• Flying Squid
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    201 year ago

    Does anyone remember the game Syndicate? When it came out, I didn’t have a CD-ROM drive yet. But I saw there was a floppy version I could install, so I got that.

    It was on 19 floppies.

    Longest, most painful install ever. Great game though.

    • @Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
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      111 year ago

      Some Microsoft Office installations were 40+ diskettes. Thankfully, this kind of nonsense was quickly replaced by CD-ROMs.

      I recall buying a massive box for C++ at a computer show in the 90s, but I can’t recall if it came with dozens of discs and/or whether it came with a massive printed reference book 😂

    • @Sadbutdru@sopuli.xyz
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      21 year ago

      I think about that game often. I got to have the old 386 up in my room after my Dad upgraded, and I somehow got hold of that game for free, used to play it after school when I was 12-14. I’m pretty sure that machine didn’t have CD drive… Could be I’m mixing up a few different memories…

    • @chriscz@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      21 year ago

      Yes!!! Loved that game, was one of my favourites. Look up Satellite Reign by 5 Lives Studios, some of the original creators built a modern retake (“spiritual successor” in their words) because they loathed the fuckup created by EA.

      • Flying Squid
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        21 year ago

        Oh nice, I’ll look into it. Reminds me of Bryan Fargo making Wasteland 2 because he didn’t like Fallout being turned into a first person game after Fallout 1 and 2 essentially being a remake and a sequel to Wasteland (Fallout 1 even had the promotional line “Remember Wasteland?”)

        I preferred Wasteland style turn-based team RPG to the later Fallout games, so I’m glad he did.

  • WashedOver
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    181 year ago

    I don’t even want to imagine how long the first update would take on that 56K Flex modem…

      • WashedOver
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        1 year ago

        I came in at 28.8 and recall stressing about which 56K modem to buy. I even took mine back and exchanged it for the other protocal as I wanted to make sure I had the right one for the next few years… What a pipe dream that was as it was changing so quickly then.

        It’s funny how now it seems like things can last a few years now. My daily driver laptop is approaching 10 years old now.

      • Bonehead
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        61 year ago

        You never experienced the joy of a 1200? You could literally watch the cursor draw the screen.

        • r00ty
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          31 year ago

          First modem I had was a box with a dial with the options 300/300 orig, 1200/75 orig, 75/1200 ans, 300/300 ans.

          It wasn’t acoustically coupled, but it also didn’t dial. I had to pick up the normal phone, dial the BBS, flick the switch to open the line on the modem and put the phone down.

      • @thisbenzingring
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        31 year ago

        I had a 28.8 that was really good. When the 56k came out, I got one but was disappointed in its performance compared to the old 28.8. When the 56k v92 came out it was much better. Sadly at that point I was getting DSL so that 56k v92 was a POS and I was a LPB and never looked back

    • Moof
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      231 year ago

      Well, first you’d have to explain to the TSA guard why you have so many “save-file buttons,” and after you crumble to dust you can easily drift away to catch your flight

    • Y|yukichigai
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      91 year ago

      It absolutely is not real, or at least it’s not a real Microsoft product. 8.1 was never released on floppy.

      It’s possible that this is a bootleg release targeting an emerging market somewhere. You can use the Windows DISM tool to split the Windows image file (WIM) into split files. Just have the first disk format the target drive, set up a temp folder, run a process that’ll wait for each disk to be inserted and copy over the split file when it is, then finally start the installation command when all have been copied over.

      …or it’s just a funny image.

    • @jozep@lemmy.world
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      51 year ago

      I don’t think it is. Booting from a floppy disk is not a thing in Windows 8.1 and installing from that many disks would take days.

      • @scottywh@lemmy.world
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        21 year ago

        You could absolutely still boot to a floppy… There’s still zero chance that this was actually produced.

      • Ook the Librarian
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        11 year ago

        Legacy system operations are used to slow processes. So I don’t think it would matter that it would take days.

        I agree; I don’t think it’s real. What system is too delicate to install an optical drive and yet you still have the need to install a “new” OS? This kinda assumes that any system that could run Windows 8 can handle an optical drive. I’m kinda hoping to be schooled in some corner case that would warrant this.

  • @Littleborat@feddit.de
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    121 year ago

    I remember using win 3.11 and my dad would tell me to close windows I am not using so the machine does not grind to a halt. Good times. Windows could to nothing back then. Minesweeper maybe.

    • @Thrashy@lemmy.world
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      71 year ago

      Before Win95/NT, Windows was basically just a skin on top of DOS, and DOS had never been designed with multitasking in mind. That meant that (with some exceptions, like 8-bit DOS programs running in virtual 8086 mode on a 386) for multiple programs to play nice with each other within the GUI, they had to “cooperatively multitask,” that is, they had to be programmed to share a common memory address space, and to yield back control of the processor to Windows periodically, so that the other open programs could get some execution cycles in before they had to yield in turn. As you can imagine, this didn’t work particularly well in practice, with software commonly forgetting to yield back to the task scheduler and pooping all over shared memory on a regular basis. Windows 95 was a quantum leap forward, with preemptive multitasking and independent address space for each running process.

  • Dr. Coomer
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    11 year ago

    Who the fuck read my mind? I literally thought about getting an old computer and for the fun of it try to install windows 11 on it.