With the dawn of desktop computing, humanity unlocked incredible new powers: traveling the world from a beige box, visiting dinosaurs that moved at three frames per second, and wasting more time than ever imagined. Information was right there at our fingertips. My parents proudly brought home a gorgeous, off-white Packard Bell 486 from Lechmere’s. It even had speakers screwed directly into the monitor. Luxury.
Naturally, being me, I immediately bought a CD-ROM drive and cracked the thing open like I was performing emergency surgery. And thus began my glorious era of amateur, mildly reckless computer repairs.
CD-ROMs changed everything. VIDEO. SOUND. Multimedia encyclopedias. Suddenly the 26-volume Funk & Wagnalls set on the bookshelf was kindling. Why read words when I could watch JFK deliver “Ask not what your country can do for you…” in a pixelated little postage stamp of a video?
And then — the games. I graduated from Sonic the Hedgehog and plumbers on psychedelics to full-motion video, real actors, and 3D graphics. These games pushed the limits of hardware and my sanity. When they worked, it was magic. When they didn’t, it was character development.
Enter The 7th Guest.
Released in 1993, it was an “interactive movie puzzle adventure game.” It was gorgeous. It was terrifying. It was impossible (as someone who is terrible at puzzles) and it absolutely flattened my poor Packard Bell. The 486 whimpered under the weight of its greatness.
But then — salvation. According to a random BBS post, the AUTOEXEC.BAT file could fix everything. This mystical startup text file could load drivers and tweak memory, if you knew what you were doing. Unfortunately, I did not.
So you experimented. You typed in random settings. “Sure, let’s set the sound card to 1. That sounds right.” Reboot. Crash. Reboot. Static. Reboot. No video. Reboot. Video but sound like a demon trapped in a tin can. It was part puzzle, part ritual sacrifice.
But when it worked: you felt like a digital God.
Of course, computers love humility, so sometimes your perfect configuration didn’t work the next day. Or it worked… but only if you held your breath. Or only if you stood in the northeast corner of the room. Anytime the game tried to load a big chunk of media, you’d brace yourself like the machine might detonate.
Still — those battles with AUTOEXEC.BAT taught me a ton. DOS, drivers, troubleshooting, blind faith, creative profanity. Skills I somehow still use today on servers and backend systems. I’ve heard it’s something called “patience”.
I also learned that in 1993, I would go to absolutely unholy lengths to avoid being bored.
A nostalgic dive into the glorious mess of ’80s–’90s home computing—beige towers, cursed CD-ROM installs, pixelated “multimedia,” and games that crashed more than they ran. Each installment revisits the tech that shaped and baffled us.