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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

In high school my friends and I had a basement drinking game called "System 32 Roulette." We had a fresh Windows 98 machine and you had to pick a file inside c:/windows/system32/ by random and forcibly delete it then reboot the machine. If the computer booted up and you could successfully get back to that folder, everyone else had to take a drink. If not, you had to finish your drink and then reinstall Windows.

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My gut reaction was "wow that sounds boring" but then I reread it and realized I would have absolutely been excited about this in high school.

It was mostly a side attraction while we played Smash Bros or whatnot. But the best part is watching a super drunk person trying to install windows. It was hilarious.

Was this off of CD-ROM or a stack of floppies? I think 3.11 was the last of the floppies, but memory is hazy around what 95 install media was. Pretty sure 98 was CD, but that could be a fun "bonus round" to force an install from floppy.

It was a CD, but a really low quality burned CD that we eventually scratched the label side on, which stripped the data side off with it. So it was eventually hung from the ceiling with dental floss. We crossed out "98" with marker and wrote in "95", but to be honest, it didn't install anything by then.

I know I've installed Win95 off of floppies. Don't recall the exact number, but believe it was around 40-50 3.5" floppies. It came in a box about the length of a shoe box.

It was 13. I only remember because that was when I first started learning about computers, and I needed them many times. My Mom loved me.

I have somehow never gotten around to throwing away the box of ancient floppies I've got in a closet from ages ago, and the Windows 95b (OSR2) installation disks I made were still in it, complete with custom color printed labels I splurged on.

https://i.imgur.com/iVNVleR.jpg

The media I copied from took up 28x 3.5" HD floppy disks. It's possible they were copied from what was originally a CD-ROM. I don't remember clearly anymore.

Note: I'm not trying to refute or correct your 13-disk figure, which was clearly a different installation set, and likely original Windows 95 rather than my OSR2, which came out around 1997.

Hrmm. Seems you're right and my memory is way fuzzier than I thought. Raymond Chen also says 13 [0]. Maybe it was just my existential dread of one of the floppies having gone bad that makes me think it was more.

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050819-10/?p=34....

I think Photoshop was around 22 floppies, but things from that time period are quite fuzzy

OS/2 Warp was 40 or so floppies, and sold at such a discount that buying a copy was the cheapest way I knew to get high quality floppies when I was in college

This was brilliant

I remember in college seeing a LOT of OS2/Warp floppies, but I never saw any machines running them.

Now I know why.

I think it was closer to 15-20, but then you had a service pack update which was another 10.

Edit: just checked in Google. Win95 was just 13 floppies. But you had MS Office and other software that was additional floppies to install.

Or watching a straight to DVD sequel of starship troopers.

…why does this loudly ring a bell? Do I know you?

Unless this was in northern VA in the late 1990s, I suspect more it’s just that there’s a certain kind of person who is disproportionately represented on HN who spent high school doing certain kinds of things. Did you take apart CRTs to make lifters too: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jrfBrrDfdEA? :D

I mean, who didn’t?

what’s going on there/how does it work?

The sharp high voltage top wire creates an ionized gas, which causes airflow towards the smooth skirt: https://hackaday.com/2016/07/13/expanding-horizons-with-the-...

Yeah...it's like Windows version of Jenga. Which piece will make the tower crumble?

In high school any excuse to drink with friends was most welcome.

We'll, still is, but in high school too.

I really feel this need be a YouTube series, "Hot Ones" style, while interviewing interesting people in tech.

Doing that in 2022 with machines from back in high school would be a true test of patience

It's 2022 but macOS still somehow takes ages to install updates, even on the most powerful laptop Apple currently sells. Windows 98 installation takes considerably less time on a single core of that same CPU in an emulator.

macOS updates are awful. In the same amount of time as some updates I have completely installed Ubuntu and set up all my programs. A 0.1 or 0.0.1 update should not take 30-40 minutes.

I actually did something similar with the family computer and Windows 95. I didn't know anything about how computers work so I started deleting files and seeing if they were needed. I actually learned a little bit about the operating system from doing this.

To be fair, that's a standard way of debugging a problem. Cut away pieces of the program and see if the problem remains. Continue until you've isolated the fault.

Hey Walter, want to bisect a Windows bug and a bottle of Crown Royal with my pals and I?

Contrary to the sibling comment I absolutely adore this idea! I am definitely doing this sometime with my friends next time I can get them to come over to my place!

Ah, the stuff on HN never ceases to amaze me. This is awesome and something my friends and I would have loved to play.

Do the same with Linux!

Much easier these days with virtualization and COW images.

Half the fun I'd say is knowing that the moment you lose the game you have to slog it through a 30 minute installer

Windows 98 had that SFC (system file checker) feature which was supposed to restore bad or missing system files from the installation cab's. Of course, provided the sfc had its own .dlls still intact and the system could at least boot to prompt.

So potentially such drinking game could last longer than booze on hands.

I'd ask if you kept a list of files that caused Windows to fail to boot, but this was a drinking game...

Before

    xcopy /h/e/c/k/r/y c:\windows\system32\ c:\sys32\

    attrib +h c:\sys32\

From a repair boot disk

    xcopy /h/e/c/k/r/y c:\sys32\ c:\windows\system32\

    attrib -h c:\windows\system32\

I wonder about the random part.. How did you achieve this ? Dice or something ? Be cause even with basic knowledge of the system it would have been easy (for a while) to delete only useless files.. It's à very original drinking game !

The Windows CMD shell contains a built-in variable called %RANDOM% that can be used to generate random numbers.

We weren’t this sober. If I recall we just went into details view, held the down arrow, until someone yelled stop.

haha damn we did a lot of those

i installed windows 98 so many times i still remember the pirated serial number k4hvd-q9tj9-6crx9-c9g68-qr2d3

and then cdc's bo2k came out and everything changed!

System 32 Jenga might also be a good name.

FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W

or something like that :-)

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