3 ms·
I grew up in the same era and I recall crashes being less frequent. There were plenty of other issues, including the fact that you had to adjust the right IRQ
by Yoric 1y ago
I grew up in the same era and I recall crashes being less frequent.
There were plenty of other issues, including the fact that you had to adjust the right IRQ and DMA for your Sound Blaster manually, both physically and in each game, or that you needed to "optimize" memory usage, enable XMS or EMS or whatever it was at the time, or that you spent hours looking at the nice defrag/diskopt playing with your files, etc.
More generally, as you hint to, desktop operating systems were crap, but the software on top of it was much more comprehensively debugged. This was presumably a combination of two factors: you couldn't ship patches, so you had a strong incentive to debug it if you wanted to sell it, and software had way fewer features.
Come to think about it, early browsers kept crashing and taking down the entire OS, so maybe I'm looking at it with rosy glasses.
- pezezin 1y agoYou are looking back with rosy glasses indeed. Last year I assembled a retro PC (Pentium 2, Riva TNT 2 Ultra, Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold) running Windows 98 to remember my childhood, and it is more stable than what I remembered, but still way worse than modern systems. There are plenty of games that will refuse to work for whatever reason, or that will crash the whole OS, specially when existing, and require a hard reboot. Oh and at least in the '90s you could already ship patches, we used to get them with the floppies and later CDs provided by magazines.
- Yoric 1y agoFWIW, I was speaking of the 80s.
- vel0city 1y agoIt truly depends on the quality of the software you were using at the time. Maybe the software you used didn't result in many issues. I know a lot of the games I played as a kid on my family's or friend's Win95 machines resulted in system lockups or blue screens practically every time we used them. As I mess around with these old machines for fun in my free time, I encounter these kinds of crashes pretty dang often. Its hard to tell if its just the old hardware is broken in odd ways or not so I can't fully say its the old software, but things are definitely pretty unreliable on old desktop Windows running old desktop Windows apps.
- Yoric 1y agoAs an OS/2 and Linux users, I mostly missed out on Win95 fun. But I was thinking of the (not particularly) golden days of MS-DOS/DR-DOS/Amiga/Atari applications.