31 ms·

Very cool. I was an MS Windows Tech Support during the Win31/1 to Win95 transition. Looking back, it went pretty smoothly. Most of our calls were HW driver rela

Very cool. I was an MS Windows Tech Support during the Win31/1 to Win95 transition. Looking back, it went pretty smoothly. Most of our calls were HW driver related or usability related if I remember well.

mysterydip 4y ago
That must have been a wild time, between brand new interfaces and a changing hardware landscape. Did you have many BSOD calls, or was that what you meant with HW driver related?
- bernardv 4y ago
  Plenty of BSOD calls for sure. Also some very memorable calls from a bunch of Linux guys who would think-up of a monster Windows machine loaded with all sorts of crazy hardware peripherals and call support to mess with us.
  - derefr 4y ago
    Are you sure it was truly just to mess with you? If I were a Linux kernel maintainer back then, and there was some hardware I wanted to fix support for but didn't personally have the money to buy, I think "trick Microsoft into divulging how their own driver for it works" would be what I'd see as a "clever hack"!
    - bernardv 4y ago
      Perhaps. But I think some of them were actually more senior techs calling in and messing with the new guy.
- nikanj 4y ago
  About as wild as any given day in Node.js land
bcrescimanno 4y ago
I'll share my own story of the Windows 3.1 -> 95 migration and MS Tech support. At the time, I was using my grandfather's old PC that had originally been a 486sx 33mhz processor with 4mb of RAM and a 200mb HDD. We upgraded the machine using an Intel "Overdrive" processor to a 486dx/2 66mhz processor with 8mb of RAM and added a Soundblaster 16 sound card and triple-speed CD ROM drive. I received a copy of Windows 95 for Christmas 1995 and proceeded to install it on the system. It worked pretty well and, a few months later, I decided I wanted to add the "MS Plus!" pack. I was 14 years old and knew very little about PCs at the time; though, I was learning. What I definitely didn't know at the time was that the HDD in the machine that I was told was nearly 500MB was actually a 200mb drive that had been compressed with an older version of DriveSpace. The addition of Plus! upgraded the compression to DriveSpace 3 which corrupted something on the drive that caused the system to hardlock as soon as the Windows 95 UI appeared no matter what I did. After spending 4-5 hours on the phone with a very patient tech support specialist at MS, he eventually concluded that I would need to format the drive as nothing we did in those hours worked at all. Definitely a major learning experience for me doing my first full system format and OS reinstall. By the end of 1996, I'd be doing my first Linux installation on a slightly newer PC that I saved money from a summer job to buy. If it hadn't been for DriveSpace 3 and an MS tech support specialist who educated the hell out of me for a few hours, who knows when (or even if) I would have gone down the rabbit hole that led to my career.
- krimpenrik 4y ago
  That is pretty wild, imagine that support in the current climate
  - dzdt 4y ago
    Exactly. We are moving to a tine where having a person individually and attentively help you with anything is a high order luxury item. A major change is on the horizon though. We are close to where a large language model could play the role of the support side of that call. But if it an AI on the support side, would anyone bother to learn on the customer side?
flandish 4y ago
Same here, though not for MS, just ISPs and resellers. Most often, iirc, it was drivers on floppies and “how do I do …”

mysterydip 4y ago

That must have been a wild time, between brand new interfaces and a changing hardware landscape. Did you have many BSOD calls, or was that what you meant with HW driver related?

bernardv 4y ago
Plenty of BSOD calls for sure. Also some very memorable calls from a bunch of Linux guys who would think-up of a monster Windows machine loaded with all sorts of crazy hardware peripherals and call support to mess with us.
- derefr 4y ago
  Are you sure it was truly just to mess with you? If I were a Linux kernel maintainer back then, and there was some hardware I wanted to fix support for but didn't personally have the money to buy, I think "trick Microsoft into divulging how their own driver for it works" would be what I'd see as a "clever hack"!
  - bernardv 4y ago
    Perhaps. But I think some of them were actually more senior techs calling in and messing with the new guy.
nikanj 4y ago
About as wild as any given day in Node.js land

bcrescimanno 4y ago

I'll share my own story of the Windows 3.1 -> 95 migration and MS Tech support. At the time, I was using my grandfather's old PC that had originally been a 486sx 33mhz processor with 4mb of RAM and a 200mb HDD. We upgraded the machine using an Intel "Overdrive" processor to a 486dx/2 66mhz processor with 8mb of RAM and added a Soundblaster 16 sound card and triple-speed CD ROM drive. I received a copy of Windows 95 for Christmas 1995 and proceeded to install it on the system. It worked pretty well and, a few months later, I decided I wanted to add the "MS Plus!" pack. I was 14 years old and knew very little about PCs at the time; though, I was learning. What I definitely didn't know at the time was that the HDD in the machine that I was told was nearly 500MB was actually a 200mb drive that had been compressed with an older version of DriveSpace. The addition of Plus! upgraded the compression to DriveSpace 3 which corrupted something on the drive that caused the system to hardlock as soon as the Windows 95 UI appeared no matter what I did. After spending 4-5 hours on the phone with a very patient tech support specialist at MS, he eventually concluded that I would need to format the drive as nothing we did in those hours worked at all. Definitely a major learning experience for me doing my first full system format and OS reinstall. By the end of 1996, I'd be doing my first Linux installation on a slightly newer PC that I saved money from a summer job to buy. If it hadn't been for DriveSpace 3 and an MS tech support specialist who educated the hell out of me for a few hours, who knows when (or even if) I would have gone down the rabbit hole that led to my career.

krimpenrik 4y ago
That is pretty wild, imagine that support in the current climate
- dzdt 4y ago
  Exactly. We are moving to a tine where having a person individually and attentively help you with anything is a high order luxury item. A major change is on the horizon though. We are close to where a large language model could play the role of the support side of that call. But if it an AI on the support side, would anyone bother to learn on the customer side?

flandish 4y ago

Same here, though not for MS, just ISPs and resellers. Most often, iirc, it was drivers on floppies and “how do I do …”