When Windows was fun

[the_scott_meister]

Does anybody remember when Windows was fun? I mean the things that you could just waste time on. Nowadays it's just so boring, just working all the time like some serious grumpy-face, or surfing the internet.

I used to have all kinds of crazy things that you could do, like a utility that put sheep on my desk top and they'd run around on top of the windows and do stuff. Another one had cockroaches that would try to hide behind window panes and scurry about whenever you moved one, and you could squish them with a hammer.

And remember all of the screen savers? My favorite was "Johnny Castaway", but any of them would do, and they were all fun to watch. Don't need them any more with the LCD screens. Pity. The kids don't know what they were missing.

[r.m.anderson]

Aye remember the early generation games that could be played and then the dreaded upgrade or update to the next windows level and the games could not
be played - so much for windows being backward compatible. Of course you could pay for the software to make some of these games work and then the other
option of dual booting to run the games on the former platform if your new machine accepts this function.
To wit I like to play chess and the first game out was I believe Sargon followed by the Chessmaster series - but alas no more even Chess Titans I can not get to
work with W8 - W7 on another machine yes. And now a further upgrade to W8.1 - I swear the sorcerous apprentice went to meet the mad hatter at the through
the looking glass windows complex.

So I just got thru a stress relieving episode LINK:

http://www.jokesclean.com/Computer/Abbo ... stello.php

AT LEAST WITH WINDOWS 8.1 THEY BROUGHT BACK THE "START BUTTON" - NOW HOW IN THE HECK DO YOU TURN OFF THE INFERNAL MACHINE !!!!!!!!!!

With the "START BUTTON" !
Go figure !

[crfriend]

AT LEAST WITH WINDOWS 8.1 THEY BROUGHT BACK THE "START BUTTON" - NOW HOW IN THE HECK DO YOU TURN OFF THE INFERNAL MACHINE !!!!!!!!!!

With the "START BUTTON" !

One link: Windows 95. Thank goodness for "Weird" Al Yankovic. He's perhaps the last voice of sanity on the planet since Tom Lehrer decided to give up on music.

[Sarongman]

I also have fond memories of software that ran on Windows 3.1 and came on the real floppy disc. This could, by typing out some numbers, create a fantasy landscape which could be mountainous and have the valleys filled with water and then treed with either pine or hardwood. This wasted time beautifully. Unfortunately, I now can't remember the title or the company. The Settlers version 1 was my first real game. Both were pretty poor compared to todays visualisations, but I look back fondly anyway. P.S. Some rust fell off my ancient memory cells---the landscape programme was called Vista Pro.

[Sinned]

I remember all the old versions of Windews and until recently had some of them on 3.5inch floppies but MOH made me get rid of them as they were just taking up drawer fulls of space I didn't really think that I would have any use for such as 3.1. There's a part of me that still regrets chucking them into a paggy bag and taking them for recycling. Half broke my heart to do it. I still have 95 and XP on CD along with some valid codes. Didn't Wyndows used to have easter eggs in it? I seem to remember using some obscure key presses to get to them. Or was that some of the applications and games. Are there any in Wintoes anymore? I still have an old laptop machine with a docking station with 95 on it. Funnily enough I booted it up the other day and tried to reset the date to something more modern and it wouldn't accept anything beyond 31st December 1999. Must have forgot that the world as we knew it ended then and as Douglas Adams says "There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." Maybe more than once. Happy days. Those were the days when I had an Ada and a C compiler on the machine and I could write, compile and test real programs. I still can't bring myself to spell Winedows right. Sigh!!!!

[beachlion]

......... I still have an old laptop machine with a docking station with 95 on it. Funnily enough I booted it up the other day and tried to reset the date to something more modern and it wouldn't accept anything beyond 31st December 1999.......

In the 70's and 80's memory space was so expensive that Bill Gates in his wisdom decided to skip the 19 from the date because the year 2000 was so far away. On screen a 19 was added to the year-part of dates. That was the same guy that thought that no computer would ever need more than 640 kB of memory. If I had made a mistake like that, I would be in jail now. He earned billions with it.

[skirtingtoday]

I remember well the flying toasters screensaver to the tune of "Hall of the Mountain King" and later an alternative of flying toilets to the same tune...

Yes, there's no fun these days when every little addition or tweak is scrutinised by "the management"

[crfriend]

In the 70's and 80's memory space was so expensive that Bill Gates in his wisdom decided to skip the 19 from the date because the year 2000 was so far away.

This actually goes back to the days of unit-record equipment (think punched cards) and predates electronic computers. With but 80 characters to encode *everything* needed, space was at a premium and hence the century digits were omitted from most dates.

This didn't much matter for the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries as there weren't many establishments so equipped (the US Census Bureau may, possibly, have been alone) and human life-spans were nowhere even near 100 years so a 2-digit year made good sense. The changeover from 20th century to the 21st, on the other hand, was a royal nuisance and, even though the "problem" of 2-digit dates was well understood, everybody waited until the last moment to actually do anything about it resulting in a mad scramble.

Personally, I started using 4-digit years sometime in the 1980s (around the same time I adopted the 24-hour clock) and now use ISO-style datestamps all the time (e.g. 2013-10-23 08:04:35) when expressing temporal values. The wise-guy in me is half tempted to adopt a leading zero on the year (as a placeholder for now) in the same vein as the guys from The Long Now Foundation (although they're serious about it). I rather suspect that humankind will have snuffed itself out in assorted religious wars by the year 10,000 (recall that there were those who were convinced that the world would end at the turn of this century), and I know for an outright fact that I'm not going to be around to see the year value overflow the 4-digit counter it presently enjoys. But it is nice to plan ahead.

That was the same guy that thought that no computer would ever need more than 640 kB of memory. If I had made a mistake like that, I would be in jail now. He earned billions with it.

Recall that 640kB of mainstore was actually quite commodious at the time, and plenty of small systems got by with a few dozen kB. The Data General NOVA 840 I have in my collection, for instance, had 96 kB (organized as 48 kWords (16-bit)) of memory and comfortably supported 11 simultaneous users. 640 kB on a desktop in the early 1980s would have been a huge amount. And it wasn't Gates that made the decision anyway, it was IBM when the designed the PeeCee, and did it on the cheap instead of doing it properly; we've been paying for their (marketing) decision ever since.

[Sinned]

For a while I worked on a PICK system. PICK was a hash file database system designed by Don Nelson and Dick Pick and the version we had ran on top of UNIX and was based on 4K frames. Each frame had a pointer to the next and previous frames and if another frame was needed it was just selected from the next frame in the heap. Those who have used it know that there's a hell of a lot more to it than this and if you're really interested then look it up in Wikipedia. An interesting system and produced some novel situations and problems. The main side-effect of this is that in the event on anything major you had to trash the environment and start again restoring everything from system tapes and backups. Anyway programming was in Databasic and the dates were scheduled as an offset from a base in the same way as UNIX and routines were supplied for the display and manipulation of dates. Well, from most of my time there the date was four-digit but at some point it changed to a five-digit so we actually had a first run of the Y2K issue. We had to trawl all the code looking for tests on the date for digit length ( if len(date) <> 4 then ) and either take this test out or change it to a numeric test. You get the idea.

[Jack Williams]

Thank goodness for "Weird" Al Yankovic. He's perhaps the last voice of sanity on the planet since Tom Lehrer decided to give up on music.

Ahah! A fellow Weird Al fan. I have some DVDs of his but also 7" singles going 'way back. Remember "Eat It"?

[crfriend]

Remember "Eat It"?

Oh, yes, and the notion of the rubber chicken still lives on in some of my commentary of settling certain fights to this day. Nobody seems to get the reference. Such is the curse of having a long memory.

A copy is available on YouTube with various "Vevo" adulterations.

The only "problem" I have, and I use that term lightly, is that "Weird" Al was always about parody; I always preferred satire, hence my attraction to Lehrer's work. To use a US-centric reference, it's akin to the difference between the (TV shows) The Munsters and The Addams Family.

[Zorba]

Windows was never fun...

[Sarongman]

Another time waster I had on Win 95 was Sim City. I have just looked at the current edition on Google and the rendering now is incredible compared to the grid pattern used then. I'm tempted, though I don't know that I have the time that would be entailed. I spend more time, now, either here or on Facebook. Which brings up the remembrance of the dead slow dial up internet with it's tying up of the home phone line, unless you had a dedicated line and account for the computer. Who remembers the buzz and burble as it connected?

[Jack Williams]

A short time ago I got this machine changed from Vista to Windows 7. At least the clock is the right shape now without me adjusting the bigger monitor to the old CRT shape from the semi-wide which is also the shape of the screen on this Lenovo laptop. How IBM managed to supply these semi-wide machines with a CRT shape operating system beats me. Should have had Windows 7 all along.
Getting used to shaking off the annoying little scroll-type thing which gets in the way of my courser all the time. I can see it would be useful if one could bring it up as required, but it is completely random and a pain in the arse. At least the clock is now the right shape and I no longer have to reset the shape of the extension monitor when I want to watch a music DVD, most of which have also settled on semi-wide. Gone is old CRT shape, giving black bands each side of picture, and "wide" which gave black bands above and below the picture.
Canon cameras have now gone to semi-wide too. My old IXUS 70 was CRT shape, my newer IXUS 125HS gives a semi-wide picture also. Good that the "industry" seems to have settled on a standard there at least, and hooray for Dell who made this really good monitor that I've had for ages (never posessed a CRT TV) that you can adjust for anything you can throw at it. LCD screens are now one tenth what I paid for this one, but don't have the features however. As they say: You get what you pay for.

Here are a couple of videos from the Murray Dick YouTube channel, the first using the IXUS 125HS and the next with the IXUS 70:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnwJWOLWBls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGEgUNQcegE

[Jack Williams]

Methinks it's the other way round.
IBM put out this semi-wide machine and Windows (Microsoft) had to catch up.