Mmm yess... the nostalgia. Well, I wasn't invented back then (29 yo), but anyway.
WinNT vs OS/2. WP 5.1 vs Word for Windows. COREL! Draw. DOS 5.22 vs DOS 6.0. 8080, Macintosh, IBM PC.
Big box software. CRTs. ISA. Riser cards. Coprocessor. FPU.
I wish I could buy ALL Byte Magazines somewhere..
Have you read it? Don't you miss those kind of hardcore, in-depth, magazines? IT EVEN HAD CODE LISTINGS!
I probably still have a few somewhere. I clearly remember Jerry Pournelle and his "Chaos Manor" where he'd try lots of stuff and reports back in BYTE. But I'm from the EU and I was into C64 and then Amiga while BYTE was kinda US-centric and PC-centric so I wasn't an avid reader... But I do remember reading a few of these.
I installed OS/2 back in the days on a PC: got it for free from a friend of my mom who worked at IBM and knew I was into computers. First PC was a 386 but then I received a 286 for free a while after. No FPU indeed: was an add-on that you'd plug into the motherboard!
The craziest thing to me to this day was the "turbo" button where I could turn my 486 (?) from 33 to 44 Mhz, something like that... But it would work while the computer was working, including while games were running!
The noise these old PC alim would do was crazy: so with my neighbour I built a system lowering the alim fan speed depending on the temp of a termistance. And I'd put my HDD into a "muffler" to lower its noise. I'd use carpet inside the tower case too. Anything to make these monsters less noisy. I was a kid and had no idea what I was doing, but things worked well enough!
Another good one: I'd take quality japanese fans and wire the 12V and the 5V from the alim to create 7V so the fans would rotate slower than at 12V... Did that for years and years and years. Basically I had quiet PCs before that was even a thing.
Oh the memories... Thanks for starting these threads mate!