drunk asian neighbor posted:

Yeah, turns out Office has been a bloated whale of a program for way longer than just the last few years

Really though that era was when CD drives were almost ubiquitous, even the Office '97 install notes mention a CD version, so at that point it was probably less of a "our software is huge lol" situation and more of a "our software was designed to fit on 1CD, if your dinosaur computer doesn't have a CD drive, at least you can still install and use the software" type thing.

It'd be like buying a boxed copy of the latest PC game nowadays (funny story, last week the physical PC version of Doom went on sale for $40 vs $60 for digital. Inside the DVD case was a DVD and a Steam code. You need the code to activate the DVD installation )

Cojawfee posted:

You didn't realize something called "sound blaster" was a sound card?

Bum the Sad posted:

And then Steam downloads the other 15gigs that couldn't fit on the DVD.

thathonkey posted:

GTA 1 was really cool and my parents had no idea what it was. I remember them slowly coming to the realization that the objective of the game is to steal cars and kill people with them.

Monday_ posted:

We got a new plotter installed at work today. Instead of toner it uses these little marble-sized balls of colored wax. At least the technician said it was wax, I'm not sure exactly what they're made of but I had a lot of fun using one as a crayon.

Black Pants posted:

I sort of skipped the high-floppy-use days, going from a TRS-80 using a random tape recorder, to a PC when CDs were well into being all the rage.

Delivery McGee posted:

GOURANGA!

Sadly, GTA1 and 2 fit here. Rockstar had them free on their website around the time 4 or maybe the expansions for 3 came out, but afaik they're again, or at least don't run on most modern 64-bit computers.

Delivery McGee posted:

Sadly, GTA1 and 2 fit here. Rockstar had them free on their website around the time 4 or maybe the expansions for 3 came out, but afaik they're again, or at least don't run on most modern 64-bit computers.

FilthyImp posted:

OS/2 was IBM realizing they were boned with the MS DOS deal right? Was OS/2 Warp their off brand Windows?

The extremely dated PCs we received in middle school had an OS/2 mode, which we neglected because we just wanted to run Tomb Raider on em.

Iron Prince posted:

I think they are files again, but steam has them available and they seem to work fine under modern systems. They don't have a price listed on the store page so I don't know what the gently caress is up with that. Maybe they still really are free. Take a look if you want. I play GTA2 just fine on steam all the time on my win10 laptop as a time killer.

TOOT BOOT posted:

What was OS/2 like compared to Windows of the time?

WebDog posted:

From what I can read the floppy version had all of the rendered cutscenes replaced with still images.

Someone's made an interesting mini-doco on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4udiQq5gpY

FilthyImp posted:

OS/2 was IBM realizing they were boned with the MS DOS deal right? Was OS/2 Warp their off brand Windows?

The extremely dated PCs we received in middle school had an OS/2 mode, which we neglected because we just wanted to run Tomb Raider on em.

drunk asian neighbor posted:

Really though that era was when CD drives were almost ubiquitous, even the Office '97 install notes mention a CD version, so at that point it was probably less of a "our software is huge lol" situation and more of a "our software was designed to fit on 1CD, if your dinosaur computer doesn't have a CD drive, at least you can still install and use the software" type thing.

an AOL chatroom posted:

TOOT BOOT posted:

What was OS/2 like compared to Windows of the time?

Computer viking posted:

As for OS/2, version 3 ("Warp 3") came out in 1994, and was probably the last time an OS/2 was "better" than windows: It had a more solid and NT-like kernel than the weird dos+stuff - design of Win9x, a GUI with a start menu before W95 launched, a more thorough and customizable UI, better internet support out of the box, and it could still run DOS and Win3.1 programs.

Buttcoin purse posted:

less mainstream apps supported it so it's kind of like Linux I guess.

Jerry Cotton posted:

Like... Windows applications? Which it mostly ran just fine?

Squashy Nipples posted:

One of the weirder aspects of OS/2 was that they put on a concerted effort to reach celebs. Of all people, they got their hooks into Howard Stern, by giving him access to someone who could provide some personal tech support ("Jeff Jarvis", I think?). Howard knew jack poo poo about computers, but he bought into the OS/2 marketing hype, and used to repeat it on air constantly. OS/2 is the wave of the future, all PCs would be running OS/2, IBM is the greatest ever, blah blah blah.

Howard ended up making a big investment in OS/2 and Lotus Notes groupware, a system they were stuck with for WAY too long.

Bonzo posted:

No, it was Jeff Schick who was a VP at IBM. Jeff Jarvis is a Stern fan and English professor who wrote a book about Google and talks out of his rear end with Leo Laporte once a week.

Lotus notes are still used quite a bit, mostly in organizations that have IBM consultants on site at all times.

Data Graham posted:

Was it this thread where it was explained how OS/2 Warp was originally supposed to be pervasively Star Trek themed, with a huge media blitz coinciding with Trek TNG promotions and poo poo? And then at the last minute Paramount/CBS/whoever pulled out and IBM had to hastily scrub all the Star Trek references from the packaging, but they couldn't remove "Warp" itself because it was too entrenched into the product, leaving it with this weird orphaned name that made no sense and made people think it was an OS that had been left out in the sun too long or something?

quote:

The 3.0 release of OS/2 in early 1995 was accompanied by a name change. Henceforth, OS/2 was to be called OS/2 "Warp." The genesis of this truly unfortunate moniker began with IBM's habit of using code names lifted from the popular and seemingly eternal TV and movie series, Star Trek. Previous beta versions of OS/2 were named "Borg," "Ferengi," and "Klingon" (all alien races on the show), and the 3.0 beta version was called Warp (as in "warp speed," as in really really fast). But as Warp neared its release date, IBM puzzled over what to call the released product, until Chairman Lou Gerstner decreed that the product should be known as . . . Warp.

It seemed an excellent idea! Earlier versions of OS/2 had been criticized by some as being slow, though this was more a function of memory requirements and setup than a technical deficiency. Star Trek was cool, futuristic, and familiar, a seemingly perfect match of product image to functionality. IBM moved ahead and designed a marketing campaign around a Star Trek theme. They rented a hall in New York City and invited hundreds to see Patrick Stewart, the then current captain of the Starship Enterprise to help roll out the product in a gala event. (Stewart was a no-show.)

The only problem was that no one at IBM had bothered to check with Paramount, owner and guardian of the Star Trek franchise and all related trademarks and marketing rights, about what it thought of this idea. Now, Paramount had no right to trademark the name "Warp"-science-fiction writers had been using the word since the 1930s. But IBM's public use of "Klingon" and "Ferengi" had annoyed Paramount, and the company wasn't about to let IBM appropriate Star Trek for its own marketing purposes. Sharp letters were sent to IBM and threats were voiced. As a result, IBM decided to drop any Star Trek marketing concepts for Warp.

This was a problem. Without a cool futuristic concept tied to the word and the product, IBM had to rely on the traditional meanings of the word. Like "bent." "Twisted." "Warped" out of shape. And other, less conventional meanings. For instance, if you were alive during the 1960s (if you remember the 1960s), "warped" was something you became after ingesting certain substances that time and experience have shown to be bad for memory recall and possibly your genetic heritage.

The result was that IBM ended up creating a very odd advertising and marketing campaign redolent of hash brownies and magic mushrooms. Twisty "Age of Aquarius" type was splashed across ad posters all over the land, proclaiming that people were "Warping" their computers. Edwin Black, publisher of OS/2 Professional magazine, described in an editorial of nearly having an apoplectic fit as he gazed upon one such IBM ad plastered up on the walls of Chicago's O'Hare Airport. It featured Phil Jackson, former coach of the mighty Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls and the flower child of NBA basketball with the New York Knicks in the 1970s, smiling through his bushy mustache at the prospect of "warping" his computer. Everyone, of course, was thrilled at the prospect of running a psychedelic, warping OS that smoked dope and had flashbacks when you asked it to retrieve a file....

Jerry Cotton posted:

Like... Windows applications? Which it mostly ran just fine?

Computer viking posted:

I don't think they ran Win95 apps, so by Warp 4 things were more linux-like - but by then things were also clearly going downhill for them.

klafbang posted:

It was its own thing, really. It was, as they said, "a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows." It ran Windows programs better than Windows in many cases. If you had at least 8 MB RAM (preferably 12 or more).

IBM's parting agreement with Microsoft ended with the 3.x series, so OS/2 only supported Win32s, the s indicating a subset of Win32 as in 95 and some other letter for NT. It ran 95 programs for a while, until they started using the full Win32 API.

I used OS/2 until sometime in '97 where I installed a beta of Windows 98. It was good, but the excellent support for Windows apps meant developers didn't make a lot of OS/2 native ones (a wibdows/DOS app would run "everywhere," and OS/2 ditto only on OS/2.

Jerry Cotton posted:

The blurb was at least ½ accurate since DOS games ran much better under OS/2 than DOS because you got more free base memory.

Bonzo posted:

Lotus notes are still used quite a bit, mostly in organizations that have IBM consultants on site at all times.

Computer viking posted:

Kind of, but kind of not.

...

Oh, and Ars did a long article on OS/2 you might want to read - http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/

TheMostFrench posted:

TheMostFrench posted:

It was awful because of the way my dad ran his network. He backed things up by copy pasting the entire of C: to a spare computer, or just copying the My Documents folder of one computer into the other. This meant there would be a folder called My Documents inside the My Documents folder, he regularly got the 'filepath is too long' error.

Buttcoin purse posted:

Pfft, I would like make a folder called C:\Backups\POSSERVER\My Documents, less confusing drat you, path too long!

Mak0rz posted:

I have a question:

Yesterday I tried playing this old game I used to love called Chasm: The Rift in DOSbox. Well turns out Chasm has pretty high system requirements for a DOS game so it runs like poo poo and has framerate issues even on 300x200. If I were to use something like FreeDOS instead, would the game run a little better?