“Old-Timer Technology”
June 8, 2011 Leave a comment
A little lofty, a little whimsical. I’m on a plane at the moment, working on a strategic outline. Of course, my mind wanders and I start reflecting on technology at large.
I remember the daze when (roughly in time order from when I encountered / mastered them):
- 5-1/4” disks.
- AppleWorks.
- Prodigy.
- The art of loading a mouse or joystick driver into high memory (this made you a ‘PC expert’, btw).
- Learning the value of markup languages from WordPerfect 5.1 “Reveal Codes”.
- F3 as the help button (WP51).
- DesqView.
- Lanman.ini.
- HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.SYS
- That awful-didn’t-allow-cut-and-paste-commands WP51 macro editor.
- Spreadsheet linking.
- QEMM.
- NetBEUI.
- “CORE” installation (any Hanford BCS readers out there?).
- While on the subject of Hanford: U:\ drive.
- Heh. Still on Hanford: SWE0 and SWE1, giving way to MTC0-MTC7. Those were the days.
- Permanent Swapfile.
- WFW. More importantly, Microsoft Hearts.
- SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI and the [386Enh] section.
- Downloading the Microsoft Knowledge Base as a 75K .hlp file.
Of course, I’m showing my age. Naturally, I left a few out (on purpose; stimulates the discussion). What do you remember?
Original Post: June 21, 2006