We Walked So that Our Kids Could Run

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dspreemtmp@reddit

A: was disk drive for us. C: was the mounted hard disk

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_gonesurfing_@reddit

We didn’t have a computer with hard drive until mid 90s. We only had the Tandy 1000 with 5.25” floppy drives.

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dspreemtmp@reddit

Those are the fun times. We started on a apple 2c in our house. Same with the 5.25 discs

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3applesofcat@reddit

Apple IIgs! Everything booted from a disk, both kind.

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OneHumanBill@reddit

We walked so our kids could be carried by palanquin, alá Wall-E. The next generation lives in technology but doesn't really understand how it works or what to do if it's not working.

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VaselineHabits@reddit

I was going to say, making it easier seems like a mistake now because there's a huge gap with younger generations and understanding how things work.

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On the other hand, that’s what people said to us when we used calculators. The only fear that I have is they of the infrastructure collapses, nobody is able to build it up again. Same goes for advanced technology.

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SlavaSobov@reddit

I'm glad we learned computers when you could still know exactly what every little component did. Now there's so many layers of abstraction. 😮‍💨

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Lucky_Vermicelli7864@reddit

Thing is we paid the price, metaphorically and literally, so that our kids could stand upon the shoulders of giants, aka us, to reach farther, sadly many choose to leap and dive unto the ground below these days.

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jaymzx0@reddit

I've worked in the tech industry for 25 years. I work with the 'kids' and although they don't know what himem.sys is, they are really smart at figuring out problems using available tools. It's all just abstraction.

The previous generation of greybeards probably complained that people my age didn't even know what a shift register was, how to push and poke memory addresses, or how to troubleshoot a logic gate with an oscilloscope.

The new tools are just abstracting away the things we worked hard building software to abstract away. AI tooling is a tool, just like Google is a tool now. The smart people can separate the bullshit from the real deal, and that's where the difficulty is. Unlike google searches, this one is going to have some growing pains.

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Cool_Dark_Place@reddit

Speaking of "old ways," that reminds me of watching "Halt and Catch Fire," and being really impressed watching one of the main characters spend a whole weekend manually mapping out the hexadecimal code in the IBM PC BIOS chip with a multimeter. I was like, "Wow... I guess that's one way to do it..."

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jaymzx0@reddit

Heh. Reminds me of how Compaq created the first IBM PC clone BIOS by reverse engineering the IBM BIOS. They created a 'clean room' with engineers who had never seen any of the IBM code or technical docs and just probed what the BIOS did, turning that into their own BIOS and avoiding any IP issues.

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Cool_Dark_Place@reddit

If you haven't seen the show, I'd highly recommend it! The first season is basically a retelling of the "Compaq" story, with a few minor changes.

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jaymzx0@reddit

Sounds like my jam. I'll give it a watch. Thanks!

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bluemitersaw@reddit

They know exactly what to do when it's not working. They yell "DAD!!!"

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buffysmanycoats@reddit

Yeah I fully expected Gen z and Gen alpha to be absolute tech wizards but I was very wrong.

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Steven_G_Photos@reddit

C:\COMKEEN\comkeen.exe

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3applesofcat@reddit

Fur video game I beat

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TellMeRUThatSomebody@reddit

OMG I thought I was the only one left who'd even heard of those games, let alone played them!!

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RosemaryRoseville@reddit

gif

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Steven_G_Photos@reddit

The best!!

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funnyguy349@reddit

Keen is in Doom 2. Map 32

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3applesofcat@reddit

Win

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Checked_Out_6@reddit

C:/fdisk

🫣

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American_Greed@reddit

dir

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jennapricity@reddit

dir/p I can't see all that at once!

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q120@reddit

Ahh the days spent trying to get enough extended memory to play Wing Commander 2… the hours spent playing around with autoexec.bat and config.sys

Oh and having to configure games with the sound card and such before play.

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rjcpl@reddit

Yeah created a batch of boot disks that tweaked it just right for a certain set of games.

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_SmashLampjaw_@reddit

Doesn't it hurt just a little bit when you hear zoomers being referred to as "Digital Natives" because they grew up from infancy touching bright colors on an iPhone?

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rangeo@reddit

Trying to teach my kid to organize storage or back up her work...If I hear it's ok it's in the cloud 1 more time.

I hope by the time she's in university she loses an assignment or project in high school so she knows and learns the dread.

Her experience with tech is that it just works.

I've been tempted to buy her a router that uses our home network and tell her she can get on the internet through this and let her set it up.

Sorry Old Dad Rant

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dimitrirodis@reddit

So did you use QEMM or HIMEM.SYS and EMM386?

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v0t3p3dr0@reddit

Edit minesweeper.ini to erase your sibling’s high scores and replace them with something unattainable.

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drgath@reddit

I stupidly tried to edit the .exe file at a friend’s house, corrupted it, and just walked away whistling. His mom was so pissed she could never play Minesweeper again.

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mfrizz@reddit

I spent 6 months trying to get Privateer to work. Ended up getting a program called QEMM to make it work.

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FishermanNatural3986@reddit

The amount of work my buddy and I put in to run daggefall was more than we played...well maybe not but close

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Tim-Sylvester@reddit

I'm pretty sure all I ever accomplished in Daggerfall was using the fly and feather fall spells to get to the highest buildings and jump off.

Those dungeons were fucking crazy though.

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FishermanNatural3986@reddit

They were so infuriating at times.

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Tim-Sylvester@reddit

I played it for God only knows how many hours and yet I didn't have the slightest clue what the plot was or what I was supposed to be doing. Just looting shops and grinding dungeons like a psychopath.

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TK-385@reddit

There was a storyline about the advisor to the emperor attempting to usurp the emperor to take over. Mostly I ended up looting the dungeons, going outside to load the cart and then sell in town.

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Morriganx3@reddit

Daggerfall 💛

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hmmqzaz@reddit

Lolllll yupppp - gotta allocate that xmp or whatever to pretend you have enough memory for wing commander

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AccidentalChef@reddit

I saved up my allowance to buy a pack of floppy disks so I could make boot disks for different games, each with their own customized autoexec.bat and config.sys.

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Hilsam_Adent@reddit

You forgot command.com!

By the time WC2 came out, we had himem.sys and the woes of squeezing every possible kilobyte out of the "the lower 640" were a thing of the past.

Oh and having to configure games with the sound card and such before play.

...when your joystick, SoundBlaster and video card all wanted to be on IRQ-5. Good times.

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q120@reddit

As /u/cool_dark_place said, himem.sys wasn’t always a perfect solution. I played with himem for hours to get WC2 to work. I did eventually though!

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Cool_Dark_Place@reddit

Even with MS-DOS 5.0 and himem.sys, it could be a little dicey sometimes, although it helped immensely with WC2 (my old 386SX trying to run it in DOS 4.1 would always crash if I tried to run it with the Speech Pack.) I remember Betrayal at Krondor still being a real bitch to get going. DOS4GW was the real game changer.

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Smorgas_of_borg@reddit

I played a game called Ultimate Domain that could only use conventional memory. I made a special boot disk that didn't load the CD-ROM driver so I could play it.

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BreakfastBeerz@reddit

Configuring IRQ channels to get your joystick to work.

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lucky607@reddit

Braminar. I think I might be the only one who played that dumb text adventure game.

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wpnizer@reddit

Terminate and Stay Resident

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XMXP_5@reddit

Doom 2 with only the PC speaker!

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rangeo@reddit

Who remembers loading and reading values to memory locations on their COMMODORE VIC 20? ...POKE and PEEK

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JFull0305@reddit

C:\deltree

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WalrusBlinker@reddit

Del.

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kace66@reddit

Dir/w

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dspreemtmp@reddit

Dir /p /w to have it pause if the list was longer than 1 screen page

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spderweb@reddit

CD games CD commander keen Keen.exe

Let the games begin..

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Mobile_Pangolin4939@reddit

The command line is still useful in all OS. I use it at work for troubleshooting sometimes. An executable with switches can sometimes do something a GUI can't. Powershell and Linux commands are good for scripts. Theoretically all things in the past are still used even though they're trying to get away from them. C is still used for games even with game engines. I think the dumbing down of things is placing to much focus on wasting time talking in meetings and in general. It's also put to much of a focus on statistics and getting the most out of a business over personalization.

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Dombat927@reddit

I miss dos

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Unruly_Evil@reddit

You can use DOSBOX
https://www.dosbox.com/

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Unruly_Evil@reddit

My first OS was MS-DOS 3.30. Since 1997 I run Linux so... And I started with A>
XT8086, no mouse, no HDD, no colors... I had an Hercules ambar monitor, my tan was amazing the whole year.

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dotBombAU@reddit

I still have visions of pulling the i/o card out of my 286 and messing with the jumpers so my devices would work.

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Eradicator_1729@reddit

They aren’t running. As a college professor I must inform y’all that young kids don’t know shit about computers. Most of my students don’t know how to find files in the file system. They don’t know the difference between a cloud server and their own computer. They don’t know the difference between a web-based program like Office 365 and the installed version on their computers. They also don’t know that there’s a difference between macs, PCs, chromebooks, and Linux boxes (if they even know Linux exists).

There’s more things they don’t know but I’m tired of thinking about it.

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-FORLORN-HOPE-@reddit

cd:\sierra\leisure\lsl.exe

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BlueProcess@reddit

Username checks out

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q120@reddit

That quiz to make sure you were an adult 😂 I tried a number of times to pass it and one day I did!

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Ezpionage_19@reddit

Oh the memories

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BlueProcess@reddit

And have raised a generation dumber than us.

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RosemaryRoseville@reddit

gif

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clickinanddraggin@reddit

My video game skills sadly topped out here

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CorporalCabbage@reddit

We crawled so our kids could tap.

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fairlyaveragetrader@reddit

I mean, still, I got to play the open world game that paved the way for all of the modern iterations. Who else remembers Ultima 7?

Launched from MS-DOS, came on, I can't even remember how many floppies

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Utdirtdetective@reddit

Cd/Wolf3d

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Illustrious-Lead-960@reddit

DISK ERROR

ABORT, RETRY, FAIL?

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ScreenTricky4257@reddit

Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard drive?

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Svenderhof@reddit

Yeah, that was an unfortunate one to run into. Maybe it's just some bad sectors and it'll be fine once they're marked. Go go gadget chkdsk!

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gnrlgumby@reddit

I got so annoyed when games required windows 95. Felt like an unnecessary complication.

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Ezpionage_19@reddit

inserts floppy disk

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TK-385@reddit

Then they became CDs and you needed a CD player. Even though there were still 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives usually underneath the player.

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King_of_Lunch223@reddit (OP)

Watch it there... It's not that floppy.

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brieflifetime@reddit

They were when I first started using them... 😆

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Lucky_Vermicelli7864@reddit

5.25" Floppies, horrible memories but was a step forward.

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prolikewhoa@reddit

floppy disk 1 of 8... installing.... may need to clear up some space on my 256mb hard drive.

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DumpsterDepends@reddit

Late boomers did too. Commodore Colt

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BritOnTheRocks@reddit

Yeah, I got computers because my dad was into them.

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omartje@reddit

I remember loading a game (cassette tape) on the commodore 64 on friday afternoon just before we went on a weekend trip .. When we got back home at sunday night the game (cassette tape) was STILL loading 😳

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BritOnTheRocks@reddit

gif

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scoff-law@reddit

I think we ran so our kids could sit.

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q120@reddit

I opened Qbasic once on my friend’s computer and he thought I was messing with his parent’s financial application and kicked me off the computer haha… I tried explaining it wasn’t Quicken but he didn’t believe me

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_Face@reddit

I've been using linux recently as I've been playing around with a Raspberry Pi. messed with it a little when i was younger, but never got into it.

$ sudo pip install boobs

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DrPupipance@reddit

win

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Potential-Jaguar6655@reddit

My summer job was installing the programming for the computer classes and the career center at my high school in 9th and 10th grades. I’m traumatized by DOS.

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Darkwaxellence@reddit

IFTHEN

GOTO

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PokesBo@reddit

C:

cd/WAR2

war2

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phyx726@reddit

In some ways, learning DOS is the reason I ended up working in tech. Navigating through a cli, editing .BAT files to load a cdrom driver etc. You sort of learn how systems actually work. Ended up being a system administrator and eventually a software engineer.

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WheelLeast1873@reddit

anyone REALLY miss CGA though?

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HylanderUS@reddit

I LOAD “$”,8-ed so that you can dir

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bcentsale@reddit

I came here to say this!

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TornadicPursuit@reddit

c: cd\games\descent descent.exe

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Preparation-Logical@reddit

cd\program files\games

dir /w

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ZeroSkill_Sorry@reddit

I'm so glad my mom gave me the foundations to use dos and later my friend's brother for showing me how to copy and overwrite my pilot's save file on X-Wing. I was save scumming before it even existed.

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