Check out This ‘90s in a Box (October 5, 2024)

[ChrisReid]

AD spotted this new Instagram Reel posted by Microsoft. It features a Sidewinder joystick and a trackball mouse under the caption, "Taking a trip to the '90s." The interviewee explains, "Back in the '90s, everyone wanted to be playing space games like Wing Commander..." and goes on about how popular joysticks were to that end. We know an increasing number of our visitors were born in the 2000s, so it's nice to be able to share an example of people talking about how the WC series was a major force in gaming in this very transformative decade!

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Microsoft (@microsoft)[/quote]

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Original update published on October 5, 2024

 

[Worf]

The trackball is actually a model Microsoft made for laptops. Early laptops didn't have pointing devices so if you wanted to run Windows, you often had to pack a separate mouse (and there were not "travel mice" that were really tiny). Microsoft created that trackball which clipped to the side of your laptop by hanging off the edge of the keyboard (this was the day before current modern chiclet keyboards). Your fingers would curl around the side, so the top button would be the left click and the bottom the right click. No mouse wheel. More modern laptops had a port on the side where you could clip on a similarly looking trackball but it plugged into the side and thus no cable required. You had to screw it in because if you didn't, the cable had a tendency to fall out.

This lasted until the mid-90s when Windows 95 forced the issue and laptop makers would have to include some form of pointing device on their laptops. This ranged from the IBM red *censored*, to the trackball (really common), to the trackpad (which came much later - late 90s). The trackpad was available earlier - Apple was the first to switch from trackballs to trackpads in the mid 90s, and external trackpads were available, but they didn't get integrated into PC laptops until the late 90s.

 

[Dondragmer]

In defence of those screws to hold serial and parallel cables in, they did work loose occasionally if you didn't secure them. They shouldn't have, we had been told in the 1980s to not move a computer unless we had parked the hard disk.

What my '90s in a box would contain:

• Two 3½ inch boot disks (one to maximise XMS memory, the other to maximise EMS memory)
• Copy protection wheels for The Secret of Monkey Island and Test Drive III (no need for Claw Marks or blueprints, by the end of the decade I had all the WC1 numbers memorised and still do to this day)
• A modem that sounds like this while it connects
• The manual for DeluxePaint Animation, badly dog-eared

What's in yours?