Back when usb was first appearing on boards, some cases had their usb port cables broken out into individual pins that you needed to place in the correct order.
I was so traumatized by jumpers… when I built my first machine a few years ago, after over 20 years since the last time I looked inside one, I had to do one tiny minor thing with a jumper. I legit panicked and felt like I was about to permanently lose my brand new mobo. For absolutely no reason other than jumper involved. I don’t even recall bricking anything, maybe just my dad scaring the life out of me about it in the 80s.
Jumpers, IRQ conflicts, out of memory for your drivers and program at the same time. Still hella fun. The front panel used to be an unlabeled, unstandardized mess.
Ah yes because some things needed eXtended memory and some needed exPanded memory, and some things didn’t like drivers being loaded into high memory and some things didn’t like other things to be on certain ports or interrupts haha.
Same. I was like “this cannot possible be a hard drive and it cannot possible get plugged into that thing, that’s where the wifi card goes on a laptop.”
That’s what I would call edge case, I stuck to reliable ones.
But fair point and possibly the availability was different everywhere too. Also, the older stuff was the worse it was. It got better over time with prints on boards and such.
Kids these days don’t know the horrors of wrangling IDE ribbon cables and fiddling with jumpers.
Back when usb was first appearing on boards, some cases had their usb port cables broken out into individual pins that you needed to place in the correct order.
But were you around for dip switches?
I was so traumatized by jumpers… when I built my first machine a few years ago, after over 20 years since the last time I looked inside one, I had to do one tiny minor thing with a jumper. I legit panicked and felt like I was about to permanently lose my brand new mobo. For absolutely no reason other than jumper involved. I don’t even recall bricking anything, maybe just my dad scaring the life out of me about it in the 80s.
Hon, i remember the days when we had to manually set the cylinder and head count in the BIOS
Jumpers, IRQ conflicts, out of memory for your drivers and program at the same time. Still hella fun. The front panel used to be an unlabeled, unstandardized mess.
Remember having stacks of boot floppies for each game so you could optimize memory allocation depending on the need?
Ah yes because some things needed eXtended memory and some needed exPanded memory, and some things didn’t like drivers being loaded into high memory and some things didn’t like other things to be on certain ports or interrupts haha.
This game requires EMS memory to be allocated, and this other game requires XMS memory to be allocated! Hold on, gotta edit my AUTOEXEC.BAT.
Some of us automated that shit.
There were times when writing batch files was more fun than playing some of the shitty games I had back then.
Still suffix my paradox games’ run commands in steam
Used to?
Ahaha good point it’s making a comeback!
The first time I installed an nvme… Like a 14th century peasant standing in front of the Vegas smiley face.
Same. I was like “this cannot possible be a hard drive and it cannot possible get plugged into that thing, that’s where the wifi card goes on a laptop.”
24 pin ATX cables for the mainboard are still a pain tho. Also plugging in RAM sticks is still dangerous as fuck if you arent careful.
The good news is, as far as components go, RAM is fairly cheap… Oh no…
And even configuring master and slave as well as irq and dma manually was never really an issue if you knew what you were doing. (except edge cases)
But every million different clone manufacturer had their own jumper settings.
You needed to have the manual for everything, because you couldn’t look it up online.
That’s what I would call edge case, I stuck to reliable ones.
But fair point and possibly the availability was different everywhere too. Also, the older stuff was the worse it was. It got better over time with prints on boards and such.