I’ve been playing around with later-MS-DOS/early-Windows a bit lately on old 286 & Pentium 1 hardware. It’s been a very fun nostalgic trip for me as a 47 year old who transitioned to PCs in my high school years. There is something oddly cathartic in wrestling through the finicky pain that is setting up that era of PC! Things were really picking up steam with networking & communications (BBS & early WWW) which was pretty exciting at the time too. Call me weird but I find the whole lore & intrigue around the businesses of the early 90s to be fascinating too. For me it drops off VERY quickly after Windows 95 but I still find some enjoyment dusting off the mid-90s memories. Benjamin Krein Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 2, 2025, at 2:15 PM, Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
On its own Windows may not cause a lot of nostalgia, but the story behind the development of BE, OS/2, Windows, MAC, NeXT, SGI, DEC UNIX X, etc. together make for an interesting story/exhibit
Bill
On Wed, Apr 2, 2025 at 1:28 PM Dean Notarnicola via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I think part of the resistance is the fact that Windows as it was is largely still with us, at least in spirit, and that the first exposure people around my age had to it was in a work environment. So we don’t exactly have fond memories of playing with it. I know I didn’t have fun loading it from diskette for hours and trying to get real mode drivers to play nice. <snip>
That being said, thirty is indeed retro. And I believe many are nostalgic for it and would be interested, especially if introduced with a short history of computer GUI’s, Windows evolution and the challenges we faced configuring and running it in the days of ‘Plug and pray’ which would still involve a short side trip Into memory and IRQ conflicts.
Care to volunteer?
Anyone else that would have been mildly interested in the Win95 talk? Its turning 30 this year in August, is that retro yet?
I know some have serious Winderz hate and thats ok, but I have fond memories waiting for it to boot on a 486 dx2 I got used and admiring the new graphics.
Jeff