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Comment by Wintamute | Hacker News Reader

I think you're right. Back in the 70s/80s/90s kids had to work at using their computers. In order to play a game in the early 80s I had to hook up a tape recorder, fiddle with the volume, tape a 1kb RAM upgrade to the back of the computer and write some code to start playing a game. In the 90s I had to wrestle with AUTOEXEC.BAT and COMMAND.COM for hours to make DOS recognise my sound card. Technical effort and perseverance was rewarded with gaming pleasure. Or rather technical effort and hard thinking were the only way to make that magical screen light up. These days no effort at all is required, games and media on screens is just ambient. It's a very different situation, it'll be interesting to see how it changes the industry ...

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>Or rather technical effort and hard thinking were the only way to make that magical screen light up.

This is crucial. A lot of people seem to be suggesting that because it's easier to get into computers kids are missing out on programming. But in reality it's the other way around - only the people who were wired up for engineering could get into computers previously and nowadays everyone can use them - you can still get into programming and plenty of kids still do - and it's easier than ever (I had no internet when I started coding - only the F1 help manual of QBASIC and my below basic English - what I could have done if I had all these tutorials available today :( ) - they just aren't the only ones in to computers so they aren't as visible as they used to be.

Think of it like this - every kid probably had some electric toy car or some such toy in the last 20-30 years. But not every kid took that car apart to see what cool shit he could do with the electric engine and batteries.

I just tried to think back at how on earth could I have done that without looking it up on the internet. I did it. No doubt about it. Would I be able to do it today? I'm suddenly not happy with this line of thought...

I think you mean CONFIG.SYS :)

Oh man, that reminds me of the 90s. You used to have this situation where certain games required a certain memory configuration (640K / extended memory).

So the first thing I did that ever resembled programming was a boot script that would give you a menu of which game you wanted to play. It would say "1) Beneath a Steel Sky 2) Dune 2 " etc. And they it would prompt you to put the right CDROM in.

Freeing up memory for some games, good memories.

I think my most vivid learning experience was when I managed to delete autoexec.bat.

lol, I think I did this too! Sixteen floppies later, Windows 95(a) was back to life.

> Oh man, that reminds me of the 90s. You used to have this situation where certain games required a certain memory configuration (640K / extended memory).

Origin games often requires that kind of things... but they were the best games of all on MS-DOS PCs! I remember the time when most people wanted to buy a PC because of Wing Commander.

Yes, those were the times. Using choice for menus, configuration for games that need a lot of conventional memory, putting drivers in HMA (High Memory Area) just to save those few kilobytes. Using QEMM to access XMS/EMS. Also, sound card drivers configuration was a pain. Good times :)

My one abiding memory of this situation was `dwcfgmg.sys` (Dos and Windows Configuration Manager?) which was the DOS driver for ISA plug n' play devices. I was at that nexus between the "old" world of MS-DOS games where you had to program IRQ and DMA settings for your sound card, and the "new" world of graphical environments and plug n' play.

So as you say, even with 8MB in XMS (or sometimes EMS, depending on the game I think, using EMM 386), the 640k boundary was an issue and I too had the joys of paring down my `autoexec.bat` and `config.sys`

But no `dwcfgmg.sys` and my "plug n' play" soundcard wouldn't work. It was a small driver, but the games of the day seemed to demand the entire 640k at startup or they just wouldn't work :(

So often it was no sound, or no game at all. Oh what I would've given to trade that for manual soundcard configuration.

Oh yeah, that was it! :)

You missed the part of moving the tape reader head to match how the tape was recorded. :)

Or using a tiny screwdriver to lift the tape deck when it wasn't possible to move the head.

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