> It was also the time when software just worked.

I don't remember this at all! I remember monkeying around with config.sys and autoexec.bat setting env variables and loading drivers all so I could play some game I downloaded from a BBS. You had to constantly switch back from Windows to DOS depending on what application you were using. for ease of use.

By contrast, in today's world you can go on an app store (windows, steam, etc) press "download" and your application downloads, installs and for the most part, just works.

You are thinking of DOS / Win 3.11 era. I also had to play with DMA and irq jumpers.

Gp post is thinking on Win 95 to XP era. When CDs were common but internet was usually 56k .

I would expect that for most people the time period where there was overlap between config.sys tinkering, Windows, and BBS was pretty small. And likely even less overlap with the era where "3D Studio was on a CDROM".

And to be honest I have always found these stories of "ohmygod I need one extra K of unfragmented low memory, time to tinker with config.sys again" way overblown. I would just do this selective boot thingie that was introduced with some DOS version and period. By the time memmaker was introduced, I don't remember ever needing to use it at all.

> "ohmygod I need one extra K of unfragmented low memory, time to tinker with config.sys again"

i know a lot of ppl went deep down the rabbit hole of computers because of this.

thou the period _was_ short because memory got bigger/cheaper and then win95 came along with 32bit and virtual memory.

I spent a lot of time tinkering with config.sys and autoexec.bat. Partly because I wanted to get different games running and partly because it was almost like a game unto itself.

I don't remember this time. I remember a time when we blamed the operating system constantly for what was just as often an application memory management failure and thought that rebooting 4 times a day was normal.

I remember what you do. Windows pop ups every hour, multiple reboots, blue screens out of no where, hardware issues, and having to upgrade via CDs. Oh shit I scratched my windows update disk!

I miss the state of development from that time.

I was developing multimedia CD content with software like Director and Authorware[1]. We had a project and when it was released the project was clearly done. Today projects don't finish because continuous integration is a never ending story.

[1] I also miss this kinds of visual programming sometimes. Authorware was very underrated imho.

I'm not familiar with Authorware specifically, but there's a whole lost world where computing was extremely rich in visuality, dynamism, and play, and the striking thing is that these qualities were expected to enhance peoples' useful output. Some of the early Smalltalk demos exhibit this beautifully, and they're from the 70s. It almost feels like the era of "rich media" embodied by Encarta, "animated storybooks", etc., was the dying gasp of that conceptualization.

The common association with computers as mechanisms of boredom, exclusion, and wage slavery is so strong now that it's hard to imagine anyone seriously countenancing the old paradigm that the technology was meant to allow. I don't know whether that outcome was ultimately inevitable or not, but either way, it's massively disappointing.

I too mourn the loss of the "interactive web" for want of a better phrase. Computer programs like Encarta used to be fun to explore and interact with. The same can be said of many '90s and '00s sites that would feature Easter eggs, or a unique method of navigation.

Bring any of this up today, and you'll immediately be met with a barrage of critiques about Flash security, or UX dogma like "Users prefer to scroll, not click around or hover on stuff."

The end result is the soulless, identikit web we have today, where the only things that display motion are the banner ads. We navigate through websites by scrolling alone, as though we were using a microfiche machine to read a newspaper from 1920.

I think the biggest issue with the "interactive web" is that we found that interactivity isn't necessarily always a good thing. Sometimes, the simpler, boring, perhaps "soulless" technology is the most appropriate technology for the task.

Remember Microsoft Bob? Or 3D filebrowsers for Unix? Turns out, those weren't improvements over the more traditional filesystem browsers that persist to this day. More recently, the tile concept that MS tried in Windows 8 didn't catch on either.

When I took a course on information visualization, one of the takeaways was that, even as we're learning about several different techniques for displaying data, sometimes (more often than you'd think!) the most effective technique is a simple table. A well-formatted table, to be sure, but a table can be more powerful than even an interactive graph.

More to the point: I'm talking to you with pure text, even less interactive content than a microfiche machine reading a newspaper. But what interactivity would enhance my content or clarify my point instead of providing a distraction?

I'm not sure were it would be on a timeline compared to Encarta, but I'd add the hay days of Flash on the web to that. Much like you describe there was such a sense of fun in those days. Flash had enough abstraction and was simple enough for anyone to create weird animations and sites with interesting interactions.

The website feels like a stale medium today. I guess it's just too important to mess with nowadays. Pragmatism and familiarity rule supreme.

PS. I'm sure I'm biased because nostalgia. Flash web was a nightmare in many (most?) respects.

The Hypercard days were a particularly exciting time. Back then, it seemed like more and more of the computer could be "authored" by regular people. Then it all seemed to vanish.

> I also remember the CD-ROM era (and before that). It was also the time when software just worked.

Except when it didn't. Keeping with the Encyclopedia theme, it was usual back then to buy an yearly book to update your paper encyclopedia; once we stopped buying these (the last one we have is from 2009), the vendor convinced us to buy a "Grande Barsa DVD" (version 6.0). It doesn't work at all unless you first download and install a small patch, which was easy to find back then but now seems to have disappeared from the web.

I don't remember that time. I remember a bunch of software that had severe errors (Office 97 parsing some emails corrupting the PST, Exchange 5.0 lacking relay control) that were only resolved by paying for a major new release. And games like 'Magic Carpet' that had game breaking bugs meaning you could never finish them, masked by making the game so difficult you would never visit the level in question.

If I could edit my own comment I would add:

Is not that it was easy, or that programs weren't buggy. As read in other comments: autoexec.bat settings, sound card problems, network drivers and a bunch of software that had severe errors. I remember those too!

Because of that I would also correct "It was also the time when software just worked" with "It was also the time when software needed to correctly work at launch".

It was the mindset. Software that worked (99%?) fine from the first installation. The "I'll fix it later" wasn't contemplated or allowed.

Like a Sega Megadrive cartridge, it had to work. It's ok if you want to write "I remember that X game that crashed when...", but you know what I mean.

All that without needing updates, nor phoning home to check which buttons I press most, or requiring me to pay for that extra feature that is already there, already installed, but it will work just for one year.

Now the mentality is close to half-baked-I-must-fix-it-later, pay-me-for-life releases.

> Just install this CD with 3DStudio.

And attach this dongle to the back of your machine. Lost the dongle? You no longer have working software.

You clearly never had to set up a sound card for a DOS game (oh the joys of autoexec.bat) or had to install your own networking drivers just to get TCP/IP support.

GP is talking about the Windows 95/98 era, not the DOS era. By that point, all of that was history.

No it really wasn’t. DirectX, OpenGL and Glide were really the start of Windows games and they didn’t become the norm until around 98 (bare in mind I’m talking about release date, not purchase date). In fact even as late as then some games were still written in DOS using special Glide or GL drivers for DOS. The 95 era of Windows was very much DOS orientated when it came to gaming.

Citation: I was a gamer and games developer in that era.

>> The content on those CDs was permanent.

For better or for worse, you can read about current events (or even from a year or so ago) on wikipedia. Which you couldn't do with your CD based encyclopedia.