to 1998 and beyond (and back again)

so i finally took a chunk of time out of my life to set up a virtual machine for windows 98.

downloaded Oracle VM Virtualbox for this purpose some time ago last year, but i haven't gotten around to actually setting up a digital Win98 on it till yesterday. mostly did it because there were some old games i wanted to run on it that i can't on a Win7, but i've got a bit of nostalgia for the system, too.

up until 2013, i've had a Win98 in my old bedroom as a work computer of sorts. 'course, i did play games on it and such, but i mostly used it as a platform for browsing the internet, talking with friends via MSN, and the occassional Wordpad drabbles and MSPaint scribbles. even in the years prior to that, most of my time was spent on the old win98 in my dad's old room, which is also currently my new bedroom. funny how these things work.

of course my history with the win98 stretches to even way before that time to when i was a kid, but my memory's foggy on that period outside of all the Jumpstart and Reader Rabbit games i played. in my current age, i stick with my trusty Win7 since there's a wider pantheon of games and emulators i can run on it, but nowadays i've been dabbling in the technical aspects of old OSes. stuff like what older systems could achieve with their technical limitations; it's part of the reason why i have an interest in tech demos and scene demos.

granted, i set up a virtual win98 almost purely for the purpose of older games, but perhaps i'll be exploring some of the technical things behind that OS. i'm older and a bit more knowledgeable on those sorts of things, so maybe i'll know a bit of what i'm getting into, and maybe learn new things in the process.

for now, i'm gonna have some fun decking out this ol' thing.

so yeah, while this wasn't that big an update on mine or the site's end, it's a step in keeping the place frequently updated. plus since i have this set up now, maybe i'll get to reviewing some old win98 stuff at some point in the future.

if you wanna set up a virtual win98 of your own for retro gaming or whatever reason, go grab yourself a copy of Oracle VM Virtualbox and follow along this tutorial if it's your first time using the thing. you're on your own for the setup bootdisc, though. or any tutorials for getting other OSes running in it.

until then, hope you guys enjoyed this little retrospective of sorts. stay rad, everyone!

curiousities - Microsoft Comic Chat

back in the halcyon days of the 90s and early 00's, IRC clients were a pretty popular way for people to message each other and host chatrooms where likeminded people could gather around and talk about things. of course, with instant messengers like MSN and Skype and the like becoming more widely used in today's more streamlined era, IRC chat clients saw a significant decline in use (from one million users in 2003 to around 400,000 in 2014, according to Wikipedia).

of course, that doesn't mean IRC chatting as a whole has dropped off the face of the earth. while it has gone scarce, there are quite a few communities around the net who still host IRC servers for people to chat about stuff, and of course IRC clients still exist. one of which we're going to talk about today.

i'll be honest, i know very little about IRC stuff aside from this one client and the Wiki page, but hey, having your chats in comic form is always rad, innit?

Microsoft Chat (sometimes called Microsoft Comic Chat or just Comic Chat) was released in 1996 by... well, Microsoft. it was bundled with the full downloads of Internet Explorer 3, 4, and 5, though distributions of Windows 98 and 2000 included the program as well. for quite some time, it was Microsoft's main chat program until some time around 2001, thanks to MSN discontinuing the official Comic Chat servers.

of course, that didn't spell the complete end of the program; being an IRC-based client, it still works with a lot of IRC servers out there today since it runs on the same standard protocols. course, there's a bit more to Comic Chat than that, obviously.