Everything works too easily now. You press a glass screen, a file appears, and nobody has to think about it. It’s boring.
Back in the 90s, getting a computer to do anything basic was a real pain sometimes. Half the time the computer won.
Here are a few bits of hardware from that era that proved technology used to hate us.
1x Speed CD Writers
Burning a CD took 74 minutes. That was 74 minutes of sitting completely still in your chair, praying Windows didn’t decide to do anything in the background. If a tooltip popped up or you accidentally moved the mouse too fast, you got a buffer underrun.
The laser stopped, the disc was ruined, and you were down £5. I had a stack of silver coasters almost to the ceiling. Verbatim brand always seemed to work better for me for some reason!
IRQ Conflicts
Plugging something in today takes two seconds. In 1995, putting a new sound card into a motherboard meant opening up the case and messing around with tiny plastic jumpers.
If your sound card wanted IRQ 5 and your printer was already using it, the whole PC just crashed. You’d spend three hours staring at CONFIG.SYS in DOS, changing numbers at random, just trying to get a game to make a noise when you fired a gun.
14.4k Modems and the Landline
The dial-up noise was bad enough, but waiting twenty minutes for a single image to load line-by-line was normal.
The real problem was the landline. You could be 90% through downloading a file that took two hours, and someone downstairs would lift the phone off the hook to make a call. Connection dropped instantly. No download manager. No resume. Just start again tomorrow. Ugh.
MiniDiscs and SCSI Cables
MiniDiscs were actually great. Tiny plastic squares that felt heavy and solid. I still really want to buy one. I used to love my old one. I used to record onto it and then listen while i was riding round the countryside.
SCSI cables, on the other hand, were a nightmare. If you wanted to run a scanner and a hard drive together, you needed SCSI IDs and termination blocks on the end of the cable. Get one jumper wrong and the computer pretended neither device existed.
Tech is better now, obviously. But there was a weird satisfaction in spending an entire afternoon fixing a jumper setting and finally hearing a Sound Blaster card work. You felt like you’d actually accomplished something.
So now two things on the list.
1. Cat
2. Mini disc recorder
