Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We sing and dance forever and a day
We live the life we'd choose
We fight and never lose
Those were the days, oh yes, those were the days

Fortunately this post is not about Mary Hopkin's song hit, but rather a look in the computer world 10 years ago. Remember those days where a huge games that comes in floppies and how we would like to fit it all in one floppy? Then games became much bigger and it fits to at least 3-4 diskettes. But we were happy and we were content.

Anyone remember how fun is was in DOS? How stable it was and you never have to worry if you just power off the system just like that? How you go around pressing CTRL ALT DEL at the same time just to do the system reset like no tomorrow? And those days where games received almost no patches and they ran just fine? How application like Lotus 123 or DBase run without any hiccups on a DOS system? The only time we see it hanging is that when we:

- Misconfigure the system - that means we configure the system to run Gravis Ultrasound when you only have a Sound Blaster Pro
- Bad programming - happened to most of the homebrew program written in Pascal or C when we found some looping bug

We never heard of C++ until much later. And that was when we never even hard that Microsoft Windows would be made into something bigger. We have full control of the file system and how we love it. Virus comes in a nasty package and in some case like Die Hard or Fish, it'll stick to the boot sector and never be removed. Unlike these new sissy viruses, we don't have a real Safe Mode. If a virus attacks our boot sector, we use debug to actually look into the drive to check the assembly coding contain no foreign codes. ASSEMBLY! The building block of the software made those days.

And those were the days we never heard of VESA. The biggest HDD around the block was 10 MB and we have only 640k worth of memory. Oh and how much games it could play. I can still remember putting a CD-ROM into the drive involve 2 process, where you put in the driver with Microsoft CD Extension (mscdex).

These days you defrag the hard drive to improve performance. Those days we play around with config.sys & autoexec.bat to limit loaded device driver. Then we used a lot of command like devicehigh to move less critical driver to the higher region of memory so that games can occupy to lower and main region of the memory.

Talking about processor, see how long we've gone since 086, 286, 386 (which lasted for 6-8 years in Malaysia) before 486 comes in. Then we have Pentium, Pentium 2, Pentium 3 & lastly Pentium 4... And the speed, my god these days you've seen a 3.2 GHz processor while my old 486 SX runs measly at 25mhz. Just roughly what my Palm m100 used to run.

Okay let me stop for the moment. To be continued... if I have more stories of the old day to share to the young generation...