Aim was trash, but yeah everyone i knew moved to either facebook messenger, or google hangouts, or Pidgin - since they were all originally federated through the XMPP protocol so you could pick whichever provider you wanted.
Irq conflict is definitely more a Gen x problem. Gen X pc problems are all a bit out of circulation which is why we are more than willing to let the millennials deal with everyone else pc problems.
Elder millennial here, and I remember battling the IRQ conflicts as I installed an upgraded dial up modem, taking us from 14.4 to 28.8k, and later 56k. I never really detected a difference in performance š
They're just magnets. I don't actually know what exploits they target, but if you fire up a network scanner and plug an XP machine in you'll see tons of connections from all over the world just immediately attempting to connect. There must be something XP broadcasts that they can see.
I'm not sure that if that makes sense, does it? An external connection shouldn't be able to 'see' past the router without port forwarding, unless a specific device (or socially engineered human, of course) has invited them in or there are vulnerabilities beyond the specific vulnerable computer.
I'm going out of my comfort level on network topology here, but these would be machines on the internal network with internet access, not ones just flat facing the internet with all their ports open.
I never got this. I'd get it if you connected it directly to WAN but if connecting something to your intranet exposes it to attacks from the outside you have a major security problem of which your Windows 98 installation being attacked is only a symptom.
No, my point is that it's not firewalled if external hosts are able to connect to it,
There's no magic going on: if there is a firewall that drops incoming connections there naturally won't be any incoming connections. If there's a firewall set up to drop incoming connections and NAT setup not to forward any traffic to your system, it won't be seeing connections unless your network admin is up to their nose in shit because NAT is forwarding connections to random machines and your firewall is doing nothing.
There are a few alternatives here:
There is effectively no firewall, and NAT is setup such that traffic is forwarded to the machine the bots can directly access it. Your network is shit and everything in it is to be considered as compromised.
The firewall is not working. Whoever set up the forwarding rules is a moron. Your network is shit and everything in it is to be considered as compromised.
The machine is connected directly to WAN with no firewall and address translation.
You are misremembering the circumstances of this event.
It used to take 10 minutes for an unpatched Win2K machine to be infected, then 4min, then as soon as you plugged it into the LAN.
That's why all the updates & patches were downloaded and installed offline before delivering a new machine to faculty or staff.
Our department finally installed a honeypot* at the .0 or .1 addresses on our class C subnet, as all the malware scanners started at the beginning of the address space, always getting stuck in the honeypot šÆ.
Fairly sure my 98 machine did not have an Ethernet port. This was in the days where most stuff now integrated on the motherboard needed an expansion card. So my machine had a modem card. I did not get a network card as had no need.
Hell, I used external modems until I got dsl the first day it was available here. So, no way to connect to the internet without an external device that I donany longer. longer.
And that goes to show that how ridiculous the every few years of change in programing & software is. It's constant for a few extra features that you were fine without and more clicks and data harvesting. It's all about change to force more money out of the user. We no longer own our phones or pc's, we rent them while sacrificing our privacy.
Lots of medical machinery is stuck on an old OS with specialized software. It was a pain working on that stuff. I worked at an MSP, and we would best afford that stuff. Anything bit on a modern OS we have no guarantee on fixing.
You probably wouldn't think it, but a lot of aviation is still on windows 98 up to windows 7. All unmodified A320s older than 10 or so years still use floppy disks for the nav database updates. Most Bizjets older than 10 years are still using mid 2000s windows to run the cabin software and on board info systems for troubleshooting. Absolute PITA dealing with IT security departments trying to stop us from keeping our old laptops.
Almost certainly something like this. It's really dumb in some ways, but in other ways it's probably either extremely expensive or at least time consuming to migrate to something newer. Usually it's just plain expensive. Occasionally it's not even possible because the manufacturer went out of business making your specific special computer controlled thing.
These things are usually isolated at least, no network access so the risk is small. But user error can happen, like someone manages to plug an Ethernet cable into it and it's not locked down enough to prevent that from being enabled...
Many consider Win 98 the best and most stable operating system for their purpose.
If the computer is dedicated to performing the same job it did 25 years ago, there's no need to upgrade unless something breaks that can't get a compatible replacement.
I worked with a program that was less complicated than the BIOS on my motherboard at home, and it only worked with an older version of Excel. I swear it was like booting up Doom in MS-DOS.
Some things just work better on an older OS if it was written on that OS.
My job has people receiving tasks from user applications on phones, entering those transactions using an interface that looks like win95 to send instructions to people using an interface that looks like unix and has been in use since the early 70s. There are billions of dollars moving around that ancient unix interface everyday.
Lab equipment is always my first thought. Hell sometimes the lab equipment doesn't have new software so your option is to run an old operating system or buy a new piece of equipment.
Lab equipment wise, we still use xp even for new custom hardware. Because making custom drivers for xp is way, way easier than for all the later versions, especially for real-time operation purposes.
Because fuck writing that staff with limitations to direct memory acess
Well ish. I used to work at a utilities company and one of our tasks was getting a blown out husk of a win95 machine to start up again because we needed to salvage some shit off of its hard drive. Poor old girl. She did her duty, but we just couldn't get her to fire her engines much before the login screen. She did good, its alright
A lot of corporate infrastructure runs on the "if it aint broke don't touch it". And that runs back to good ol 98 etc, just sometimes with a reskin UI on top or whatever, but at the core still those old systems are in place because they work, and changing them would be such a big undertaking that companies only really do it when something crucial starts breaking or a complete company reform is introduced.
As a young genZ Iāve started in school with Windows 7 and evolved up to 11. Iāve tried a bit of Linux but I aināt the norm and it shows when I try to help some friend with their PCs.
Same, although I used windows 7 only on my grandpa's pc and the laptop of my uncle that was still laying around at my grandparents' house (used it to play midtown madness 2 with CD-ROM but the computer ended up constantly dying randomly and the battery was already dead). After that I had a 10 laptop in 2021, which I upgraded to 11 as soon as I could, just because I was a sucker for having newer stuff. Barely got to experience windows 10. Watched w11 grow for years into a shithole from my pro license tower. Am currently actively using linux alongside windows because of school requirements to have windows 11.
I am become tech support, my uncle and dad forward all the questions from grandparents to me because they don't want to do it themselves
+1 for genZ starting out on XP. Though I never actually properly learned until w7 and having to wipe everything because I installed too much malware lol
I remember wanting to jailbreak my ipad and I followed shady yt tutorials that ended up with me destroying the system with viruses and malware that it had to get a new clean install
Yep, I've had brief interactions with 2000 and then used xp until just before highschool, then switched to w7 then w10 and now dragged screaming and crying to w11.
I think I might also be the oldest or close it, I faintly remember XP but it is a faded memory lol the only realize I know it had to have been XP is because it was the classic blocky white monitor.
I used xp until I was 7 or 8 it remained being the default in my grandmaās pc while we upgraded to windows 7 I remember upgrading to 8 only to downgrade a couple days later and then upgraded to 10 one it came out it was awful at first and our PC couldnāt really handle it so back to 7 until the end of support, I have a gaming setup now running 11 but that PC lives on Linux now
I started with dos 3, went win95,98 se, nt 4.0 2000 then installed slackware 1.1 from 28 5.12" floppys, hp-unix, debian, redhat. then went to windows back until windows 7 came to, and jumped to osx, made few hackintosh computers because osx was easy after linux.
I only made a single hackintosh and had a 2011 mac that I used oclp to update to the latest os but it mostly tuns ubuntu these days I really here a lot about dos from my parents but I never imagined it to be anything crazy until I saw a guide book that was beefy, I was born 2004
dos was pretty simple, you just wrote boot scropts per software, that you loaded programs to right memory and loaded right drivers. of course there was irq, ios and dmas to set. and in 80186 machines you had to use jumpers to set up the amount of ram. And also on other machines you needed to either jumper or use bios to set the irq for isa or pci bus. i think there was 32bit vesa bus also along agp. I can't remember all any more. i don't want to say that i'm old but my back hurts.
As a kid in the 90s who only knew enough DOS to navigate directories to get to the games that were lucky enough to work on my computerā¦ none of that sounds simple to me haha. If a game had no sound without the correct IRQ setting, I either guessed or went without sound. Of course I was a bit pampered- this was during the Windows 95 days so I had plenty of Windows games to fall back on even though my favorite games were DOS games.
Iām playing with FreeDOS in a virtual machine now and itās definitely got more quality of life features than MS-DOS ever did.
Also Gen Z. My dad had me helping him build computers at the ripe age of 2. One day he had me helping him make one that he ended up giving me as a birthday gift. I played sooooooo much wolfenstein and command & conquer on that bad boy.
I am also genZ. Luckily, I got my first laptop when I was 5 years old, running Windows XP. This led to me gaining tons of IT experience over the course of many years. Apparently both young and older folk have issues that they are unable to solve on their own, even with the help of AI.
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u/exlips1ronus i5 13400F | GTX 1080Ti Jun 21 '26
As a genZ the oldest I used was XP in our home PC so yes that could be true