I'm pretty old, but I'm guessing a lot of you still remember the old days, before plug and play, in the autoexec.bat -config.sys days. What's the most obscure tech that you remember?
Borland Sidekick took over Int 0x09 (hw kbd isr) as a TSR but never called the original function pointer in the Inerrupt Vector Table. So, you had to load Sidekick last in the Autoexec.bat file or no other TSR would work. Tidbit from an author of many commercial / OEM TSR's.
I've got a client that still uses a USB US Robotics 56k modem that I have to know what COM port its on, cause it will occasionally change and then I have to set that port in the receiving app to get it back working again.
I prob had to do that late last year? It'll prob break again in a couple of months.
There has to be a way of using powershell to query what port the usb dialup modem is on and either change it back to a specific port, or put that detail into whatever registry entry/configuration ini file the "receiving app" has, and then let it run in the scheduler...
Yeah in windows it would auto configure typically to use IRQ 5 for the audio, I think it was a mouse that connected to my 2d graphics card at the time, not a seperate serial port mouse.
In dos though I didn't load my mouse drivers or the serial comm ports, so straight boot to dos IRQ 3 should have been free.
Worked fine for my mouse though when I did load it in dos or in windows.
The coolest thing I ever did was set up 2 player The Settlers splitscreen.
With 2 serial mice (one for each player) an SB16 and a Gravis Ultrasound while having no IRQ conflicts (except the printer port, who cares I don't print while gaming), all drivers loaded and still enough conventional RAM to play the game.
When you hit 100% cpu usage, a thread ran amok, and no multi-cores so the system was just completely locked. When the first dual CPU systems were reachable to consumers I had one, oh man, I was the lord of computing when I got that iwill board.
My most memorable IRQ problem was to do with a Yamaha sound card.
The place I worked at at the time sold PCs, and one package included a Yamaha sound card. The motherboard for this build had a factory option for a built in Yamaha sound card, but the company was buying it in without it, so they could sell the add-on card as an upgrade.
But by doing this, we found a bug. The Yamaha cards didn't work in the motherboard. They simply couldn't be found by the driver. The BIOS had a toggle to enable the "built-in" card and if enabled, it would find the card and the driver could talk to it - but no sound came out.
Near as we could figure, turning the "built-in" card off in the BIOS disabled the ISA card even though it wasn't "built-in". Enabling it allowed the hardware to work, but it was as if it was still trying to push the actual audio out through a speaker port that didn't exist.
Switching to anything other than a Yamaha card fixed the issue.
Ha my first professional programming job, had you work 3 months in support/help desk/ pc configuration. Was actually a really good idea. You learnt about users and their pain points
When I did a student work experience at a tech shop, To upgrade the bios you physically remove the chip and replace it. And if you put it in wrong, you released the magic smoke.
I don't have to imagine. I had to have one of the most awkward conversations of my life explaining it to a younger Dean at a very prominent Black university (widely acknowledged as the institution that the setting for Cosby Show spin-off A Different World was based on.) On the fly I chose Primary and Secondary but advised him that manufacturers very in how they refer to it. The year was 1998 and he was buying an additional hard drive for his personal desktop. His institution was one of our largest customers.
in my first IT gig, at a UC campus, one of my tasks was to add a second, larger IDE hard drive for a lawyer user who was black. I got the sense he was technical enough he could have done it himself but he was going to let me "do my job". The guy was super chill :-)
When I formatted the new drive the prompt appeared to name the drive, his existing 120 MB drive was "Python" I said how about "Anaconda" for the 340MB? He said heheh yup that works
Edit: "Anaacnda" wtf? lol
I was practically jumping with joy when I got my first MoBo and drives compatible with Cable Select. It was like a whole universe of possibilities opened up!
(only to be a bit disappointing immediately afterwards because, like, come on, how often do you shuffle drives around in a Big Tower PC?)
I remember when the hospital I worked at started using IBM PS2 with no hard drive. Booted via floppy. Then a year or two later we started receiving devices with 25MB HDs. No longer needed floppy to boot.
Fuck the scsi bus. I'm 45 but my step dad worked in tech and had like a $10k computer back in 95. He let me fuck around with it a lot. Was so cool having a scanner, zip drive, jazz drive, Internet (not AOL), and all this cool shit before most of my friends. No surprise I'm an engineer today.
Jumpers in interface cards, NICs, sound cards, parallel and serial cards, to set the IRQ! Having to make sure that all of the cards had different IRQ settings so they didn't clash and crash the machine.
Making sure all serial ports were using unique addresses...oh, and ensuring different SCSI addresses for devices...and using Norton Utilities to 'fix' corrupt areas of the hard drive.
This is why you set a GOTO/JMP or equivalent at the end of each card, so it doesn't matter what order they're loaded.
Lets you do a little trick where you shuffle the cards in front of a horrified programmer before shoving them into the reader, then blithely start using your program.
HAHAHAHA, damn I remember those thank you. I used to peek a lot to make sure the memory entries were correct during debug sessions. Core memory unlocked. Thank you.
Depending on the job I might still add my Netware admin time from the 90's to the resume. Especially if I want to indicate upfront I'm in a protected class.
Ahh the good ole days.. when you were worshiped for your skills.. how I miss you..Somehow it has become… ‘why hasn’t this incredibly difficult task been completed yet..’
Groupwise was amazing. I was the email admin and we ran Groupwsie. Then my company decided we would migrate to Lotus Notes. And suddenly my 25 hours a week of Email administration turned into 80 hours.
This. The endless quest to get as much free memory free below 640kB for running DOS games and software. And running Memmaker to automate that. The real kings used Quarterdeck QEMM to get up to 634kB free...
The glory of OS/2 and being able to use ALL my RAM while truly multitasking running 3 line BBS on a 386 with an insane 16MB of RAM and 2 500MB HDDs! It was the glory days!
I had an interview once where they asked what webdev tools I was using, I said “notepad” and I really don’t think that was the answer that they were looking for.
If you'd gone that route you'd basically be able to choose your own paycheck at this point. iSeries (formerly AS/400) is still still sold by IBM, and there are a surprisingly large base of enterprises that still run on that software. If you can develop AS/400 apps using Cobol and/or RPG, you're one of few these days as many of the old-school developers are retiring.
I used to surf the internet in a netcafe back in the days. My whole email fitted in a 1.44MB floppy which I had to insert in the drive before launching Eudora.
The bad that I remember was when, on a couple of occasions, the network had a card that didn’t play nice with the token. Putting that much trust in a NIC today is crazy. Usually OS/2 was part of this equation and if you looked around, you were in a corporate part of a bank or similar.
The good that I remember was taking a passive MAU home from work and a couple of 16 mbit cards to use back in about 1997. Was quite fast for home use when the only thing going was 10m and I was typically using a crossover cable because I was poor lol.
4, 16, or 100? Have never seen 100 used before but know it exists. Now if they’re using 16 and passive MAUs anywhere in the architecture, that’s some crazy stuff there. Wait a minute…are there even drivers in modern OSes for TR? Next thing you’re gonna tell me is that they’re using IPX to connect to a NetWare 3.x server that’s been up since before 9/11.
Took a couple of years to save up successfully nag my parents for a 1541, so I had to resort to Shift + RunStop (PRESS PLAY ON TAPE) until I got my hands of a fast loader cartridge.
Moving memory chips from dead IBM 5150 dual 5.25 drive computers to working machines so the new MS Word 5.1 for DOS would run. It needed 512kb of memory and many machines were 256kb and needed to be upgraded before the new Word version would run. 3M Company 1992
I will always remember the Dilbert cartoon where they convince the boss that the token ring fell out of the network in his office and he had to find it.
uucp email and file transfer, over phone lines addressed via ! paths. eMail could take days to arrive if it hit intermediate systems at exactly the wrong time of day
USENET - before the Great Renaming
Eternal September
10base2 ethernet over coax and the joy of thinnet terminators and vampire taps
Smitty (the running man busy animation on AIX SMIT) and how he would fall on his face if there was an error
Having to specify memory models when compiling code on Xenix
Using physical jumpers or preferably dip switches to change settings on cards
SCSI IDs
Having to figure out IRQ assignments yourself
Trying to get a modem, mouse and sound card working at the same time
Token ring networks, or as we "fondly" referred to them, Broken Ring
I've been doing this job since the Novell Netware and Token Ring days.
I remember when we upgraded to NT 3.51 and Lotus Notes, replacing cc:Mail. And then the upgrade from Lotus 123 to Microsoft Excel on Windows 3.11. Then eventually the replacement of Windows 3.11 with Windows 95 - pre Active Directory - still using the Novell connector for authentication.
I remember the day the Sniffer sales rep showed up at our IBM mainframe shop. The Compute Director (who wore a suit and smoked cigars in 'no smoking' areas and drove a Lincoln Continental) assured him we didn't need a Sniffer on the little thicknet LAN that had grown up organically. He claimed to know every device on the cable, and wouldn't waste money to confirm what he already knew.
The Sniffer sales rep drilled a vampire tap into the thicknet, tapped in, and within a minute said, "You've got apple devices on this cable." After much indignant denial, then investigation, then confirmation, then retribution, the Sniffer guy got his sale.
I did CompuServe support in 1997, and this was my way to knock the assholes, the ones that couldn't cope with a woman doing tech support, down a notch. They might have been better than I at a lot of things IT, but I sure as hell was better at getting them online with our service. So I did a speed run through the settings - not too fast, mind you, I always clicked the same things I was asking them to do - and when they fell behind, in my sweetest voice, I said something like "Oh, so sorry, am I too fast? Force of habit, let me slow down a bit to match your speed." They usually behaved a lot better after that.
It was brutal, you'd ask very specific questions, then try to follow along on your own PC.
Didn't take me long to GTFO, I lasted just over a year, I think. Then took a corporate desktop technician job for a commercial real estate firm. Much better pay, much less stress. Back then, as soon as you were sick of a gig, you just picked up the phone to your job recruiter and bam! you had another job. Those were the days.
Booting a PDP4 by loading paper tape read instructions by hand by setting bit switches on the front of the machine, loading a byte at a time to memory. Only then you could go on to load the paper tape program. (Still on op sys in any real sense)
Okay how many of you had to terminate your own simplex fiber optic connectors? Cleave the glass , epoxy the glass, cook the glass, polish the glass, inspect the glass, back to polishing til the power meter is clean. Wax on, wax off. it was zen and relaxing.
talkin bout 802 ethernet with no dot, Holmes. Wait your turn to speak through the optical coupler DONT CALLIT A HUB!!
jumpers (across pins on a circuit board, not the thing you wear when you exercise).
dialing strings for modems (I did phone support for ISPs, the 'unsupported' queue).
throwing a monitor away because I didn't get the setting right in linux to run X window (90's linux)
I remember adding a 387 math co-processor in the MOBO of my 386. This significantly boosted the performance and was a completely optional add-on. I also remember installing MS-DOS 6.0 from several floppy disks and was EXCITED to have SCANDISK to fix drive errors and corruption.
Your computer didn't have enough RAM to play SIM CITY and run windows at the same time, so you had to create a boot disk to boot off of when you wanted to play.
I still remember writing software for RDOS on a Data General Eclipse. Printing using teletype machines and storing data on paper tape and punch cards. Using WordStar on a Sanyo MBC-1200 CP/M system. Sending data to far away via acoustic coupler.
Back in the days of ISA/EISA cards I was lucky enough to get one of the (at that time) new IBM PS/2 computers with Microchannel. MCA cards had no jumpers but instead came with a floppy which had the configuration data for the card, which was loaded into the BIOS (which was on hard disk) and then configured automatically.
I remember people killing the needle printer by sending a core file to it, then not jumping to stop the job when the paper ran out. The holes in the ink tape were pretty cool.
I don't feel like an old-timer but I definitely remember that far back. I used to work for a software house that provided UNIX (and later VMS) connectivity into Windows desktops. We routinely ran two or three network stacks at the same time (TCP/IP, NetBEUI, DECnet, Wollongong, etc.) as well as multiplexed serial connections over dial-up modems. The art of getting all this to work resulted in some very complex config.sys and autoexec.bat files before typing the infamous win
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u/pops107 Apr 14 '26
Running out of IRQ's and having to shuffle things around.