Bog-Standard Multimedia:Why PC industry standardized on multimedia in the 90s

tedium.co

17 points·jslakro··6 comments

From my personal memories of the 1990’s, the big breakthrough for multimedia on PCs was Windows 95.

Prior to Windows 95, installing a sound card was a big pain due to manually having to fiddle with IRQ allocation. In addition, many drivers were 16 bit DOS drivers and could take space from the valuable 640k DOS memory (MemMaker anyone?)

Also, multimedia was often large data so programming 16bit programs with their segmented memory models was a big pain.

Windows 95 really fixed a lot of those issues. It spurred the development of 32 but drivers. Plug and play made it a lot more feasible to install sound cards, etc. it was easier to write 32 but programs to process that larger data.

Because the PC clone makers were struggling, through the mid-90s, to get where the Mac and Amiga were in the late 80s.

[deleted]

> I hate to be that guy

Then don't be that guy. Hacker News discourages nitpicking a single thing from the article in the comments.

Calling the whole computer "the CPU" was very common in the 90s. I believe the author of the article deliberately misused the term to invoke 90s vibes and moods.

Edit: Also common at the time was calling monitors "the computer".

If I had to guess, Intel's marketing department played a significant role in quashing the misuse of 'CPU', with their "Intel Inside" stickers and marketing. "Intel Inside" got people to understand that an Intel CPU was something that existed inside their computer, and was not the computer itself. The general public gradually became aware that their computer was "a dell" and inside it somewhere was an Intel CPU.

> Calling the whole computer "the CPU" was very common in the 90s.

The author was clearly used to working with minicomputers.

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