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There were entire communities based around specific DOS games and applications. Notably: ZZT, MegaZeux, a slew of abandonware games, QBASIC, and so on. A lot o

There were entire communities based around specific DOS games and applications. Notably: ZZT, MegaZeux, a slew of abandonware games, QBASIC, and so on. A lot of people discovered just how limited DOS was because they were fascinated by computers, but DOS (and likely Windows on top of it) was the only thing they had at the time. Yet they wanted to push the boundaries and ended up finding the ceiling. At least that's been my experience.

versteegen 5y ago
For creative pursuits, limitations can counter-intuitively be good to have. Not only do you learn a lot (and have fun) when you're forced to understand a system well to work around its limitations, but it removes a lot of the distraction of choice ("option paralysis"), so you make creative decisions instead of technical ones. That's why it was all so much fun. I had so much fun that I'm still actively maintaining one of those originally DOS QuickBasic game engines -- it was ported to FreeBASIC and modern OSes long ago, but it's still got that DOS look and various limitations.