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.
Yes they did exactly that actually
Iirc from a YouTube video I watch long ago they trade mark all the ink printer technology and abused it for years until we made laser printers
I bought a laser printer for my job in 1990. They’ve been around
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.
Do you mean patents? Trademarking ink wouldn’t do anything.
Remember when you had to configure the IRQ with DIP switches?
Yes! Remember when you had to set your HDD to master or slave using jumpers? Then channel select came along and made that easier.
Using a brother laser printer through cups on linux, it just works.
I’m pretty sure that Brother is the only printer company that didn’t sign a contract with the devil.
Still only on the laser printers though. In my experience Brother inkjets have become trash like all the rest.
Ah, I’ve only owned one of their laser printers. It’s like 13 years old and still works great. We’ve only had to replace the cartridge 2 times.
Getting your modem not to conflict with your mouse. Yes, this was a thing.
And managing/freeing upper memory so you could play games in DOS like DOOM.
You’d plug your mouse into the serial port and your scanner into your printer port. Wild times.
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.
I’ll go with what’s on CompTIA’s A+ certification exam for $100 Alex.
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 remember having to configure the sound card within games. IRQ and DMZ settings. I had no idea what I was doing so a lot of the time I just played without sound.
DMA, direct memory access. DMZ is a networking thing.
DMZ is also between North and South Korea.
They also stand for the same thing (demilitarized zone) oddly enough.
I’ve seen it backronymed into “data management zone” in a few places, but it will always be “demilitarized zone” to me.
Irq was always 8
C:\>type autoexec.bat @ECHO OFF PROMPT $P$G PATH C:\DOS;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM; SET TEMP=C:\TEMP REM -- HDD cache: SMARTDRV.EXE 2038 512 MODE.EXE LPT1:,,P >NUL SHARE.EXE /F:150 /L:1500 MOUSE.COM /Y DEVICE=C:\sb16\DRV\CTSB16.SYS /UNIT=0 /BLASTER=A:220 I:5 D:1 DEVICE=C:\sb16\DRV\CTMMSYS.SYS CD \WINDOWS WINAnd don’t forget to set the jumpers correctly!
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.
I had to rewind my games and WASD was QAOP.
Add-in sound cards. Sound Blaster 16 baby!
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.
Typewriters… ratatatatatatatatap click ding whirrr
Most technology would objectively be improved by the addition of click ding whirrr
I remember this, but I also remember never actually managing to get a serial port gamepad or joystick to work in Windows. Only DOS.
Wtf is that top font? Those bitch ass letters are going too low.
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.
Oh shit th CD drive connection! If you didn’t plug that in, Audio CDs wouldn’t have any sound.
Sound cards used to take up one of the few slots so they’d also have a joystick port since the people buying sound cards were often doing it for games.
I remember buying the Sound Blaster card and “upgrading” my ram for a pretty penny so I could play wing commander.
It was also the MIDI port, so it made sense.
