huge walled gardens and invasive adtech…iPhone had come out and it was amazing watching the mobile market rapidly advance. I remember seriously suggesting Windows Phone to my parents…Google Docs totally upended how we did assignments in late elementary school.
- FillardMillmore 6y ago
  I don't think Google Docs was a thing until I was in high school. Still, don't think my schools adopted it quickly. I do have many fond memories of flash games too (and of course, viruses I inadvertently introduced to my parents' computers). Back when I was learning computers in elementary school, we were taugh to use Yahoo! as our search engine and most of our 'computer' assignments for the day involved drawing butterflies in Microsoft Paint or seeing how many words we could type per minute.
pjmlp 6y ago
I belong to a similar generation and for me actually only Windows and macOS map to the feelings that I enjoyed while using those 16 bit machines and small flirt with BeOS and QNX demo floppies. For many years I looked forward to GNU/Linux settling into one stack and offering a multimedia experience like the Amiga, Atari and Acorn, but that was in vain in the kingdom of CLI and forking projects.
dm319 6y ago
I'm like you - that the Windows era was a low point in computing for me. I used Workbench 3.1 before, and Linux afterwards, and both of those kindled my interest in computers far more than Win 3.1 - XP ever could. On the otherhand I do have some nostalgia for those Windows days - it wasn't all bad, just a little on the boring side. I remember those themes from Win98 with the associated screensavers fondly. I also posted here about running old versions of microsoft office, and I enjoyed playing around with them and had forgotten that they were actually pretty decent pieces of software.