• Desqview, swapping between GoldEd and the BBS watching the users playing LoRD and other games. And before that, scrambling to quit my game and get the BBS back up when I was using my 286 for gaming instead of leaving the BBS running.

• Those terrible, terrible CGA games that I played because for a couple years, I only had CGA and no EGA. The high pitched whine of the CGA monitor whenever I stood behind it.

• When I finally got OS/2, and could play Descent or Doom, while the BBS was handling a phone call in the background.

• Even older, printing out yet another Bill the Cat on my dot matrix printer.

• Typing in games from Compute Magazine into my Atari 130xe, but the checksum being wrong because I used abbreviated basic commands due to being a lazy typist.

• Getting killed by that darn Terminator in Zone 2 of LOD again...

• Going to my Uncle's house to transfer all of Kings Quest 6 from 1.44mb to 1.2mb floppies.

To add devices for your computer (like a disk drive, a serial or parallel port, or more memory) you needed a huge box with a very rigid cable and a lot of space.

This was for the TI-99/4A.

A couple:

1. CRC Errors when restoring 9-track tapes (the large reels) on a mini at work.

2. A manager not knowing a removable 256meg Disk Pack suffered a heard crash. So he mounted it on 4 or 5 production drives, destroying the hardware. He did this to test if the Disk pack was OK. This caused almost a month of agony while we went looking for hardware to replace the drives. This caused manufacturing to slow down since inventory could not be ordered.

I can almost laugh now :)

Loading games from big floppy disks, hearing the CLINK CLUNK CLUNK WRRRRR noises, on the BBC Micro computers at school in the early 90s. There were boxes of awesome games like Chuckie egg that we had to work out how to load during lunch breaks.

Then getting our first home computer with win 3.11 which was a huge deal then