The content on those CDs was permanent. Software rarely needed an updated, it didn't called home with telemetry and it didn't needed a constant internet connection to work. There wasn't subscription models for most of the software.
So you want to do some 3D renderings? Just install this CD with 3DStudio. It works.
I don't remember this at all! I remember monkeying around with config.sys and autoexec.bat setting env variables and loading drivers all so I could play some game I downloaded from a BBS. You had to constantly switch back from Windows to DOS depending on what application you were using. for ease of use.
By contrast, in today's world you can go on an app store (windows, steam, etc) press "download" and your application downloads, installs and for the most part, just works.
And to be honest I have always found these stories of "ohmygod I need one extra K of unfragmented low memory, time to tinker with config.sys again" way overblown. I would just do this selective boot thingie that was introduced with some DOS version and period. By the time memmaker was introduced, I don't remember ever needing to use it at all.
i know a lot of ppl went deep down the rabbit hole of computers because of this.
thou the period _was_ short because memory got bigger/cheaper and then win95 came along with 32bit and virtual memory.
Gp post is thinking on Win 95 to XP era. When CDs were common but internet was usually 56k .
I was developing multimedia CD content with software like Director and Authorware[1]. We had a project and when it was released the project was clearly done. Today projects don't finish because continuous integration is a never ending story.
[1] I also miss this kinds of visual programming sometimes. Authorware was very underrated imho.
The common association with computers as mechanisms of boredom, exclusion, and wage slavery is so strong now that it's hard to imagine anyone seriously countenancing the old paradigm that the technology was meant to allow. I don't know whether that outcome was ultimately inevitable or not, but either way, it's massively disappointing.
The website feels like a stale medium today. I guess it's just too important to mess with nowadays. Pragmatism and familiarity rule supreme.
PS. I'm sure I'm biased because nostalgia. Flash web was a nightmare in many (most?) respects.
Bring any of this up today, and you'll immediately be met with a barrage of critiques about Flash security, or UX dogma like "Users prefer to scroll, not click around or hover on stuff."
The end result is the soulless, identikit web we have today, where the only things that display motion are the banner ads. We navigate through websites by scrolling alone, as though we were using a microfiche machine to read a newspaper from 1920.
Remember Microsoft Bob? Or 3D filebrowsers for Unix? Turns out, those weren't improvements over the more traditional filesystem browsers that persist to this day. More recently, the tile concept that MS tried in Windows 8 didn't catch on either.
When I took a course on information visualization, one of the takeaways was that, even as we're learning about several different techniques for displaying data, sometimes (more often than you'd think!) the most effective technique is a simple table. A well-formatted table, to be sure, but a table can be more powerful than even an interactive graph.
More to the point: I'm talking to you with pure text, even less interactive content than a microfiche machine reading a newspaper. But what interactivity would enhance my content or clarify my point instead of providing a distraction?
Except when it didn't. Keeping with the Encyclopedia theme, it was usual back then to buy an yearly book to update your paper encyclopedia; once we stopped buying these (the last one we have is from 2009), the vendor convinced us to buy a "Grande Barsa DVD" (version 6.0). It doesn't work at all unless you first download and install a small patch, which was easy to find back then but now seems to have disappeared from the web.
Is not that it was easy, or that programs weren't buggy. As read in other comments: autoexec.bat settings, sound card problems, network drivers and a bunch of software that had severe errors. I remember those too!
Because of that I would also correct "It was also the time when software just worked" with "It was also the time when software needed to correctly work at launch".
It was the mindset. Software that worked (99%?) fine from the first installation. The "I'll fix it later" wasn't contemplated or allowed.
Like a Sega Megadrive cartridge, it had to work. It's ok if you want to write "I remember that X game that crashed when...", but you know what I mean.
All that without needing updates, nor phoning home to check which buttons I press most, or requiring me to pay for that extra feature that is already there, already installed, but it will work just for one year.
Now the mentality is close to half-baked-I-must-fix-it-later, pay-me-for-life releases.
And attach this dongle to the back of your machine. Lost the dongle? You no longer have working software.
Citation: I was a gamer and games developer in that era.
For better or for worse, you can read about current events (or even from a year or so ago) on wikipedia. Which you couldn't do with your CD based encyclopedia.
HAHAHAHAHA NO.