Don't muck with my setups.
Posted by Gerund54@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 51 comments
Characters:-
Customer: Owner of business, payer of bills
Me: OP
Doctor FW: A specialist of some fame in a small town. Travelled to foreign countries fixing people.
Back in the late 1980s I had my first customer. He was using a program to run Autocad to do drawings for clients. He would put in the dimensions and the program would print a list of components and then do a drawing automatically and print it. To make it work you needed to create an autoexec.bat and config.sys that not only had lots of buffers= and files=, but also loaded device drivers in high memory.
Being Dos 3.3 it needed to be QEMM and after using OPTIMIZE (supplied with QEMM) you then needed to adjust each memory segment manually to get the best results. Of course being somewhat paranoid I created a "Backconf" directory and two batch files saveconf.bat and rest.bat. One I used as I altered config,sys and autoexec.bat files, and the other I had as insurance.
Then came the phone call.
Customer: "Doctor FW was visiting and while he was looking at my computer he told me I didn't need files=50 and buffers=45. He reset them to 20 each and now Autocad doesn't work. I need it to work first thing tomorrow. Is there any way you can come fix it for me?"
Me: "Tell Doctor FW not to muck with my setups and type this "Rest"
Customer: "It says '2 files copied'"
Me: "Now turn it off and turn it on again."
Customer: "Oh I hope this works."
Me: "Now it's fixed."
Customer: "Let me try it" (Printer sounds in the background) "It's working! You're a genius! What do I owe you?"
Me: "Today it's free, Next time it will be lots."
Doctor FW never touched that computer again.
Gerund54@reddit (OP)
Hands up who remembers QEMM?
devin1955@reddit
Who remembers what QEMM stood for. (easy)
Speciesunkn0wn@reddit
Quirky Electronic Memory Module
The_Mad_Highlander@reddit
Goodness, we're old.
land8844@reddit
Haha 🫵
bends over and pulls muscle
Ninja_feline@reddit
tries to bend over and pulls a muscle
luther_crackenthorpe@reddit
reads about someone bending over, and pulls a muscle
yrabl81@reddit
Wow, we're "old".
meitemark@reddit
We may be old, but we will never grow up!
yrabl81@reddit
I define part of "growing up" the ability to distinguish when to act in a childish manner.
So... Yeah.
SeanBZA@reddit
And the dirty thing Windows did to say Win95 could not work with it, because part of the startup looked for the QEMM driver by name, and errored out saying unable to use. But if you changed the name to EMM386, it would not even know, and worked just as badly.
Arokthis@reddit
/r/FuckImOld
ChooseExactUsername@reddit
A long time ago in an x86 far, far away.
Redoing Novel IPX drivers to live in hi-mem. Configuring emulation boards on PCs so they could talk to the mainframe.
Windows/GUI were but a dream.
land8844@reddit
I'm too young to have dealt with command line-only production hardware, but I do prefer the terminal in my Linux machines. It's more comfortable than a buggy DE.
rilian4@reddit
🙋♂️
Diminios@reddit
I do. It finally allowed me to play all the games without having to worry about finagling mouse drivers, SoundBlaster drivers and CD-ROM drivers into the tiny tiny memory space.
senapnisse@reddit
I used DESQview and QEMM from Quarterdeck to run multiple dos boxes for BBS. The double tap of alt button with left thumb to cycle through dos tasks is a core muscle memory that still sometimes appears 30 years later.
MastadonBob@reddit
DesqView was a Godsend that actually worked, unlike IBM's heavily promoted and buggy TopView
Responsible-End7361@reddit
Vaguely, I was in high school when I was tweaking my computer memory to play games faster.
indetermin8@reddit
I remember seeing it in use, but never learned how to configure it.
quadralien@reddit
I had a tightly packed high memory. Optimize would take a long time and I would still hand tweak because optimize introduced environment variables which would make each TSR a tiny bit bigger than normal.
the_syco@reddit
I think I only used EMM386.
Suspicious-Option-73@reddit
I do.... And i'm not even tech support.
gargravarr2112@reddit
It will never cease to amaze me how few people are able to connect cause and effect.
Teknikal_Domain@reddit
Let's give the user some benefit of the doubt here, if that was all the exchange was, it's entirely possible that they do not muck around in DOS, they know what they said but not where it is or how to change it.
gargravarr2112@reddit
Of course, and this story is from the 1980s so there's a very good chance this was not the verbatim exchange.
However, if the critical information is accurate, the point still stands. $User let $DoctorFW change critical settings on their PC. Their PC proceeded to not work. Why did $User not demand $DoctorFW undo those changes before phoning OP?
It's still this incredible ability to not see cause and effect in computing. It happens to this day. I occasionally see the help desk tickets.
"Hi, I changed $CriticalSetting and it broke $CriticalApplication. I need $CriticalApplication working immediately for a deadline. Fix it!"
Our help desk people spend a LOT of lunchtime at the local boozer...
-MazeMaker-@reddit
He probably didn't sit down to work on Autodesk while $DoctorFW was still there. And if you have to call someone, are you gonna call the guy who broke your computer or the guy who makes it work?
gophergun@reddit
"I changed a thing and that thing changed. What do I do?"
CostumingMom@reddit
They're the opposite side of, "you touched it 6 months ago to replace the mouse. You must have done something to cause today's crash!"
rangerquiet@reddit
I'm not an IT person but needs must so I do remember creating a boot disc with autoexec.bat to create enough space to run my copy of Privateer.
Ich_mag_Kartoffeln@reddit
I think at one point I had 6 (or maybe 7) different boot configurations to allow various games to run.
Counterpoint-RD@reddit
Similar here, with Elite II: Frontier - not so much for space reasons, but to avoid the heart attack every midnight, game time 😄... because that's when it stopped for a few seconds - "$#!%, it crashed!" No, it did not, but I was running it from floppy, and every midnight, the market prices are recalculated, which has to load some data from disk... and therefore kicks on the floppy drive - AND EVERYTHING STOPS, for two or three seconds... Boot disk that copies everything to RAMdisk (and save games back, after), and my health was saved 😁...
scyllafren@reddit
I do and I have a story.
Once upon a time there was a 1 year course, half finance, half IT, government paid. This was in last millenia, 1998 I think.
One day the IT teacher and I got in an argument about which one is correct :
Mine: DEVICE = HIMEM. SYS DOS= HIGH
or
Teacher's : DEVICE= EMM386 DOS=UMB
I.managed to convince the teacher, that mine is the correct, because of this question : "Can you use these on a 286?" He answered yes, so I pointed out that the EMM386 would not work, so that is incorrect. He got a bit surprised, but agreed.
Next day, quick exam, and the question "how to move dos to the unused memory space to free up the main memory?" was in it. I obviously wrote the first one as answer.
We got back the corrected exam papers next day, and my solution for the question was marked as wrong and he wrote the second, incorrect answer as "correct".
Same teacher. Guess who ignored that teacher for the rest if the course?
SeanBZA@reddit
If you used DOS= HIGH,UMB you would have gottem more free memory, irrespective of the upper memory manager used, as first DOS would be loaded partly in the high memory past 1M, so that real mode pointers could be used easily enough, and also getting pretty much everything out of that lower 640k, except for around 1k of page 0 stuff (and actually some DOS programs would not work, because they would crash if loaded in the first 128k of memory, which is why some programs had a batch file which simply called them from Loadfix, which allocated space up to 128k, marked it as in use, and then chain loaded the actual program to use the next memory), and also then almost all the Command.com code would be split between the high memory area and the UMB, getting as much as you could get as free space.
scyllafren@reddit
I know that, but that wasn't part of the talk. Thanks for sharing with others. I always loaded the mouse driver there.
A note: for UMB, you need EMM386, so on 286, you actually can't do it.
ozzie286@reddit
My dad, RIP, was still using his old DOS based program to manage his small business til the day he died. After his poor old 5x86 finally bit the dust, I needed to get it running on modern hardware. To do that, I had to modify config.sys and autoexec.bat in DOSBox. Files I hadn't touched in probably 25 years. Google was very much my friend that day.
MastadonBob@reddit
I was about to snark "5x86 were called Pentium by then" and then reality intruded...I'd forgotten AMD made 5x86 chips to compete with Intel Pentiums....and they are still available for sale in new condition on Amazon for 60 bucks! "Works with Windows95" is helpfully silkscreened on top of the chip.
SeanBZA@reddit
IBM and Cyrix as well, let us not forget.......
deeseearr@reddit
There was also the Cyrix 5x86, which was basically a hopped-up 486 which outperformed the early Pentiums but still ran on a Socket 3 motherboard. It was followed by the Socket 7 6x86 which was a lot faster than a Pentium at the same clock speed, but only for integer operations. The floating point unit was mostly absent as Cyrix had designed their processor to only run existing code written for the 486 and didn't consider code that new code would be written to take advantage of Intel's hot new FPU.
ozzie286@reddit
Ours was a Cyrix 5x86 :)
Puzzleheaded-Joke-97@reddit
That brings back a lot of memories of life before Windows!
I lost my mind a few years ago, so cannot remember a lot. I used Desqview and 4DOS and a zillion tiny utility programs and batch files in the .COM days when a really good computer did miracles with only 640K of memory.
honeyfixit@reddit
There wasn't life before windows. Windows was the beginning of the universe. All praise Bill Gates
Gerund54@reddit (OP)
4DOS was my favourite thing to use. Later on in the early 90s OS/2 was much better.
honeyfixit@reddit
Okay well then I can go into DoctorFW's office and tell a patient "you don't need ten fingers and ten toes you'll be fine with 3 on each one. I'm just going to cut off the rest."
Gerund54@reddit (OP)
It warms my cold, dead heart to see so many old computer users still here. QEMM was necessary in the 1980s as Microsoft did not have their own version until DOS 5/6. I have a later story from Windows 95 days that bit me in the butt and lost me a customer.
If you are interested in such a story please ask me.
Arokthis@reddit
Yes.
owenevans00@reddit
"Today it's free, Next time it will be lots." Perfect.
SumoNinja17@reddit
When I got tired of fixing the PC's in our office, I'd add an extra step in the autoexec.bat files. One ran a program that would make all the characters on the screen fall into a pile on the bottom. Another one would scream for help, yelling that he was stuck in the computer.
The last one would "shake" the screen, but I set this one up so it only did it a couple of times, and when the person got me to show me how it was acting up, the program had run its course and the screen never moved.
unixhed@reddit
Still have a client running a Clipper dispensary/accounts system. Needs 2 printers. LPT1 was easy, LPT2, not so much. Winprint saved the day, until user deleted Winprint directory.
Europaraker@reddit
As a teenager I didn't mind helping people with their home computer.
But even then I knew messing with work computers was different and should be done very cautiously. There are lots of things people use business computers for beside Word and Outlook!
And making the computer worse could cost them quite a bit of $$$.
androshalforc1@reddit
Rest, doctors orders.