BobMcBob

Yes! This is it, thank you! I've been trying to find these for a long while. I even remember co-opting some for a Geocities page back in the day when those were kinda cool lol!

I know this isnt related to the post, but does anyone remember the artist or website that had a bunch of cool textures and colorful tiled wallpaper for the early days of linux? think mid-90s.

I've been scratching my head for years and my searches have never found it, but there has to be some white beards here that can recall it.

I remember there were some really cool options available, I believe in a square format for better tiling. If anyone can remember and post a link or archive I would very much appreciate it.

Tech Tangents is one of the best retro channels on youtube but by retro I dont mean glorified nostalgia either. Shelby puts a lot of work into his videos and likes to showcase what awesome engineering went into some of the early tech that was practically magic. Love the channel and glad to see it on HN.

https://archive.ph/Rh6Ut

I can tell you from first hand experience it was. 4mb was the minimum requirements and I can tell you, that legally MS was correct in that statement. When I eventually did get a copy of Win95 plus Update (SP1 basicly), I ran it for exactly 1 week before I scraped together enough money to purchase another 8mb of RAM from Fry's. After that it was fine, at least until it blew itself up.

As someone that ran it for over a year, before getting a Win95 box, I don't disagree. But at the end of the day, it was still Win3.1x under the hood. Win95 was bloated at the time, sure, but after the first service pack I thought it was a huge improvement.

Back in the day, when I was but a young teen, sad that I couldn't afford Win95 when it first came out (or run it THAT well on a 486DX2/66mhz & 4MB RAM).

Stuck with Win3.11 I looked for other things I could run, that didn't involve me nuking the PC and installing Slackware or otherwise distrupt the "Family PC's" main use; running Lotus 123 for my mother's home accounting business.

So what I found was something that could mimic a "modern" OS, but that still offered 100% of the compatibility, that even an accounting parent could stomach.

IBM Workplace Shell for Windows 3.1x:

https://winworldpc.com/product/ibm-workplace-shell/151

I found it on either the early web, or on a shareware BBS, but the purpose was the same; to convince someone to please, for the love of god, buy IBM OS/2 (not even OS/2 Warp!)

I sure as hell didn't care or want OS/2, but boy did it make my slowly falling behind Win3.11 PC look like the cool kids with their brand new spaceheater Pentiums.

I occasionally reflect back on that time and sorta miss those days, and that computer.. but then I remember it was a Packard Bell sunday flier special "package deal" purchased at Circuit City by a clueless parent in the early 90s, and I was lucky it lasted 4 years before the motherboard blew up and was sent to the recycler. Of course the 2 PSUs, and 3 HDDs dying in that time should have been a hint.

Yep, same here.

Rocked a Packard Bell 486DX2 66mhz, with 8MB Ram, and a 400MB HDD. Came with a 14,4kbps modem that I upgraded to 33.6kbps. BBSes from the free newspapers is what got me "online" and eventually I was able to PPP over WinSock to get my Windows 3.11 on to the REAL internet.

I miss those times.

Nothing like spending hours downloading a few early MP3s in 94-95, and having to play them back at 1/2 or 1/4 quality because the 486 couldn't keep up (and even then running out of cache 60-70 seconds in and paused for it catch back up).