Really? makes downloading anything a God damn joke!

The golden age of technology when noone could reach me via phone.

Dial-up sounds remind me of the time when I used to spend a minute or two contemplating life and the universe while waiting for our internet connection to fire.up.

I don't miss dial-up, but I do miss being able to sit there and just do nothing for a few minutes. Everything these days is NOW, NOW, NOW.

Dial-Up NotWorking? :)

I miss not having a cap on my internet, even though the speed acted as a "natural" cap not letting me dl more than 2 GB a month.

I don't have experience with dialup because back then we weren't able to afford one. Beside, internet in our country back in the day was the thing of upper-middle & upper class people, until it become mainstream in mid 2000's.

As for old computer, I have to to thank my grandfather for lending us one of his ancient machine in mid 90's. I believe the CPU was operated under 100 MHz, with 1MB video memory. I learned to familiarize myself with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Then in late 90's, my grandpa lend us another PC, a much powerful AMD-K6 II 550MHz, 32MB RAM and 4MB S3 Trio 3D video card. Even though it was outdated at the time, but we didn't complain. I remember playing Half-Life, NFS, Nascar and dozen other Windows-based video game on the lowest possible settings under software rendering. That was a good, fun time.

I don't miss dialup and old PC's per se, but I do miss the excitement of certain periods in PC development. The home PC explosion of the early 80's was incredible to live through, and the development of 3D accelerators was also fascinating. For dialup, the development of the internet was also interesting.

Y'all have been marzookered. Shame on you.

ah the black death. now these were the days. didn't need to go far before you found a corpse to turn into one of your undead minions and add to your forces. hell, all you needed to do half the time was go next door and you would have a few corpses ready to be reanimated.


as for dialup. That bloody thing would kick me off this magical place you call the internet web half the time when i was in the middle of playing a flash game or something.

A few months ago when I tried to get certain DOS game to run on a real MS-DOS machine (Pentium 133 with all the bells and whistles), I was appalled how hard it was to get it to run, compared to DOSBox. I had forgotten how hard it can be to get even simple DOS games to run reliably on the real thing. In DOSBox most things run without much of extra fiddling, with real DOS PCs there were all kinds of extra quirks e.g. due to wrong CPU speed, the CPU cache causing problems (e.g. no digital audio on some old Sierra games unless you disabled CPU cache from BIOS; Sierra later released patches for those though) etc.

Not to mention, my real Roland CM-32L has scratchy sound in some games, where the Roland emulator (Munt) plays them cleanly. So I nowadays even before Munt over the real Roland.


For virtual machines specifically though... I haven't had much success with them yet. I'm running both Windows 98SE and XP in virtual machines under VMWare Player, and for now I don't consider them that good option for playing old games. They are somewhat promising, but not quite there yet. The problematic games that have issues on e.g. Windows 7, usually have issues on a virtualized PC as well. Maybe they just are that finicky.

Hell no, i hated that sound cause all i remember is wait...wait...wait...connection lost.
For old computers....are you really missing monochrome/CGA/EGA?

I have an XP VM that I build for LANs that works great. Basically I purchased multiple copies of a heap of DRM free LAN games, got them all to work in an XP VM and we just copy the VM around and everyone has the same games, patched and known to work.

I miss understanding better how my machine worked, and I enjoyed our old computer at the time, but every fresh upgrade makes computing easier, so not many would want to go back to it, which is what usually encourages nostalgia. The sound of the modem is highly memorable, but I am glad I don't have to wait and wait and wait and see if it will let me online this time. Amusingly, I was about to say that I am glad random phone calls don't knock me offline anymore, but I fell offline right after the phone rang just now. Shouldn't be related events, just an odd coincidence

This was terrific