just fiddling around's Journal: Of OS's and men

It started a looong time ago, when my parents bought my first computer, a 8086 loaded with 640 kb of memory, a CGA video card and two 5 1/4 inch double density drives. With it came a copy of MS-DOS 3.2, which was not too bad a release: handled all the necessary formatting and copying stuff, and played games all right. It was even able to handle directories and hard drives! GWBasic was the language of choice for the broke kid I was, and "poutOnne Soutonne dredde" ("Pour some sugar on me", horribly mangled) was the inside joke the whole city of Quebec was sharing. George Michael was making the hearts of the girls of the neighborhood beat with "Faith".

A few years later, in 1993, we changed our then-obsolete computer for a AM386-40 MHZ (almost as powerful as a 486!!) and forked 300$ extra to get all of 8 MB of memory. All my friends were drooling , and I had no sound card yet! But back to operating systems: we had MS-DOS 5.0, having safely jumped over the dreaded version 4(you tought WinME was a first in the category "crappy remake of a good previous version"? ). All was fine and dandy, and Windows was a novelty no hobbyist wanted to waste his CPU cycles on. QBasic was the successor to GW, being also bundled free with MS-DOS. Salt 'n Pepa was the tune of the summer, Converse shoes were making a killing by being cheap-made AND expensive, and Celine Dion, on her first english album, was hammering that "Love Can Move Mountains".