Thank you, 100 times this. There was literally nothing fun about it.

I remember desperately trying to put drivers in high memory, because Wing Commander 2 needed more memory if I was to get the precious images of the joystick moving. Slowly removing items, one by one from my autoexec.bat file, desperately hoping it was going to work, but then the creeping realisation that I would have to unload my soundcard drivers if I wanted a chance.

Or the time our bios randomly wiped its memory and my dad was convinced I had destroyed the harddrive. Thankfully I was told by a family friend that I would only have to turn on the BIOS and set it to # 31 (because somehow hard disk sizes, sectors, et cetra were all standardized) in order to access our precious 95 megabyte hard disk.

Ah, yes, and I also remember what a relief it was when the newer generation of games (starting with Doom IIRC) used "DOS extenders" to switch the CPU into protected mode and be able to use 16 MB or more without any fiddling...

Another anecdote from around that time (or a bit later): some friends were alarmed that their PC was not booting Windows as usual. Turns out they had forgotten a bootable CD in the CD-ROM drive, which was showing some cryptic text mode menu on startup. Easy fix: remove CD, restart, works...

SimCity CD-ROM edition was the greatest. It needed sound card drivers, mouse drivers, CD-ROM drivers and MSCDEX, and it required 605kB of free conventional memory.

Oh, and only some hard drives were standard like that. For others, you needed to set sectors, tracks and landing zone manually. Happy fun times if your CMOS battery ran out.