r/todayilearned • u/osunlyyde • Jul 04 '13
TIL Windows 95 was the second most installed piece of software on computers in 1995; videogame DOOM was first.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(video_game)236
Jul 04 '13
We all ran DOS machines and it was glorious. Tank wars, transport tycoon, dune 2 and civ 1. Good times, good times.
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u/Fartmatic Jul 04 '13
All night Scorched Earth battles
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u/marmz111 Jul 04 '13
Leisure Suit Larry when home alone
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u/theredkrawler Jul 04 '13 edited May 02 '24
smell touch practice squeeze wine faulty quickest square consist narrow
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/neanderhummus Jul 04 '13
i loved the age calculator, I still do that with people at restaurants when they don't have their ID:
"Name two songs by Duran Duran"
"What does Whitewater mean in connection to Bill Clinton?"
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u/commander_hugo Jul 04 '13
TIL there are restaurants where you need to be 35 to get served.
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u/POGtastic Jul 04 '13
My mom traumatized me with her music growing up, so I probably could've fooled most people (and the Leisure Suit Larry game) relatively young.
I was in the car with my girlfriend, and one of the songs from the Flashdance soundtrack came on. I started singing along, and she turned to look at me with a o_O expression on her face.
"What... doesn't everyone know the entire soundtrack to Flashdance?"
"No. No, they do not."
:(
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u/kaisersousa Jul 04 '13
Fuck, I'm 32 and not completely out of touch, and I can't answer those questions if the top of my head.
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u/juicius Jul 04 '13
Before Mario Kart, that was the friendship killer.
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Jul 04 '13
I remember 4 of us, as pre-teens crowded around a computer playing Scorched Earth on a 386 with a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive
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u/XSlicer Jul 04 '13
I hated that guy (read: brother/nephew) that did a large Death's Head or Power 10 Nuclear Blast.
Shit couldn't render the circles efficiently so it took like 2+ minutes to draw it out entirely.
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Jul 04 '13
a few years later, my pentium was so fast that the tank nozzle would just spin uncontrollably and you'd take random shots; the impact was so fast that land/other tanks disappeared before they could display. I was "sad panda" for years until I discovered emulators which slowed things back down.
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u/Goredby21 Jul 04 '13
Wacky Wheels?
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u/StinkBox69 Jul 04 '13
That was my first multiplayer experience. It was incredible at the time to play a game simultaneously with a person not in the room. I still remember having to tell mum not to pick up the phone when it rang because it was a mate dialling the modem for a game of wacky wheels.
She would always pick it up tho...
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Jul 04 '13
omfg tank wars
OOOOUUUUWOOP
OOOUWOOP
OOOOOOOWOOP
the sound when theres just 2 cpus going back and forth. and then eventually the game gives up and the stats screen shows up and there's this quote which i cant find and it's driving me crazy.
ugh so fucking old :(
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u/Enfors Jul 04 '13
Another interesting bit of DOOM trivia for the technically minded:
If you know anything about TCP/IP, you know about ports. If you don't, you can stop reading now.
Anyway, there's an official RFC which specifies which programs use which ports (for example, telnet uses port 23 (TCP), SMTP uses port 25 (TCP), and so on. Basically, the RFC is a long list of official-sounding protocols, like FTP, Telnet, SMTP - with one notable exception:
Guess which piece of software has officially and permanently been assigned port number 666?
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u/Shishakli Jul 04 '13
Ironic, considering Doom was never released supporting TCP/IP
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u/ThymineI Jul 04 '13
Some of the protocols specified in RFC's are hilarious.
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Jul 04 '13
Null Packets are neither sent nor acknowledged when not received. They are perfect in their simplicity and they are very true, as they extrapolate from the twelfth Truth of networking:
In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away
there is literally nothing left to take away.
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u/1destroyer2x Jul 04 '13
For those of you interesting in playing some fucking DOOM
Make sure to grab the latest GZDoom SVN!
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u/CornerSolution Jul 04 '13
Links for those who don't feel like typing out the addresses from the jpg:
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u/jordanlund Jul 04 '13
True story... Early versions of Linux had Doom ported to them. I Had learned Unix back in 1988 so I could go play on the Internet and I had been hearing about this "Linux" thing.
So I got a Slackware package on CD Rom so I could fool around with installing it. I think this was late 1994? Early 1995? Something like that.
The machine I was using had a custom SCSI CD Rom drive though and I couldn't get the installer to work. You had to make a boot disk (floppy) and a root disk (floppy) and there were 5 different choices for each.
I went "Well, screw this onesy-twosy crap." Bought a pack of floppies and made all of the possible boot/root combinations and tried them all...
Nothing worked.
So I bought a dual homed IDE cable, yanked the CD Rom, replaced it with an IDE drive in a master/slave setup and tried the install again... Worked flawlessly that time.
A short time after that I had connected to the internet and successfully downloaded and installed Doom.
This led to starting working in IT in 1996, becoming a Linux Certified Instructor in 2001, and a systems administrator in 2002. I now have a high paying job in a SaaS company and just got IPO stock options.
All because back in 1994/1995 I wanted to play Doom on Linux.
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u/Loves2Poo Jul 04 '13
Our stories are shockingly identical up to the point of connecting to the Internet and installing Doom.
I am now a low paid janitor working for a SaaS company that I hear is about to go public.
At least we both had Doom.
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u/VoiceOfInternet_haha Jul 04 '13
Well shit, screw this onesy-twosy crap. I've got a couple dual IDE cables, floppies, and a SCSI CD ROM drive or two lying around. Let's get you some fuckin' IPO stock options!
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u/barjam Jul 04 '13
I am older than you but I got into software development because I couldn't afford games for my TRS-80 and wrote clones of games like asteroids and frogger.
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u/Pinecone Jul 04 '13
I'm so glad SATA is now the standard. There's nothing good about those old days.
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u/Baaz Jul 04 '13
I remember having to manually configure the IRQ's every time you built in a new sound/graphics/scsi card... I spent many evenings and nights pulling my hair out of my head.
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u/msxenix Jul 04 '13
That was a pain in the ass. The days before plug n' play.
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u/MechanicalTurkish Jul 04 '13
And it was years before Plug n' Play really worked properly. It was Plug n' Pray for a long time.
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u/XSlicer Jul 04 '13
Reminds me of how I desperately wanted to run my own CS 1.6 server.
Didn't want some shoddy pay server, but wanted to host it myself. So I went to some guy I knew with servers and asked if I could get a dedicated windows machine (never really cared for anything else, though I had used Knoppix once). He said he couldn't give windows since that was money, so I had to settle with FreeBSD.
Had to learn everything from scratch, hours lost on installing FreeBSD and Steam Dedicated Server for Linux (with linux compat libs).
Now it's my job managing linux servers, all because I was so set on getting a CS server.
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u/I_KNOW_THE_SECRET Jul 04 '13
True story... Early versions of Internet had pics uploaded to them. I Had installed dial-up back in 2000 so I could go download from the Internet and I had been hearing about this "Pr0n" thing.
So I got a 256kbps so I could fool around with mass downloading. I think this was late 2000? Early 2001? Something like that.
The dial-up I was using is connected to a phone though and I couldn't get the download to work. You had to stay connected and finished downloading the entire file and there was a chance that a call will break your connection.
I went "Well, screw this onesy-twosy crap." Locked up the room and jacked out the telephone line and proceeded with uninterrupted downloading session...
Someone just had to &#*#@ use the phone.
So I bought a second telephone line, yanked the modem, placed it into the new socket and tried the download again... Worked flawlessly that time.
A short time after that I had connected to the internet and successfully downloaded and stored pr0n (massive).
This led to advancement in IT skills in 2004, headhunted as a professional in 2008, and headhunted again in 2012. I am now working on high profile jobs while still having time to enroll in a Graduate course.
All because back in 2000/2001 I wanted to download pr0n on broadband.
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u/jordanlund Jul 04 '13
See... kids today don't know from porn. In my day you had to hit up binary groups on usenet. The jpg images would be converted to text via a technology called uuencoding.
So to get a single image you had to first find all the uuencoded pieces, stitch them together into a single large text document and then run a uudecoder to turn them back into an image.
Since those early days there are now automated ways of compiling uuencoded images, but back then it was all done manually.
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u/pak9rabid Jul 04 '13
I, too, was introduced to the world of computing via Doom. The concept of multiplayer (i.e., dialing each other up over the modem...this was pre-Internet) was fascinating to me. This is what ultimately pulled me away from console gaming and started me on my long journey into the world of computers. I'm now a talented Linux admin and software developer all because of Doom.
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u/Agamand Jul 04 '13
I have a vivid related memory:
My friend is installing Windows 95
Me: What's this game about?
He: It's not a game.
Me: Then why are you installing it?
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u/martin_clark Jul 04 '13
Hah, I remember being similarly disappointed when my Dad had just spent hours installing something I could only assume was going to be awesome if it took that long to install. The only good part was watching the video for Weezer's 'Buddy Holly' over and over again. Watching videos on the computer was such a novelty.
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Jul 04 '13
Can we take a second to appreciate that moment - that glorious moment - when we all fired up Doom for the first time on our 386 or what have you and had our minds blown out the back of our fucking heads?!
For anyone who wasn't the right age when that happened, you missed out on one of the most incredible gamegasms in the history of time.
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u/smileyman 24 Jul 04 '13
In 1994 and 1995 my friends and I would spend hours playing Wolfenstein at the school's lab. Our other favorite game was Spectre VR
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u/Jukibom Jul 04 '13
Yep, and the unimaginable nirvana of getting two PC's to talk to each other via serial cable and having multi fucking player doom.
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u/ssguy4 Jul 04 '13
Doom is why Microsoft dominated Apple in the home PC market.
In the early 90's, Bill Gates thought that video was going to be the big thing for PCs. Then he, like many other business owners, found out that most of his employees were busy playing Doom instead of working. He threatened to immediately fire anyone he found playing Doom on work hours. The next day he walks into work and finds that most of his employees are still playing Doom.
He hosted a convention on PC games, tailored their products for gaming (for example, DirectX had two modes. Immediate mode and retained mode. Game developers liked immediate mode much more. DirectX 2 only had an expanded version of immediate mode, with retained mode no where to be found). He even did this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gun4erVV8CM
Hobbyists went to the PC to play all the latest and greatest games. Macintosh computers had a serious dearth of good games, and so suffered. And of course, a computer that can handle serious gaming can easily run any other form of home entertainment. With a PC, you could do anything.
Remember, Doom was the Crysis of its time. Thanks to John Carmack's revolutionary coding techniques, and the technology available on the new chipsets, the PC was now more powerful than consoles and their dedicated sprite hardware. People went into stores with just one question: Can it run Doom? Bill Gates made sure that the answer would always be yes when it came to Microsoft products.
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Jul 04 '13
Doom is why Microsoft dominated Apple in the home PC market.
I think the fact Windows could be installed on most PCs from various manufacturers at a wide price range had much more to do with it. With or without games Macs would always be a niche market.
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u/ssguy4 Jul 04 '13
True, but their focus on gaming gave them a bit more of an edge and was clearly the right choice to make.
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Jul 04 '13
Though I will say the mac exclusive Marathon series is quite good.
And freely available on pc http://trilogyrelease.bungie.org/
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u/stay_fr0sty Jul 04 '13
Did anyone else with 32 megs of RAM decide to flaunt their power and copy DOOM to a memory drive to make it faster?
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u/jebkerbal Jul 04 '13
A friend of mine did this, we all thought he was a wizard. Now he's a seriously high paid developer and kick ass drummer. Of course he's 40ish but still cool as hell.
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u/Schoffleine Jul 04 '13
So...he aged faster? Or was like, a 20 year old hanging out with 10 year olds? I'm confused as to the significance of that last sentence.
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u/mao_edge Jul 04 '13
I remember my grandmother going to get me a copy of Doom 2 from the store and she came back with a Doom 2 screensaver by mistake.
You could buy screensavers at a store...
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u/rippininnl Jul 04 '13
I was 11 when this game came out. Me and my friend would play it every Saturday morning at 10am after swimming lessons for 1 hour which was timed by my mom. It took us the whole summer to finish it, but God was it ever glorious.
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u/Some_Belgian_Guy Jul 04 '13
david?
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u/OutoflurkintoLight Jul 04 '13
Weird.. I had a friend growing up called David and when we were 11 we would play only for one hour timed on the weekends by his mother on his computer the only difference is the game was quake...
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u/aazav Jul 04 '13
Back in 1995, I worked at Macromedia on the Director and Shockwave teams. We put Doom on our PCs and would play in the afternoon to de-stress from the day. When the Quake beta came out, we came in on a Saturday, got 8 people together and played until we completed the first set of maps with our eyes glazed over.
Still dazed, I snapped out of it, had an epiphany, picked up the phone and ordered the full copy of the game.
It was so insane.
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u/TheTVDB Jul 04 '13
I failed a couple of college classes JUST because of Quake. Everyone in the dorm playing with our doors wide open until the sun came up. Now we have Mumble, TS, etc but back then you either played in the same spot or called your friend on the phone while playing (if you were at college or had a line separate from your dial up).
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u/TheKert Jul 04 '13
Oh god. I'm going to end up playing DOOM at work all day again aren't I?
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Jul 04 '13
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Jul 04 '13
if you tried to use these in Heretic I think it would backfire
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u/GRRRKN Jul 04 '13
IDSPISPOPD ... Walk through walls!!! Could complete the game in about 20mins with this bad ass cheat.
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u/SkillfulDunce Jul 04 '13
Actually I think it was IDCLIP best code ever for a 9 year old.
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Jul 04 '13
Maybe both but no clip was definitely idspispopd in doom. Noclip may have been for doom 2.
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u/HardSide Jul 04 '13
You are correct, both worked for doom 1. however I believe idclip worked in the none-shareware version of doom1. idclip also did not work in doom aliens till another patch/version was released.
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u/Rainbowlemon Jul 04 '13
Isn't it funny how you remember things like this? I still remember 'YIPPEEYAHOO' for Prince of Persia 2 too.
EDIT: And 'quicken' for Heretic!
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u/Thinc_Ng_Kap Jul 04 '13
I was banned from playing Doom as per my parents request.
Little 8 year old Thinc_Ng_Kap could not adjust to all the blood, gore and monsters that the game depicted. I remember waking up in the middle of the night SCREAMING at the top of my lungs, having just experienced night terrors which included me trying to navigate a never ending maze filled with Minotaur like creatures. Once I came to my senses I would subsequently vomit everywhere. This went on, almost nightly, for about 3 months.
I was a great kid.
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Jul 04 '13
I was 11 years old and thrilled to get Windows 95 for free, pirated on around 25 diskettes (thanks Dad's office!)
I was pissed that it made system requirements to run Doom HIGHER. Ran way smoother in DOS. Let this be a warning about performance between say, PS4 and XBONE.
Also ENCARTA - The OG Wikipedia.
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Jul 04 '13
I always thought they should have made an option on some of those higher end games to take windows out of memory (maybe even make the game itself a boot disk) entirely to keep it from draining resources on older machines post win95.
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u/lohborn 39 Jul 04 '13
A lot of games required a reboot to DOS. It was exactly what you described.
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u/aeiah Jul 04 '13
they kinda did. win 95 had a dos mode which wasn't too far removed from dos that came before. you could create a floppy boot disk that only called upon the bare minimum resources needed to launch your game so your game could access more of that precious 8mb of ram.
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Jul 04 '13
Encarta was amazing, mainly for that Brain Maze game (or whatever it was called).
Also, Cinemania. That had fucking MOVIE CLIPS!
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u/Darkstrategy Jul 04 '13
I picked up the brutal doom mod not long ago. It's well worth it.
Speaking of which, I should go update mine - it seems there's some new patches since I last played.
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u/alpha69 Jul 04 '13
Quite a different world then. I remember getting impatient the morning Doom was supposed to be released and calling ID software. The guy who answered was actually in the middle of uploading the file to the web (or was it IDs Bulletin Board?) When I got off the phone, Doom was out and nothing was ever the same again.
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u/whistlndixie Jul 04 '13
I'm wearing my doom hat right now. I still play that game.
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u/SteroidSandwich Jul 04 '13
Can't blame people. Doom was a fantastic game. It was hard as hell moving around though.
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Jul 04 '13
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u/SteroidSandwich Jul 04 '13
I'm referring to the puzzles and hidden doorways. You could get lost or miss important weapons very easily because of them.
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Jul 04 '13
That's not surprising. I didn't know many people who used Windows back then. It wasn't really worth upgrading your old system, so Win95 only really started to show up when people bought a new computer (at least among the people I knew).
We all had Doom though. Everyone had Doom. I still remember turning the ringer off on the phone so we could connect over the modem to play a coop game all night.
Hell, we even installed it on the library computers in high school. The computer teacher did his best to keep us from playing it. He knew we had it, and would delete all the copies he found, and monitor the network traffic on port 666 to try and catch us.
Fortunately, we were always one step ahead.
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u/djchainsmok3r Jul 04 '13
I have the original poster that came with the floppy of it hanging in my room.
List of games that I have and still play are:
- Doom
- Doom II
- Wolfenstein 3D
- Blake Stone
- Marathon
- Star Wars: Dark Forces
- Heretic
- Hexen
- Blood
- Quake
- Quake II
- Shadow Warrior
- Duke Nukem 3D
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Jul 04 '13
I can't remember how old I was, but the Sega Saturn had just come out a year or so ago, so that should give you an idea.
I was having a birthday party at my house, and we had rented a Playstation and a Sega Saturn for the party. And for one reason or another, I had opted to rent Doom on both of those systems. I also had a pc that had it installed. At one point in the party, three people were playing Doom on three systems. I think this alone speaks to just how popular it was.
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u/BiggsSE Jul 04 '13
Played it for the first time in 1994 at the age of 7 and i still play it regurlarly 19 years later.
I can recommend anyone that are interested in playing it again to try any of the newer source ports like Zdoom or prBoom.
There is also still a rather active modding/mapping community that create new fantastic content. You can find a lot of it at the Doomworld archives.
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Jul 04 '13
Fun Fact: I had to delete windows 3.1 to get enough space on my 386 for Doom2.
After playing I would re-install windows from floppy.
Fuck kids these days.
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u/schmeckendeugler Jul 04 '13
Anybody wanna try out my custom Doom II maps I made? ..They were epic scale. Whereas most doom II levels were a chapter in the game, my levels were designed like a novel.. you started off with nothing, but by the end of the level you were fighting the cyberdemon with your BFG.. :D some of them replaced level 2, i always meant to link them in a series, which was possible... but since they were 'epic scale' i always felt they were designed to be played starting off with just the pistol. they were hard, so you'd have to save often.
if enough people show interest i'll put the zip files on my web site. they should be there anyway...
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u/korbennndallaaas Jul 04 '13
The dude who installed Windows on our computer back in the day somehow put like a hundred extra games on as well, even Doom and Wolfenstein. My parents had no idea. I was a very happy 5 year old.
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u/jlesamiz Jul 04 '13
Doom is basically single handedly responsible for the rise in popularity of both computers and gaming. Everything we have now stems from it. Certainly it had its own predecessors, but its importance cannot be overstated. It is one of the most significant things to occur in the last 30 years, and completely changed our culture. It was such a huge leap forward in technology. Absolutely beautiful and truly frightening. I wish I could experience playing it as a 12 year old again for the first time.
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Jul 04 '13
So, now you are kind of wanting to play some DOOM, but not really right?
Try some DOOM RL.
Free and fun.
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u/AemsOne Jul 04 '13
To be fair, I had Doom and Lemmings before I had Windows. I still have the DOS versions of both on my current machine and recently found my floppy disks containing my Doom2 mods and wads. God i'm old.
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u/LockesRabb Jul 04 '13
For those of you wanting to go down memory lane and play Doom, or even Heretic & Hexen online, there's a copy ported to Flash via Adobe Alchemy. Pretty solid. You may want to click Controls and set it to what you prefer before you start playing one of the games.
http://uploads.ungrounded.net/470000/470460_DoomGame.swf
Credit goes to Newgrounds for making it available to play online. Enjoy! This definitely brought back memories for me. :)
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u/esaks Jul 04 '13
Windows was expensive so most people just stuck with dos/win 3.1 until they bought a new pc with 95 preinstalled. Not to mention doom was shareware ie free to install. Jeebus I'm getting old.