Speedrunning Windows 95

There was a thread a few days ago where someone mentioned their password was the key to "a very popular software" and someone in the replies guessed it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19298120

FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-2B7Q8-8TG6W. I am not sure if its correct.

edit: yes it is. Checked the link in other thread.

There are a lot of numbers from my past that are still committed to my memory too, even though I haven't used them in years. Old telephone numbers, bank account numbers, long-distance calling card numbers (back when a long-distance phone call was a thing you actually paid for). It's weird.

This was me, but with the OG Starcraft: Brood War CD Key. I think I still remember the key, but I'm not sure and I don't have the CD to verify.

I immediately recognized that key :)

Story of my life too, including the 15 years part! Every once in few years, when I feel like my memory skills are fading, I recite the damn key, pat myself in the back and go back to sleep.

The FCKGW key was written down on one of the documents recovered from Osama bin Laden's compound:

https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/61/61C5FB27A...

I just had a similar thing happening a year or two ago. My mom sent me some old backup CDs that she found while cleaning out her basement. I was very happy to find my first attempt at making a game with graphics on one of the discs. The game was written in Visual Basic so I downloaded a copy of the IDE and luckily the installer ran under Wine. When I got to the license screen, some forgotten but apparently not decayed part of my brain clicked into gear and to my surprise I just typed the 12 digit code from memory on the first try, 20 years after I last installed it.

Here's the (not so amazing) result. Consider it a "Show HN"? https://vimeo.com/220071855

My friend had similar 'super power's but.. with Diablo 2 CD key ;)

This joke also reminds me of the "Banned%" Club Penguin speedrun. It was short-lived but people came up with various tricks to speed up the email verification subsequent banning process.

https://www.speedrun.com/cp#Banned

https://www.pcgamer.com/getting-banned-from-club-penguin-is-...

Bought a Dell XPS. After opening the box and starting it, Windows 10 crashed on the second click in the install process!

Windows NT and newer supported unattended installs of both the OS and other software you wanted installed automatically. Not as fast as imaging, but equivalent of a manual install, just without any manual work.

That’s how we handled 100s of machines with an IT dept of just 3-4 techies at the uni I worked for.

And we loathed people who came with non-standard HW our custom boot disks didn’t handle (remember that even being a thing?).

Things have certainly changed and IMO mostly for the better.

In the last job I had, Win 95/98 was on a computer used to send programs to a 20-ton piece of metal working equipment. Of course, you had to drop into DOS to use the necessary software. Transfer rate was around 900 baud. The computer that actually ran the machine consisted of a white monochrome monitor and a desk-sized cabinet full of control boards. The cabinet had an air conditioner attached to it and had trouble running on hot days.

Trivia about this machine: on the corner of one control board there was a single, green indicator LED with a broken lead. It was bent over so the broken part would still contact the solder joint and light up. If at any point it stopped making contact with the circuit, the entire machine locked up or threw random error codes until you wiggled it back into place.

"We'll fix it later"

At a college I worked at a few years ago in one of the larger lecture class rooms. There was a Windows3.1 PC mounted in the podium/lecture counter. It was used primarily for controlling the levels of lights, dropping down the screen and projector, and a few other menial tasks. I don't believe it was wired into the network and don't believe it was ever replaced.

Your link says otherwise. XP can do it too. Might just be a software thing

Reminded me of this https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/7xakd9/windows-31-is-sti...

Ha! Very neat. Wish I’d thought of that trick back in the day.

If you have 21 disks and 21 machines, how much slower is this install method than if you had 21^2 disks for 21 machines?

Assuming all disks read in equal time and it takes no time to move the disks.

In case anyone was wondering (as I was):

> While any of these special filenames would have worked, the most common one used to crash old Windows machines was con, a special filename that represents the physical console: the keyboard (for input) and the screen (for output). Windows correctly handled simple attempts to access the con device, but a filename included two references to the special device—for example, c:\con\con—then Windows would crash. If that file was referenced from a webpage, for example, by trying to load an image from file:///c:/con/con then the machine would crash whenever the malicious page was accessed.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/in-a-...

"oh he forgot to uncheck <component>, that's going to cost him..."

I would probably watch that. At least it would be better than most of the things on the telly.

Semi-oblig-xkcd: https://xkcd.com/284/

It would be great to have a Win95 speed run on SGDQ or similar. :)

Plus if you're using VMs you can manipulate it even further. For example, "lie" to the simulated OS about file-writes, and return files already on the visualized image.

Rules would have to be carefully written.

You can speedrun PC games. For video games, better hardware can speed up things like loading times (which also happens if you put an SSD in your PS4) and increase the framerate but the actual gameplay won't become faster beyond the threshold necessary to play the game smoothly.

This particular speedrun is much more tied to the hardware, but that's part of the fun for these people. It might make more sense if you compare it to something like car racing. Both the hardware and the person matter a lot to the outcome.

A lot of the time, for PC games, someone will have made a plugin that integrates into both the split and the game that removes loading screen times, turning it into an "in-game time" run

Most games run a time-limited simulation, so better hardware will only reduce lag and load times, as well as let you dedicate more computing power toward graphics calculations. An in-game timer can be made to ignore all of these.

As someone using Gentoo in 2004 (what was I thinking?) I would love to see how long this takes in a VM back by a CPU from 2019 and tons of RAM. I have some memory in the back of my head of compiling Gentoo on a Sun Sparc 20 (4xCPU ... I think) with max ram (32 or 128MB?!?) - because I owned one and could (it was old HW in 2004). It took a few days from stage 1. Today if I need to compile anything I ssh to a builder server with 48 cores and 256gb of RAM as the i7 laptop is to slow. Ah, memories.

Funnily enough you've just surfaced an old memory of mine, we did the same thing.

I vaguely recall having to build a 486 out of a bunch of parts, install windows and get to the desktop.

Fun times

How about if it was put together some standard box, then install any operating system and connect a browser to a website [running on the box, the website printing "hello world" to the screen - and must be open for the judges to connect to].

Plenty of scope for choosing and comparing different OS, different software, etc..

you installed linux every night and installed windows every morning?

Ah, found the solution: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=82787

I just want to know what window manager that it.

To show off their waifu of course!

Football fans wear football team shirts to advertise their affiliation. I expect this is the equivalent for fans of Japanese cartoons.

In some cases (can't speak about this specific case) it's a matter of being recognizable. Many platforms (YouTube, twitch, ..) have limited capabilities for the creator to be recognisable. With such a branding at the second video you know "it's the anime guy"

Visual appeal. The anime waifu is more eye catching than a plain background.

Just a playful way to mess with people. At work, I see a guy that wears a D-Va shirt every other day. He is a big guy, and the whole D-Va thing is printed full-screen on his shirt. It makes quite a funny sight.

4chan people are notorious for pulling that kind of shit. I wouldn't be surprised if the person that makes that video is from /g/.

If you don't find it funny, then you don't find it funny, like how you don't get some movies or memes that people like. I do.

creator here; That was my desktop background at the time, recorded the video with obs at 720p because I wanted to get anything watchable on youtube (480p suxx if I wanted to include a timer, also it would look way worse).

BTW, she's not my `waifu`, I just like her as a character.

I use Arch BTW