this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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I have fond memories of Windows XP working well.
Do not have fond memories of the multi-dvd game installations, but I still have my library of physical games. :)
Nothing sucked more than buying a used game only for it to ask for disc 5 to be inserted to continue, when it only came with 4!
Oh, true, but back then game companies would sell you those single disks you needed. My copy of Baldur's Gate 2 was missing one that I was able to replace for a few bucks.
In hindsight, I kinda miss the awesome customer service that used to exist.
Idk a tiny almost imperceptible scratch causing you to retry installing 3 or 4 times might a contender. At least the missing disk is a clear error.
There's a circle in hell for game publishers that only wrote "disc 1" on a CD or DVD (or floppy, back in the day) and not "disc 1 of 3". I think it's the one where they have to wade forever in shit.
Multi dvd? Those are from 2007 and later, iirc. Multiple cds were common by 2000 already, tho
Windows 98 came on 28 floppy disks.. We definitely felt the pain prior to 2007...
And before that, there were games that spanned multiple floppies. Plus, floppies were less reliable, so there was a higher chance one of the disks would fail to read, leading to the Retry, Fail, Abort menu.
They were only 1.44MB so a 50GB game would take like 40k floppies.
I installed Office 97 from 49 floppies on a bunch of office computers. We didn't have CD-rom drives, so we requested the floppies from Microsoft (this was a free of charge service). Took me a week. Got into graphic novels, as I was waiting for each floppy to load.
Watching Basement Brothers play some old PC88/98 games and using several actually floppy diskettes is incredibly entertaining. Those also only had like 300kb of storage
I watched a video where a dude wrote his own filesystem for floppies so he could run and play factorio from floppy disk. It was quite entertaining.
How usable did it end up being? Like would he frequently need to change disks? Or just during startup?
He mostly needed to change disks when the music changed. Apparently most of the game is loaded at the loading screen.
I remember when Doom Ultra HD 8k came on 40k floppies. Back before we even had 2k displays. It took nearly 2 days to read it all into RAM (mind you, I had a cluster of 200 computers just to have enough ram...) and ran at about 0.01 FPS on my 640x480 CRT. And you had to read about 73 more floppies every time you loaded a new map.
Ah, the good old days.