While we're wandering down memory lane, we should remember the Stacker/DoubleSpace ripoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law...

I owe my IT career to doublespace, lol.

I messed up the family PC and decided to reinstall windows on its 80mb drive that had been repartitioned to 100mb thanks to dos 6.22 and doublespace.

However, I did not have dos 6.22 install disks, I had dos 5.0 install disks and then 6.22 upgrades, and the 5.0 disks could not see the hard drive partition that doublespace had taken over, so it saw our 80mb hard drive as a 1-ish mb hard drive that was too small to install to.

Format couldn't see it, and fdisk couldn't either, so I could not start over from scratch no matter what I did.

Queue me panicking.

My mom was at work overnight. I had until she got back to fix it or I was dead meat.

I had no money, I was a child. I had no one and nothing to turn to other than the user manuals that came with the operating systems

I knew how to make a bootable floppy disk, and using that knowledge and a nat 20 inspiration roll I made a bootable dos 6.22 floppy disk that had the doublespace system on it, booted the home pc with that, used the doublespace software to revert the drive, and then was able to reinstall dos 5, upgrade to 6.22, install windows 3.1 and all of my moms software to finish up about 15 minutes before she arrived home in the morning.

The first thing my mom did when she got home was boot up the family PC. She was a little peeved that her solitaire high score got erased but everything else was fine.

Yep, that one time when all those supposed GNU/FOSS types suddenly fell in love with software patents. Who could forget...