I couldn’t help feeling nostalgic after my last post on the Abridged History of Windows. So, let’s take a look at 26 things that show personal computing has come a long way!
Do you remember:
Table of Contents
Hardware Has Come A Long Way
- Booting from a floppy disc
- Knowing how to wire the insides of a computer, before the wire ends were shipped keyed
- Using jumpers to set IRQs
- Using jumpers to designate hard drives
- Daisy chaining SCSI devices while making sure the IDs are different
- Removable storage before the popularity of USB flash drives – 5.25″ and and 3.5″ floppies, Zip discs, CD-Rs, etc.
- Worrying about filling up your hard drive
- When defragmenting your hard drive or RAM was necessary
- When adding RAM to your PC was the way to improve your performance
- Noise of the dial up modem when trying to connect to the internet
- Using a typewriter when you couldn’t print from work or the library
- The noise of a dot matrix printer
- Playing with the preforated sides of the dot matrix printer paper
Software
- Basic color screens
- DOS
- Files or software being in the KB range
- Running a setup utility before starting your games or applications
- Having to uninstall an application in order to install updates or the updated application
- Using Winamp (R.I.P.)
Internet
- Using AOL Instant Messenger
- Getting upwards of 100 free AOL internet CDs in the mail
- NCSA Mosaic and the subsequent Netscape Navigator versus Internet Explorer war
- Tripod and Geocities
- Using many search engines to find what you want
- Waiting several minutes or even hours to download a file in the low MBs (<= 5MBs)
- Sharing Internet connections with other PCs
If I can think of more ways on how personal computing has come a long way, I will most certainly add them! What do you remember in the days of yore?
