Unfortunately, we had too many students for each computer during classes. I started a revolt that “Computers are wasting our study time, as our upcoming board exams are more important.” The whole class signed the petition and the School Head had to schedule a class-wide talk and agreed to make it totally optional to the point of, “If you really want, you be part of it. But yes, study for the exam is more important.”
So, the computer classes ended up with just me (the traitor), a friend from Kerala, and the school head’s daughter. We ended up like 3 computers each to our disposal. I wrote a QBasic Game-ish program to impress my first girlfriend — she uses the arrow keys to launch dots to hit some area on a heart-shaped thingy on the screen and it prints her name. I remember using physical graph-paper to calculate the screen “pixels” (I think) or co-ordinates to calculate strike areas.
Oh and Yes, almost all of my classmates remember me for being that traitor.
https://brajeshwar.com/2025/fixing-a-dos-computer-for-the-ar...
I loved your story, ingenuity and the cheekiness of youth!
Of course, the kernel would be based on capabilities (probably SeL4). And applications would probably ship as WASM bundles. And I'd have a built in local first user database built around CRDTs and things instead of a file system, kinda like a modern Lotus Notes. But for the UI? That era was great.
To be fair Ladybird is probably needed more urgently now.
Incidentally, I recently replayed Loom, from a bit before that era. It's still a lovely, wonderful game! Such a shame the fan-made sequel (Forge) seems to have died.
I believe it was reasonably popular back in the day, made money at least. Now it would be almost avant guarde in its slowness I guess. You can't even double click to run. The popular art of yesteryear becomes the high art of today...
I was eyeing a career in IT and moved across soon after, and was dumped into Novell Netware 3.12 land which was an eye opener (Fire Phasers anyone?).
16-bit, to me, are the dark ages. Lot's of confusion, not much good came out of it technologically and aesthetically. God, everything was ugly. Maybe all the trials and tribulations were necessary for what was about to come but I like believe they weren't.
32-bit to me is the golden age and 64-bit is platinum.
If you offered my a time machine to go back, I'd surely say: "No, thank you!". There hasn't been a better time than now, but if you'd forced me at gun point, I'd pick the 80s over the 90s any time.
No SSDs though :(
On the other hand, at least I'll get to play Castle of the Winds.
(I also loved Z: Steel Soldiers, but despite the '01 release date, I'm sure it too would have run on a Pentium II).
[1] possibly NCD-16, https://groups.google.com/g/comp.windows.x/c/yGBvXhuTL0Y
Maybe the doctor could take you back there with a TARDIS, but time paradoxes and fixed points in time and all that
I have fond memories of the 486 era, which was really the early 1990s. I'm kinda surprised the PC component of this isn't mentioned here. it was also peak Borland.
It does mention Windows NT but honestly nobody really cared about that until NT 3.0/3.5 and it soon thereafter became Windows XP and laid the foundation for modern Windows.
1993 IIRC had pre-1.0 Linux. I downloaded a distribution (SLS) onto ~30 5.25" floppy drives about that time.
But I really wonder if it was that the tech was sufficiently good at that time or it's simply the tech we had when life was sufficiently good. 1993 was before the dot-com bubble started. That's true. And I guess with more computing power came a lot of the things that many people dislike now. Ads, news feeds, social media, micro-transactions, etc.
But we also have Youtube, video streaming, digital maps and navigation, search engines and a host of other things that are genuinely good.
This stuff was also fantastically expensive (in inflation-adjusted dollars). We shouldn't forget that too.
For me, youtube is only nice because of the decades old content that people have put on it. But that is because there is no such quality content made in the world anymore, and that is partially because of the enshittification bought on by the internet.
If it was not the case, youtube won't be that big of a deal. Let me disclose here that I am not a big fan of "on-demand" content.
Also, music ... back in the 90ies, if you were drawn to the obscure side of music, you'd read about it, and could, at best, imagine what it was like, because your local record store didn't have it, the bigger store the next town over didn't have it, and IF anyone could order it was with a non-refundable down payment.
Nowadays, you can probably find it on YT, and that's great IMHO. I my musical horizon would be so much more limited without it.
Also I've learned a lot about guitar repair ...
Where I disagree with you is video streaming. In my opinion, YouTube and the commercialisation of holiday memories (which later became Instagram influencers) were the beginning of widespread depression. Seemingly regular people sharing their exceptional life somehow forces everyone else to compare themselves to the dreams presented on YouTube and most people will come up short and then most people will feel insufficient. I believe that’s why early YouTube ads were so powerful. Your ad for exotic goods would play immediately after the viewer became painfully aware of how boring they are, when measured against the top 0.1% on a global scale.