I have a collection of files from the late ´90s and early ´00s. Many of them are .JPG, .MP3, .WAV, instead of .jpg, .mp3, and .wav. Why was that the norm at the time? I usually just change the extension myself.

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    2 days ago

    Of course in those days 640 Megs of RAM was all we needed.

    “There’ll never be a need for more than that”, you’d say.

    • monketman82
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      2 days ago

      640kb more like! Don’t get me started on upper and lower ram DOS nonsense…

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        2 days ago

        Yeah it took on a life of its own, including his effort to crush it or explain it away. But I think he said it. Also that it was heavily context-dependent, and ultimately just a way to shit on the man who single-handedly robbed us all of an open-source utopia of informed citizenry by being a greedy bastard.

        • aMockTie@piefed.world
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          2 days ago

          Also not defending Gates, but realistically it wouldn’t have made any sense for him or anyone at Microsoft to say such a thing. The 640K barrier was not chosen by Microsoft or caused by DOS, it was a limitation of the 8088/8086 CPU that IBM used in the original PC.

          It wasn’t until the 80286 that the issue was partially solved, and then the 80386 and on where it was completely solved (though still required a lot of fiddling and manual configuration which was the fault of DOS’ design).