Old games: more analysis

In my last post I’ve mentioned that 1995 was a turning year in status of PC as home computer at Russia. I think that main reason for that was that CD-ROM went to mainstream public.

Do you remember what was a portable carrier for data? Floppy-disks, mostly 3,5” size (5.25” size were obsolete at that time). Each disk was capable of storing 1.44 Megabytes of data. For office usage it was okay, because you could put several office documents on disk to transfer them to different location. But games were becoming larger, with animated cut-scenes, music and lots of sprites. Installing a game from 10 floppy-disks was not funny. Another problem was that those disks were not reliable.

 In Russia we had a long tradition of software piracy: taking a game from a friend was common. But with sizes of games increasing, that become a problem. CD-ROMs were a solution: pirates started to sell CD-ROM disks with collections of games: about 50 – 100 games, with 10-20 “gems” and others were some moderate games. Gaming become easy, so PCs become home entertainment.

During floppy age an important development were made: archiving tools. They were forgotten in CD-ROM age, but returned in internet age