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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I don’t think I’ve needed to ask anyone anything when dealing with computers (except when helping someone with a self caused issue, of course, in which case the question is usually “why did you do this?”) since I was a little kid figuring out how to use my 286… I find that usually you just need to read the fucking screen (an extremely rare talent, I’ve come to realise), and in harder cases a bit of googling or, if push comes to shove, RTFMing seems to do the trick… but OK, we’ll see, I’ve been wanting to try NixOS for a while once I have the time, and my computer is getting old… maybe this summer I’ll find some time, better this than updating to Windows 11 in any case. 🤷‍♂️


  • Batch files¹, powershell, visual basic if you use Office, Lisp if you used AutoCAD back when macros were written in Lisp… 🤷‍♂️


    ¹- And, frankly, I doubt setting up NixOS is particularly more complex than setting up an autoexec.bat boot menu back when some programs (well, games are programs) wanted extended memory and some others wanted expanded memory (couldn’t have both modes at the same time, of course), and you had to make sure the drivers loaded in the most optimal order (which could vary depending on the aforementioned memory expanders, and which drivers the specific game actually needed) to fit as many as possible of them and DOS in high memory leaving as much as possible of the 640KB of system RAM free for the program… and I’m not even getting into the whole IRQ thing for soundcards and whatnot… and we had to do it all without Internet, learning by trial and error, or word of mouth, or from magazines…












  • Back when disk compressors (Stacker, DoubleSpace, and such) were a thing I was cleaning my 85MB hard drive to make space for some games, found some massive file I wasn’t using, and promptly deleted it, which did indeed free a lot of space.

    Way too much, in fact.

    Turns out DriveSpace or whatever Stacker clone Microsoft had built into DOS somehow exposed the file in which it stored the compressed file system within the compressed system itself, allowing the user to delete it if they were stupid enough. So, when I deleted it, hilarity ensued.

    In the end I think I was somehow able to recover the drive by booting from a floppy and using undelete or something like that, but it was a learning experience to say the least.

    Damn, I miss those good old times.