In high school my friends and I had a basement drinking game called "System 32 Roulette." We had a fresh Windows 98 machine and you had to pick a file inside c:/windows/system32/ by random and forcibly delete it then reboot the machine. If the computer booted up and you could successfully get back to that folder, everyone else had to take a drink. If not, you had to finish your drink and then reinstall Windows.
It was mostly a side attraction while we played Smash Bros or whatnot. But the best part is watching a super drunk person trying to install windows. It was hilarious.
Was this off of CD-ROM or a stack of floppies? I think 3.11 was the last of the floppies, but memory is hazy around what 95 install media was. Pretty sure 98 was CD, but that could be a fun "bonus round" to force an install from floppy.
I know I've installed Win95 off of floppies. Don't recall the exact number, but believe it was around 40-50 3.5" floppies. It came in a box about the length of a shoe box.
OS/2 Warp was 40 or so floppies, and sold at such a discount that buying a copy was the cheapest way I knew to get high quality floppies when I was in college
I have somehow never gotten around to throwing away the box of ancient floppies I've got in a closet from ages ago, and the Windows 95b (OSR2) installation disks I made were still in it, complete with custom color printed labels I splurged on.
The media I copied from took up 28x 3.5" HD floppy disks. It's possible they were copied from what was originally a CD-ROM. I don't remember clearly anymore.
Note: I'm not trying to refute or correct your 13-disk figure, which was clearly a different installation set, and likely original Windows 95 rather than my OSR2, which came out around 1997.
Hrmm. Seems you're right and my memory is way fuzzier than I thought. Raymond Chen also says 13 [0]. Maybe it was just my existential dread of one of the floppies having gone bad that makes me think it was more.
It was a CD, but a really low quality burned CD that we eventually scratched the label side on, which stripped the data side off with it. So it was eventually hung from the ceiling with dental floss. We crossed out "98" with marker and wrote in "95", but to be honest, it didn't install anything by then.
Unless this was in northern VA in the late 1990s, I suspect more it’s just that there’s a certain kind of person who is disproportionately represented on HN who spent high school doing certain kinds of things. Did you take apart CRTs to make lifters too: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jrfBrrDfdEA? :D
It's 2022 but macOS still somehow takes ages to install updates, even on the most powerful laptop Apple currently sells. Windows 98 installation takes considerably less time on a single core of that same CPU in an emulator.
macOS updates are awful. In the same amount of time as some updates I have completely installed Ubuntu and set up all my programs. A 0.1 or 0.0.1 update should not take 30-40 minutes.
I actually did something similar with the family computer and Windows 95. I didn't know anything about how computers work so I started deleting files and seeing if they were needed. I actually learned a little bit about the operating system from doing this.
To be fair, that's a standard way of debugging a problem. Cut away pieces of the program and see if the problem remains. Continue until you've isolated the fault.
Contrary to the sibling comment I absolutely adore this idea! I am definitely doing this sometime with my friends next time I can get them to come over to my place!
Windows 98 had that SFC (system file checker) feature which was supposed to restore bad or missing system files from the installation cab's. Of course, provided the sfc had its own .dlls still intact and the system could at least boot to prompt.
So potentially such drinking game could last longer than booze on hands.
I wonder about the random part.. How did you achieve this ? Dice or something ? Be cause even with basic knowledge of the system it would have been easy (for a while) to delete only useless files.. It's à very original drinking game !
