[stevage]

>The modem sang its negotiation out loud, and that shriek was two machines arguing about how to speak to each other, and after enough times you could hear when the argument was going south and the call was about to drop. You set little jumpers on drives with your fingernail. You knew which interrupt your sound card answered to, because if you guessed wrong it answered to nothing. The machine was made of edges and you cut yourself on them, and that is how you found out where they were.

Wow. I had literally all of these experiences. I remember how you used to have to remember the Sound Blaster interrupt settings and pass them to any game that used it. And I'd completely forgotten about IDE jumpers, but yep - how fiddly it was when you wanted to put 4 hard drives in the same computer, figure out which were slaves and masters, etc etc.