Why were computers back in the early 1990s fun?

Yeah I did that in 1975.  They had just come off of using reel to reel magnetic tape.

. When they went to the moon, they had reel to reel computers in the launch command room.

.  That was the way it was. Microsoft did not exist then, neither did Apple.

.  Everything was either Dos(disk operating system) or another language like Cobol or Fortran(more for scientific applications)

.  Your entire "Word processing program "No, not Microsoft Word but a different Word processing program that also contained a word correcting program in the one 650kb disc.  And you could write a story or assignment on the same disk.  Almost an encyclopedia of information...as there was no pictures or sounds..or color. There is that much room as words take very little space.

Basically all business, very little in the way of games. 

. The room was just station monitors..about 30 monitors and about 10 class rooms and all connect to the VAX.  Basically a vacuum tube computer in a dust free room by itself.   There was no personal computers.  The VAX cost around $10,000.00.  There was no internet.  In this case it was a TECH school that had the computer.  Maybe the odd large business was getting around to having a computer.

.  What is fun about paying for a few years of schooling and try to understand computer programming?    I just saw it as a fancy typewriter.

But we learned how to write tight programs that would fit on single floppy discs.

. Later they moved to the 3 1/2" floppy disks that could hold more info and did not get folded accidently.   Then another 2 years before the computer had a ROM (early hard drive)  The discs were the Ram as they had all the active executable commands.

Nobody wants to go backwards except you.

They were tons of fun!  And I was one of the ones who had loads of 5.25" and 3.5" disks.  As a matter of fact, when wally world still sold 3.5" disks I bought a few packs, and I still have them, and they still work.  I have an old DOS 6.2 computer, 66mhz, with both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives.

So the blank 3.5" disks come in handy because on this computer I have a Dell 3.5" external floppy drive, and am able to move files from here to my DOS computer.  There's some stuff that runs better on the DOS machine rather than Dosbox.

I enjoyed Windows 3.11 as well, but the problem back then was that you had this beautiful DOS, and no one wanted to learn how to use it.  It was like, literally, a 5 minute thing I could teach, CD <foldername> to change folders, DIR to get a directory listing, EDIT, to edit files, nope.  Everyone wanted pictures.  And in my opinion, computers became less fun with GUI operating systems.

There are still some things I do on here, where I use CMD, because for me, it's just faster.  For example, folder creation.  In windows you have to right click, click create new folder, type in the name, press enter.

In CMD, all I have to do is go to where I want to make new folders, MD <foldername> ENTER, done.  I made 20 folders for organizing videos in a folder on a USB stick, and I first did the right click thing, then was like, okay forget this, CMD, MD folder1, ENTER, MD folder2, ENTER, it just went so much faster.  But yea, I think that now computers have become less fun.  It's like I guess because they're a part of everyday life, we think nothing of it.

But what I find fun, might not be what someone else finds fun.  So that's kind of why I have some of the old stuff.  Because I use it when I want, and it's so much fun everytime :)

By the early 1990s, most folks were using 3.5" floppies.  And usually it was a button that popped out when the disk was inserted, and then pressed to eject the disk.

Also by the early 1990s, graphical user interfaces GUIs were pretty common place.  Windows 3.0 was released in 1990 and was very popular.  And by then even DOS programs often had graphics and a mouse by that time.

You're thinking more of the 1980s, say 1983 thru 1989. 

But yeah, it was fun.  It was fun in both decades.

I used to be sweet on a girl who worked at a floppy diskette factory way back in those days.

you are obviously a bit biased, but that's okay. everybody likes what they like.

the reason we prefer small USB drives is BECAUSE they are so small. you can carry DOZENS in your pocket. how many 5 1/2" floppies could you pocket?

and all that other stuff just sounds like a lot of work to me.

especially when you can now just install to your hard drive, and not have to:

1. find your floppy

2. take out the floppy and insert it in the drive

3. wait for drive to read floppy

4. hope that floppy isn't dusty or got bent or damaged

5. find the right filename that will run the program

6. swap disks when the info you need is on a second disk and you cannot afford a second floppy drive

etc.

everything that has changed has been to accomodate convenience. even SSD drives have dropped boot times to seconds instead of minutes...

maybe cause people just made them

More tactile and auditory feedback.