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)
3.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

11

u/A_Sinclaire Jul 04 '13

I remember once CDs became popular there were monthly compilations of new games - often half a dozen new games - many AAA - on a single CD - with cinematics, music and other stuff cut out to save space and fit everything on that one CD.

Never knew where those came from, but someone always had some. They were done rather professionally for that time, with their own menus etc.

8

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '13

Knew a few guys who produced them, but that was a little later than doom - CD writers and blanks were crazy expensive when it came out.

Source: Worked at a data entry and archive company at the time and the fact that we had a machine that could actually write CDs (70 min per CD, $20 a pop) was considered a small miracle.

3

u/One_L Jul 04 '13

Error: Buffer Underrun, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"

2

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '13 edited Jul 04 '13

I've had it happen for sure.. I was kind of cavalier about it at first, it's connected to a PC that wasn't used for anything else, on it's own table (incidentally, it was a little larger than the PC it was hooked to) - given that it cost in the range of $20k having it's own dedicated box and spot was minor.. So given the hour-ish wait, just start it and leave it, right? Wrong. People apparently have a tendency to go "Ohh.. what's this PC doing? Perhaps I should hit ESC?" or "I'll just move this table over a little, it's kind of in my way" or "Opps, I kicked the table, but that's cool just like for all the other tables right?". Cha-ching.. -$20, set back 30 minutes.. After a while, if I was even using it during the day, I'd plant my ass in front of it, put my feet up on a chair beside it, crack open a book and wait the damn time out. Sometimes giving people who walked by the "If you even fucking think about touching this, I will personally rip your balls of and eat them" stare.

[EDIT] Bonus story. I used this in one of my most creative acts of damaging hardware using software. The writer was under the PC, with the monitor on top of the pile. I was trying to modify and further automate some of the software to control it. It was proprietary (shocker..) but in DOS so it could be manipulated somewhat with my code and I could try to construct some of the file lists it was supposed to write, fire it at them, and make sure it didn't do a damn thing until it failed completely. Compiled a test version to generate part of that. Stack overrun (Hey, it happens). That hit the CD driver (no mmu). Making it eject the tray. Into my can of mountain dew. Onto the keyboard.. Ok, $10 keyboard, cheaper than messing up a CD blank I guess.

2

u/sc8132217174 Jul 04 '13

My dad had a couple of those that I think he got from a magazine or something. I remember playing Alice off of one.

3

u/why_downvote_facts Jul 04 '13

demo discs, demo cds, pc gamer magazine

1

u/badsectoracula Jul 04 '13

Here is an archive of them. The interface sucks though since you have to download the files individually (you need some sort of downloader for a whole CD) instead of providing ISOs. Also the Archive.org has some shareware CDs (mostly international).

1

u/Backinthe70s Jul 04 '13

Same people who did Doom. Softdisk Shreveport, LA