Don't talk to me unless you built PCs before Plug 'n play. You're not a real man unless you've tried to install memory, booted your computer to a completely black screen and had to count beeps and look them up in the motherboard manual to see which manually assigned IRQ you selected is fucking everything up so you could pull everything back out just to be able to boot to the CMOS and try selecting a new IRQ, putting everything back in, and trying again.
And this is coming from someone who's old enough to have followed PETSCII schematics to both solder a second SID chip into my C64 to get 6 voices, and have soldered together a homemade video cable for my C128 to be able to get 80 characters without buying a new monitor.
Those were rough days.
I was hot shit in the 80s because I had a C64 BBS that had both a dedicated phone line so that meant the BBS was actually 24 hours (a rarity since most BBSes went offline around the time everyone got home from work and needed the phone), a 1200 baud modem, and I had TWO hard drives! A 1541 and later added a 1571 just so people could log in one person at a time and input their move in the online D&D adventure game that took place on my BBS lol. It took weeks just to get out of a room. Talk about needing a long attention span and patience.
I will say this as a Gen X'er that we earned our stripes. Back when you had to actually know about computers if you wanted to do anything with them. Like I said, rough days.
While it's nice to puff out my chest and say I was there, I will also say that Plug 'n Play was a godsend. As well as USB. This is coming from someone who completely fried the printer port on my PC because I plugged in a printer and forgot to turn it off first.
/computer nostalgia
