Hacker News Reader

Comment by javier10e6 | Hacker News Reader

I worked in the DELL Manufacturing plant in north Austin (Metric Blvd) on the 386->486 heydays. The DELL Optiplex 386SX will run around 800 to 1200 DLLS and came pre-installed with MD DOS 6.1 and Windows 3.1. When the 486 machines started churning out of the factory Windows 95 came to be and the PCs came pre loaded preloaded with a short action snippet of TOP-GUN and MS Encarta Encyclopedia so you could test your optional and expensive Sound Blaster 16 card. Our competition were Compaq and Packard Bell.

View on HN

> The DELL Optiplex 386SX will run around 800 to 1200 DLLS

Dumb question (maybe I've been out of Windows world too long) but what does this mean?

Dynamically Loaded Libraries

he he. DLLS is short for DOLLAR$ :)

I don't think that's a normal abbreviation. If you Google "DLLS" all the results are about DLLs (and that's obviously not because dollars are an obscure technical term). Maybe you were thinking of USD?

Ha, ha. I also thought we were talking about Dynamically Loaded Libraries and I couldn't remember a time when Windows would show me how many DLLs I had loaded or stop me with, "Sorry, too many DLLs loaded". :P

Unlike extensions on Macintosh that showed up on the start up screen as they loaded!

What language is that? The only abbreviation I've ever seen is USD (the three non-romance languages I speak a little of use a variation on "dollar" which, by context, is always clearly USD.)

> When the 486 machines started churning out of the factory Windows 95 came to be and the PCs came pre loaded preloaded with a short action snippet of TOP-GUN and MS Encarta Encyclopedia so you could test your optional and expensive Sound Blaster 16 card.

I remember the excitement when the SB meant my computer could play, e.g., human speech in my games—I forget what the games of that day were; one of the early Ultimas?—rather than just the beeps and boops of the PC speaker (although some people could do amazing things with that speaker!).

It was Doom. The era of the 386/486 still had a large component of "could it run doom"? And Doom on even an 8bit adlib/sound blaster clone on the ISA bus sounded amazing at the time.

"YOUR SOUND CARD WORKS PERFECTLY"

Good memories :-)

There was a nice easter egg in the installer there that i discovered. Much like how if you repeatedly click on one of your characters in the game they start to get annoyed, the sound card test did the same thing. "IT DOESN'T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS"

Ah yes I'd forgotten about that.

Thanks for sparking a fond memory ^_^

CONFIG.SYS be damned!

Wing Commander 2 is responsible for putting the most SoundBlasters into pre-Win95 computers. And it wasn't just for the sound capabilities. The first generation of SB cards included a CD-ROM interface. Prior to ATAPI there was no standard way to put an optical drive in a PC. SoundBlaster put the sound and CD-ROM interface on one card it saved you having to buy extra hardware, and encouraged developers to use discs for distributing their software.

Eventually IDE/ATAPI drives became the norm, and I believe the SB16 dropped the proprietary CD-ROM.

My original (8-bit) Sound Blaster did not have a CD-ROM controller, but my first SB16 did.

Man I remember when I got the sound blaster 1.0 directly from Singapore it was amazing. Even had the gameblaster chips that worked with a handful of games. The next big card for me was the gravis ultrasound which was a must when you were into the whole demoscene in the late 90s.

I remember seeing the box for Sound Blaster 2.0 at a friends house and just looking at it felt magical at the time. And those soap box speakers powered by batteries, you just can't replicate that sound on modern systems and their fancypants speakers and soundchips.

GUS was definitely a game changer for me also, I can still remember how much cleaner and yet at the same time warmer the sounds outputted by GUS were when used correctly.

At that time these chips and cards still had their signature sounds, kinda missing this period in a way.

> I remember the excitement when the SB meant my computer could play, e.g., human speech in my games—I forget what the games of that day were; one of the early Ultimas?—rather than just the beeps and boops of the PC speaker (although some people could do amazing things with that speaker!).

They certainly could do amazing things with that speaker. I remember being blown away when I loaded up a PCPlus magazine "superdisk" cover disk some time in the early nineties IIRC and speech came out of the PC speaker -- "Welcome to SuperDisk 61" (or whatever number it was).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com