4 ms·

I worked extensively with Windows 2 back in the day. Possibly even with Windows 1.0 I can't quite recall. It was a constant battle to get enough RAM for appli

I worked extensively with Windows 2 back in the day. Possibly even with Windows 1.0 I can't quite recall. It was a constant battle to get enough RAM for applications to run. Futzing around with himem.sys and moving around network drivers and stuff in high memory. Windows applications had to run within the first 640K of RAM. In reality, around that time most corporate machines were 80286 machines and as I recall a high specced machine usually had 2MB RAM. Kinda weird to think that working, useful Windows applications ran on systems with that little memory. Ugh I'm glad those days are gone.

pdonis 3y ago
> It was a constant battle to get enough RAM for applications to run. Futzing around with himem.sys and moving around network drivers and stuff in high memory. This was a battle even if you weren't running Windows. Many DOS programs wanted enough of that first 640K that you had to jump through hoops to fit them in.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Rebooting 15 times with different driver ordering in the hope you'll find another 3KB of RAM to get the application to run. Really sucked if you were booting from floppy.
  - robin_reala 3y ago
    QEMM was a life saver in this regard.
    - agumonkey 3y ago
      so qemm was a configurable mapper ?
      - justsomehnguy 3y ago
        QEMM was way more aggressive in clawing out the memory blocks from all nooks and crannies, definitely was more configurable and also had a way to test different configurations of device drivers (ie CONFIG.SYS) fully automatically, so you just started it, go to eat/whatever (pray what it wouldn't lock up) and come back to the best result.
    - pdonis 3y ago
      Yes, QEMM was my goto for quite a while for this. I also ran DESQView once I got a computer that could make good use of it.
  - yomlica8 3y ago
    I remember I'd save random mouse drivers I found on different machines at school looking for the one that used the least amount of ram. God, what a nightmare.
- Bluecobra 3y ago
  When I was a kid I really wanted to play Ultima VII and getting that game to work right with a sound card and mouse was a game within itself for a newbie. I think it used its own proprietary memory manger just to make it harder. Eventually I was able to figure it out by making the right boot disk and config.sys, but man what a pain.
  - roody15 3y ago
    That game was amazing and I remember doing the exact same thing. Had to disable ems memory and boot the computer so that the game engines memory manager had enough to work with. Honestly that game probably set in motion my career path in IT.
- vctrnk 3y ago
  My course of action was to run Memmaker, and let it take care of (almost) everything. It usually worked fine. Sometimes I had to fine-tune config.sys/autoexec.bat to make a bit more room or disable EMS, but those were edge cases. Now that I think about it, it'd be fun to know how Memmaker works internally, but I can't seem to find info on that. Maybe no one has done such analysis... yet.
  - yomlica8 3y ago
    > Now that I think about it, it'd be fun to know how Memmaker works internally, but I can't seem to find info on that. Maybe no one has done such analysis... yet. It has been a long time...doesn't it just go through and LOADHIGH all the obvious possibilities? I feel like it maybe had some library of candidates it would check. I never had this program, I think I did it all manually after analyzing config.sys and autoexec.bat on systems with more free ram than I had. It makes me realize how much knowledge I just mined from school computers.
biogene 3y ago
What network were you on? I'm curious, I never had anything except dial-up (BBS) back in those days.
- nine_k 3y ago
  NetWare, I suppose. IPX was big even under pure DOS.
  - smackeyacky 3y ago
    In that era you had to load the network drivers before windows, it was all DOS based. It wasn't until windows for workgroups that windows based networking was a thing.
  - andrewstuart 3y ago
    Netware, I also worked with Microsoft's SMB and a few other lesser known things. 3Com something or other. There were some interesting network types around then too - unfortunately alot of coax networks (a disconnected cable would bring the whole network down), Banyan Vines, some IBM token ring which had some weird cables and connectors. Cat 5 networking came in not long after. Back then there were all sorts of protocols flying over the network. IPX/SPX, XNS mainly. The one protocol NOT present on our systems was TCP/IP.
    - biogene 3y ago
      Nice, must have been interesting to use such a variety of tech that people were still figuring out. Yeah, I got directly into TCP/IP with trumpet winsock. All the stuff prior was before my time (the stuff that I had access to anyway).
deaddodo 3y ago
> Windows applications had to run within the first 640K of RAM. In reality, around that time most corporate machines were 80286 machines and as I recall a high specced machine usually had 2MB RAM. There was a protected mode version of Windows 2.0 that would run on 386s and allow larger memory access. I believe it also ran on 286s, but protected mode was crippled quite a bit on those chips.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  I can't remember the specifics now - it was 35 years ago or something... but as I recall the memory situation wasn't sorted out until Windows 3.0. That's what made Windows 3.0 so exciting - the memory model.
  - vetinari 3y ago
    That was windows "enhanced mode", when running on 386. 286 could not return to real mode, once entering protected mode (by design; a way was found later by resetting the cpu) and had no vm86 mode. 386 had these features, and by the time of windows 3.0 release it was popular enough, so they could be used.
    - Narishma 3y ago
      No, even without those 386 features, Windows 3.0 did introduce a new memory system that allowed Windows applications to more easily use up to 16MB of RAM IIRC.
- happycube 3y ago
  For Windows 2.x it was less about protected mode than the MMU -- paging allowed EMS (bank selection in real mode) to be done by the CPU.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
> Kinda weird to think that working, useful Windows applications ran on systems with that little memory. > Ugh I'm glad those days are gone. I'm quite the opposite... i miss the times when applications could run in a few megs of ram.... nowaday just a browser showing a simple weather report wastes 2 gigs+ of ram.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  I was there. They were perhaps not shit applications, but they were extremely basic. It’s a nostalgic fantasy to look back at that stuff imagining it’s in any way comparable to what users expect today. I don’t care about applications wasting RAM. Modern machines have plenty of cores and RAM and the software is unbelievably powerful today. I have some nostalgia for those days (I have a huge collection of vintage computers). But it wasn’t “the good old days”, in which software was done right and now it’s all sloppy and bloated and lazy. Not at all. I’m glad of modern software, operating systems and tools. Back then there was always something you wanted to do but couldn’t because the software to do it didn’t exist yet - very frustrating. Now almost anything you want to do, you can because someone has developed the stuff you need to do it. I’m super glad I was there for the early days but glad they’ve passed.
  - Bluecobra 3y ago
    > I don’t care about applications wasting RAM. Modern machines have plenty of cores and RAM and the software is unbelievably powerful today. I do care when applications waste a lot of RAM and cores but application performance is still terrible. Looking at you, Microsoft Teams. I don't remember mIRC ever being a slouch, even on a Windows 95 PC with 8mb of RAM.
    - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
      Yep, skype is horrible too (hmm... could there be any connection, I wonder who bought skype a few years ago...), even if you use the same functionality as with irc clients (just text chat). Fucking slow to respond, replaces code snippets with emoticons and every time you send anyone an URL, it has microsoft servers open that url... "just in case"... even if it's a http://192.168.1.100/ http://192.168.1.100/ url, which is clearly on a private ip address, and there's no way microsoft servers will be able to connect to that, but you'll still have to wait for a timeout before the message gets through.
DylanSp 3y ago
> There was a demon in memory. They said whoever challenged him would lose. Their programs would lock up, their machines would crash, and all their data would disintegrate. > The demon lived at the hexadecimal memory address A0000, 655,360 in decimal, beyond which no more memory could be allocated. He lived behind a barrier beyond which they said no program could ever pass. They called it the 640 K barrier. From https://www.filfre.net/2017/04/the-640-k-barrier/ https://www.filfre.net/2017/04/the-640-k-barrier/.
Tagbert 3y ago
Windows 1 was hard to work with because they used a strict tiling model for window management. All apps had to fit into a screen grid of non-overlapping tiled windows. You very quickly got to tiles that were too small to be useful and hurt the usefulness of Windows as a product. By Windows 2, they had given up on that tiling model and gone with overlapping windows.

pdonis 3y ago

> It was a constant battle to get enough RAM for applications to run. Futzing around with himem.sys and moving around network drivers and stuff in high memory. This was a battle even if you weren't running Windows. Many DOS programs wanted enough of that first 640K that you had to jump through hoops to fit them in.

qingcharles 3y ago
Rebooting 15 times with different driver ordering in the hope you'll find another 3KB of RAM to get the application to run. Really sucked if you were booting from floppy.
- robin_reala 3y ago
  QEMM was a life saver in this regard.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    so qemm was a configurable mapper ?
    - justsomehnguy 3y ago
      QEMM was way more aggressive in clawing out the memory blocks from all nooks and crannies, definitely was more configurable and also had a way to test different configurations of device drivers (ie CONFIG.SYS) fully automatically, so you just started it, go to eat/whatever (pray what it wouldn't lock up) and come back to the best result.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    Yes, QEMM was my goto for quite a while for this. I also ran DESQView once I got a computer that could make good use of it.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  I remember I'd save random mouse drivers I found on different machines at school looking for the one that used the least amount of ram. God, what a nightmare.
Bluecobra 3y ago
When I was a kid I really wanted to play Ultima VII and getting that game to work right with a sound card and mouse was a game within itself for a newbie. I think it used its own proprietary memory manger just to make it harder. Eventually I was able to figure it out by making the right boot disk and config.sys, but man what a pain.
- roody15 3y ago
  That game was amazing and I remember doing the exact same thing. Had to disable ems memory and boot the computer so that the game engines memory manager had enough to work with. Honestly that game probably set in motion my career path in IT.
vctrnk 3y ago
My course of action was to run Memmaker, and let it take care of (almost) everything. It usually worked fine. Sometimes I had to fine-tune config.sys/autoexec.bat to make a bit more room or disable EMS, but those were edge cases. Now that I think about it, it'd be fun to know how Memmaker works internally, but I can't seem to find info on that. Maybe no one has done such analysis... yet.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  > Now that I think about it, it'd be fun to know how Memmaker works internally, but I can't seem to find info on that. Maybe no one has done such analysis... yet. It has been a long time...doesn't it just go through and LOADHIGH all the obvious possibilities? I feel like it maybe had some library of candidates it would check. I never had this program, I think I did it all manually after analyzing config.sys and autoexec.bat on systems with more free ram than I had. It makes me realize how much knowledge I just mined from school computers.

biogene 3y ago

What network were you on? I'm curious, I never had anything except dial-up (BBS) back in those days.

nine_k 3y ago
NetWare, I suppose. IPX was big even under pure DOS.
- smackeyacky 3y ago
  In that era you had to load the network drivers before windows, it was all DOS based. It wasn't until windows for workgroups that windows based networking was a thing.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  Netware, I also worked with Microsoft's SMB and a few other lesser known things. 3Com something or other. There were some interesting network types around then too - unfortunately alot of coax networks (a disconnected cable would bring the whole network down), Banyan Vines, some IBM token ring which had some weird cables and connectors. Cat 5 networking came in not long after. Back then there were all sorts of protocols flying over the network. IPX/SPX, XNS mainly. The one protocol NOT present on our systems was TCP/IP.
  - biogene 3y ago
    Nice, must have been interesting to use such a variety of tech that people were still figuring out. Yeah, I got directly into TCP/IP with trumpet winsock. All the stuff prior was before my time (the stuff that I had access to anyway).

deaddodo 3y ago

> Windows applications had to run within the first 640K of RAM. In reality, around that time most corporate machines were 80286 machines and as I recall a high specced machine usually had 2MB RAM. There was a protected mode version of Windows 2.0 that would run on 386s and allow larger memory access. I believe it also ran on 286s, but protected mode was crippled quite a bit on those chips.

andrewstuart 3y ago
I can't remember the specifics now - it was 35 years ago or something... but as I recall the memory situation wasn't sorted out until Windows 3.0. That's what made Windows 3.0 so exciting - the memory model.
- vetinari 3y ago
  That was windows "enhanced mode", when running on 386. 286 could not return to real mode, once entering protected mode (by design; a way was found later by resetting the cpu) and had no vm86 mode. 386 had these features, and by the time of windows 3.0 release it was popular enough, so they could be used.
  - Narishma 3y ago
    No, even without those 386 features, Windows 3.0 did introduce a new memory system that allowed Windows applications to more easily use up to 16MB of RAM IIRC.
happycube 3y ago
For Windows 2.x it was less about protected mode than the MMU -- paging allowed EMS (bank selection in real mode) to be done by the CPU.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

> Kinda weird to think that working, useful Windows applications ran on systems with that little memory. > Ugh I'm glad those days are gone. I'm quite the opposite... i miss the times when applications could run in a few megs of ram.... nowaday just a browser showing a simple weather report wastes 2 gigs+ of ram.

andrewstuart 3y ago
I was there. They were perhaps not shit applications, but they were extremely basic. It’s a nostalgic fantasy to look back at that stuff imagining it’s in any way comparable to what users expect today. I don’t care about applications wasting RAM. Modern machines have plenty of cores and RAM and the software is unbelievably powerful today. I have some nostalgia for those days (I have a huge collection of vintage computers). But it wasn’t “the good old days”, in which software was done right and now it’s all sloppy and bloated and lazy. Not at all. I’m glad of modern software, operating systems and tools. Back then there was always something you wanted to do but couldn’t because the software to do it didn’t exist yet - very frustrating. Now almost anything you want to do, you can because someone has developed the stuff you need to do it. I’m super glad I was there for the early days but glad they’ve passed.
- Bluecobra 3y ago
  > I don’t care about applications wasting RAM. Modern machines have plenty of cores and RAM and the software is unbelievably powerful today. I do care when applications waste a lot of RAM and cores but application performance is still terrible. Looking at you, Microsoft Teams. I don't remember mIRC ever being a slouch, even on a Windows 95 PC with 8mb of RAM.
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    Yep, skype is horrible too (hmm... could there be any connection, I wonder who bought skype a few years ago...), even if you use the same functionality as with irc clients (just text chat). Fucking slow to respond, replaces code snippets with emoticons and every time you send anyone an URL, it has microsoft servers open that url... "just in case"... even if it's a http://192.168.1.100/ http://192.168.1.100/ url, which is clearly on a private ip address, and there's no way microsoft servers will be able to connect to that, but you'll still have to wait for a timeout before the message gets through.

DylanSp 3y ago

> There was a demon in memory. They said whoever challenged him would lose. Their programs would lock up, their machines would crash, and all their data would disintegrate. > The demon lived at the hexadecimal memory address A0000, 655,360 in decimal, beyond which no more memory could be allocated. He lived behind a barrier beyond which they said no program could ever pass. They called it the 640 K barrier. From https://www.filfre.net/2017/04/the-640-k-barrier/ https://www.filfre.net/2017/04/the-640-k-barrier/.

Tagbert 3y ago

Windows 1 was hard to work with because they used a strict tiling model for window management. All apps had to fit into a screen grid of non-overlapping tiled windows. You very quickly got to tiles that were too small to be useful and hurt the usefulness of Windows as a product. By Windows 2, they had given up on that tiling model and gone with overlapping windows.