Reminds me of a story: I ordered a soundcard for an engineers workstation. Had problems with accounting about this. What does he need a Soundblaster for? Well, he actually needed a joystick for his CAD package!
I used to have to unplug the printer from the parallel port so I could plug in my first MP3 player and transfer MP3s I had totally legally acquired in 1999.
The parallel port scanner that made your entire computer able to do absolutely nothing while scanning. No mouse input, no display update. An absolute time warp for your CPU.
Why are you surprised? The only ADCs in you computer were on the sound card, and a joystick was just two potentiometers and a couple of push button switches.
There was this game I wanted to play that required a lot of memory. My dad didn’t want to spend more money on the computer so I spent a few days hacking the bios, config.sys and autoexec.bat to make sure only the bare minimum was met with drivers for the sound blaster and the mouse loaded and enough RAM left for the game to load.
Absolutely is/was. It’s how most of the engineers I know, including myself, got started with computers that led us to the career we have today in tech.
I took the part 1 test right before they turned it into a 3 year expry certificate. Should have taken part 2 also but I have a problem with being a perfectionist and printers were never my favorite subject.
Going to do Security+ and Network+ soon because I’m going back into IT. Not even going to entertain A+. Going to do ITF+ just because it never expires.
I got it as part of my degree program them I ended up getting a job not in IT. Security+ was not too hard to get as well. Even though I don’t plan on getting back in I still wish I never lost my free Net+ voucher.
Going from game port to USB with “plug and play” was a huge deal man. Not having to manually assign IRQ to get your audio working too lol. That said, there is still one thing that was cursed in the old days and remains cursed now: printers. Fuck printers.
I’m convinced that in the late 90s/early 00s, the printer companies got together to form a cartel, and have purposefully neutered all consumer-grade printers from that point forward. They knew it wasn’t profitable (unless they charge an arm and a leg for the ink, which of course they eventually did), so they decided to just not play the game at all.
Yeah but they cost like thousands of dollars back then. Upwards of five figures for professional grade printers I believe. They were out of reach for most consumers.
Yea and some fucking cards only had IRQ selection jumpers for irq 5 or 7. Had a situation where I had to swap cards depending on if I wanted to use my twain scanner or play games with sound.
Used to be Lexmark was really good, too. Simple printers that weren’t too fancy, but they worked. Guess they’re still around, but I haven’t used one since the very early ‘00s.
For me, it was about learning the anatomy of the laser printer. I do remember a lot about IRQ and memory addressing, but I don’t remember it being that much of the test.
I would argue that for the humble serial or parallel port printer, things just worked. Yes, the ribbon needed replacing sometimes, and the tractor feed could snag or jam. But that’s all a see-it-and-fix-it situation - zero tools required. These things took raw serial data, a straight dump of ASCII characters on the wire. Nothing to confuse and nothing to get wrong. No wacky software drivers either - just tell the software what hardware port to talk to and you’re printing. You got boring text, tabs, spaces, newlines, and zero frills.
For whatever reason, the moment we started to emulate professional printing on a consumer budget was when things started to get hairy.
Oh boy. I’ll never forget the amount of fun I had copying them by hand as a 12 year old.
There was one with coordinates to a wireframe of a sports car and drawing it on screen. What blew my mind was the next section where we perform trigonometry magic to rotate the whole thing in 3D space with arrow keys.
If you started a call with your cellphone close to a loudspeaker you could hear the connection being initiated through the speaker. Something like a tat-ara-tat sound.
IIRC transmission power was higher back in the day and the shielding of electronics wasn’t quite as good. So if you put your phone by a speaker the RF interference would be enough to be able to hear over the speaker.
GTA IV uses this sound when you’re about to receive a call while driving. I remember being confused (and subsequently blown away by the attention to detail). I’m a little nostalgic for the sound so I’m glad it’s preserved in that game.
You forgot to load EMM386 or even HIMEM.SYS! You might as well not even bothered installing that expensive 4MB SIMM stick for all the use you’re gonna get out of it.
Oh man the memories this brings back. I remember being sat down in front of a 386 by my dad when I was ~6 years old. I asked him how to use the mouse, he gave me an instruction manual and told me to figure it out.
We often criticize boomer dads but they were right about this point: kids have unlimited curiosity, feed it.
My daughter recently turned 6 years old. She saw a game called Wobbledogs and wanted to play it. I sat her in front of an old PC and told her to figure it out. She spent a few hours playing last night and narrated the entire experience to me lol. Glad she is enjoying herself. Even if this doesn’t set off a lifetime of experience in IT she will develop some problem solving skills, and if nothing else she is learning something useful as opposed to being handed a tablet.
Not only was I somehow given the card to upgrade my Apple IIe to 128k in the 80s when I was elementary school age, my parents trusted me to install it because they didn’t know how. And I did!
That could have gone so horribly wrong lol. It’s like the times my dad asked me to set jumpers for anything, I think he was more spooked than I was but he let me do it anyway. Every badly set jumper is a learning opportunity I guess lol.
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