You’d plug your mouse into the serial port and your scanner into your printer port. Wild times.
Going from game port to USB with “plug and play” was a huge deal man. Not having to manually assign IRQ to get your audio working too lol. That said, there is still one thing that was cursed in the old days and remains cursed now: printers. Fuck printers.
I’m convinced that in the late 90s/early 00s, the printer companies got together to form a cartel, and have purposefully neutered all consumer-grade printers from that point forward. They knew it wasn’t profitable (unless they charge an arm and a leg for the ink, which of course they eventually did), so they decided to just not play the game at all.
Remember when you had to configure the IRQ with DIP switches?
Yes! Remember when you had to set your HDD to master or slave using jumpers? Then channel select came along and made that easier.
I remember studying for my first A+ cert. So much of it was dealing with IRQ assignments and conflicts.
I remember having to configure the sound card within games. IRQ and DMZ settings. I had no idea what I was doing so a lot of the time I just played without sound.
DMA, direct memory access. DMZ is a networking thing.
DMZ is also between North and South Korea.
They also stand for the same thing (demilitarized zone) oddly enough.
I’ve seen it backronymed into “data management zone” in a few places, but it will always be “demilitarized zone” to me.
C:\>type autoexec.bat @ECHO OFF PROMPT $P$G PATH C:\DOS;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM; SET TEMP=C:\TEMP REM -- HDD cache: SMARTDRV.EXE 2038 512 MODE.EXE LPT1:,,P >NUL SHARE.EXE /F:150 /L:1500 MOUSE.COM /Y DEVICE=C:\sb16\DRV\CTSB16.SYS /UNIT=0 /BLASTER=A:220 I:5 D:1 DEVICE=C:\sb16\DRV\CTMMSYS.SYS CD \WINDOWS WINAnd don’t forget to set the jumpers correctly!
You forgot to load EMM386 or even HIMEM.SYS! You might as well not even bothered installing that expensive 4MB SIMM stick for all the use you’re gonna get out of it.
