Remember when we used to carry around those giant CD binders full of driver discs?

I was digging through my old tool bag last week and found a 48-disc binder from 2004. It was almost funny thinking about how many times I'd flip through that thing looking for a NIC driver or a modem install. Now I just pull a USB drive with a folder of drivers I grabbed from the manufacturer site. What happened to change it? Probably around 2010 when Windows 7 got good at finding stuff on its own. Anyone else still keep a few old discs around just in case?

3 comments

3 Comments

danielr997d ago

Is it really that big of a deal though? I mean yeah sure it was a pain flipping through binders but people act like it was some kind of dark age. You just threw the disc in and waited two minutes. Now everyone's worried about driver signing and chipset compatibility and Windows Update randomly breaking things. Honestly I think the old way had its own kind of charm. Plus those floppy disc holders people used to carry around were way more annoying. I don't really miss digging through them but I think the nostalgia is overblown.

paul_ramirez7d ago

Nah man I gotta push back hard on this one. You're totally downplaying how bad it actually was. Two minutes? Try installing Windows 95 from like 23 floppy disks where one of them was always corrupt and you had to start over from disk 1. People act like driver signing is annoying now, but remember when you had to manually set IRQ addresses and DMA channels so your sound card wouldn't conflict with your modem? That was actual dark age stuff, not "charm." The whole disc-swapping chaos with Windows, drivers, applications, and games where each one came on a separate disc that you'd lose or scratch within a week. Yeah sure modern PCs have their issues but at least I can install an entire OS in 15 minutes from a USB stick without praying to the hardware gods. The binders weren't even the worst part, it was the hunting through them trying to find the right version of DirectX or that obscure driver disk that came with your graphics card.

gracethomas5d ago

lmao "its own kind of charm" danielr99 you sound like me trying to convince myself my early 2000s MySpace pics were cute when really it was just bad lighting and poor life choices. nah i feel you on the modern PC headaches tho, my latest Windows update literally killed my sound driver and i spent an hour figuring out why my headphones were just static. but @paul_ramirez is right, i still remember the terror of hearing that clicky sound when a floppy went bad halfway through installing something. like congrats, you just lost 45 minutes of your life and now you get to start over while praying the next disk isn't also cursed.