bluedino

That increased at the same rate of lazy/stupid users.

There used to also be fun, and somewhat interesting questions to answer or discuss.

It quickly turned into simple questions and "send me the codes"

In the earlier Windows days, Borland and a couple other companies did their own buttons etc

https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c5a0e280-a1c3-974a-24c2-90...

Counter point - driving down the beach in a convertible with good tunes blasting and the sea breeze in your hair is fun.

The annoying thing now is the guys with the full dresser bikes or Polaris Slingshots that have 2500W stereos installed.

You can be all the way down by the water and hear their music clear as day, as they are idling through traffic on the A1A

Loud exhausts everywhere - pickups, domestic V6/V8's, motorcycles.

Super-bright headlights/aux lights improperly mounted or operated, blinding you at night.

Stereos you can almost feel before you hear them.

So no different than 30 years ago.

It's not from the VFX team but someone wrote a clone of the ATM hacking program

https://bert.org/2021/01/04/t2-pin-cracking/

Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid-tier at the time

I like to use Google books to refer to old issues of PC Magazine.

For $1999 in Feburary 1999, you could get the Pentium 450MHz desktop with 128GB of memory.

That said, I could do almost everything I do today on a similar machine back then. Surf the web, admin Linux servers, web development, edit video, play games, Photoshop, IRC, type papers...

https://books.google.com/books?id=mi_RGvUW6eQC&pg=PA108-IA3&...

And the 7800 was technologically superior to the Famicom.

I'd never heard this before, in what ways?

The 7800 seemed to be lower resolution and I don't really remember any examples of games that looked close to what a good NES game looked like. But even the basic ports like Galaga/Dig Dug looked better on the NES.

I know there were over 10 times as many games released for the NES and probably just as many more developers so they definitely had more work put into them.

The other big problem with the 7800 was it was mostly arcade ports. They didn't really do any original games.

People were tired of the 5th home version of Galaga, Pac Man, and Dig Dug (even though the 7800 had decent ports, especially compared to the 2600, which it was also backward-compatible with). Nintendo came out with originals like Super Mario Brothers and Zelda, and then all the third party games...

They really should be controlled a lot more - a nearby house was hit by some sort of Roman candle thing and completely burned down the other night.

There was at least a lot less "illegal fireworks" when people had the drive two states away to buy them.

Also, swapping through 26 floppies to install would have been... Something.

Windows 95 was about that size, and Office was closer to 50?

At my very first job I remember installing stuff that way...ugh

Reminds me of the fake computers (and TV's) in furniture stores that were made of cardboard

Sort of, but they were all dial-up providers and it ended up being a race to the bottom, which seemed to be $9.95 a month, full of busy signals, then they all merged.

Seeing something similar today, we have the phone company and cable company, and now we've got a third option of fiber, the same lines being re-sold by 4 different companies, I'm sure in few years we'll be down to two companies.

That's the timing chain tensioners losing oil pressure.

Now we get the popup for 'Click here to save 25% on your first order'

In the past, popups were a new browser window, and could appear by the tens or hundreds.

Help people when they explicitly ask for help.

And then you encounter the askhole.

Things we don't have to worry about anymore:

10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers...

Your Windows 98 machine being taken over by viruses minutes after booting up

Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!

Adware infesting your system. WeatherBug, HotBar, BonziBuddy, Ask Jeeves, Gator, you'd have half your screen taken up by add-on toolbars in your browser.

Your system crashing at least once a day. Compared to the 16-bit days, system crashes are rare.

Terrible streaming. Nothing like RealPlayer on a modem, where it sounded like a clock radio placed deep inside a steel 55 gallon drum.

Laptop battery life that was measured in minutes. If you had more than 2 hours of battery life...

Can't you just use a hot corner configured as "prevent sleep"?

ID dominated the PC shooter scene for 4.5 generations in a row. Insane.

Wolf, Doom, Quake, Quake II, Quake 3 Arena

Dark Forces was great, but that tech was too late so it never went anywhere. Duke3D showed up, and while it was entertaining, it was clearly a level below what ID could do. 3D Realms fumbled that tech, then got caught up with the ultimate vaporware, Prey, and it took Epic stepping in with Unreal that finally dethroned ID.

Sandy talks up the people that left ID during that time, but did anyone (other than him) do anything noteworthy in the gaming industry? Romero was responsible for Daikatana of all things, Michael Abrash was never a 'game programmer', despite having a very successful career in Xbox, VR, etc. No idea about the other guys.

Sit in the sun for a bit closer to the equator. You'll feel it very quickly

The e-bikes aren't that annoying, it's the kids (and adults) riding all over the city on 4 wheelers and UTVs. The cops chase them around but it doesn't do much good.

Dumb question, but if parts of the game are written in asm, can you create C code that produces a binary equivalent when compiled?

There's an ice cream shop around here that cashes in on nostalgia.

40 years ago, there was a dairy that made ice cream, and sold it in the summers on the side of the building. We'd go there as kids, line around the block, everyone loved it and it was a very popular and loved place.

It eventually burned down, the company stopped production, you know how it goes.

About ten years ago, someone built a clone of the old dairy's neon sign, rented a new building, and served generic hand-dipped ice cream (blue bunny brand?)

It's just regular ice cream. But they have the sign. And they can charge $8 an ice cream cone, and people line up just like they used to. Ridiculous.

It was very common, or at least made out to be.

I never had it happen either, but I used SyQuest drives more, and then moved to CD-R (which was the real click of death for Zip disks)

Bare minimum for it being playable was a 486DX4 100MHz or similar, but with the floating point Quake really wanted a Pentium

He apparently bought this place in 2016:

https://streeteasy.com/blog/craigslist-property/

Was this peak Windows UI?

I would say so, but the Active Dekstop stuff wasn't the right move.

Fisher-price came next, with Windows XP. At least you could easily switch back to classic.

And then Windows 8, we won't even talk about that.

They have enough employees to build native apps

They'd screw those up as well.

There are buildings in my town that haven't been used in 20-30 years. And that's in the 'modern' shopping area. In the old 'downtown' area there are some that have been empty for 40+ years.

I have a legacy email account with a "used to be popular" ISP

It's free, I've been using it for ~25 years, you know the drill.

However, I lost access to it when I bought a new phone, and everything didn't transfer over. I couldn't reset the password without buying the 'premium' service, it was only $10 or $15, I was able to cancel after (so I wasn't re-charged next year or month).