OMG, do I remember Kurt…endless entertainment.
He might have done that…I’d forgotten but now that you mention it I sense memories returning…
And Kurt, yes. And the infamous GT, whose name we spell in initials only and many sites actually had added to the profanity filter so no one could post it!
Ah, the F3 boot disk. Don’t load the CDROM driver, not needed! Everybody, I found a new slimmer mouse driver, only takes 15k! QEMM386 and DRDOS messed with JUST to get that over 600k low RAM footprint.
I had an autoexec.bat and config.sys with numbered options so that on boot I could choose to go with a slim “F3 only” boot or a full-featured one with everything running.
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Falcon 3.0, the game that launched a thousand IT careers (mine was pretty abortive, but that’s another story). My burning desire to have F3 run pretty quickly harnessed the awesome power of my adolescent brain to not only wrangle that decrepit 386SX we had to run it, but to deceive my parents into thinking I was doing homework while bombing the everliving crap out of some runway somewhere 
I became way better than dad at tweaking the machine to wrest every last bit of memory and performance out of it. I also had to learn some not quite above board tricks to “steal” the disk space from him. (I hid the gunship 2000 and falcon directories deep within the directory structure of dad’s word processor)
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Falcon and the Wing Commander games. I remember it well. 
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That is so true. You really had to work hard to manage memory on those old games. Falcon 3 was the first game I bought for my new 386 and started me down the IT rabbit hole.
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I was an expert with modem strings!
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This one time at boot disk camp…this one mofo shoved his floppy disk into another mans disk drive then let out an exasperated moan which was barely audible. After a bit of audacity editing…one could make out “oooh that feeling” almost like the hype surrounding the F16 launch. The hype is there…just need to dig around to find it
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i felt like Gary Sinise from Apollo 13, the scene in Apollo 13’ Simulator trying to figure out the right startup sequence without going over power draw (in our case memory).
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Nah, more like the movie space camp and keeping the shuttle at 30 degrees reentry phase or it will burn up in the earths atmosphere. Far more edge of the seat tension than any simulator in any movie anywhere.
I know exactly what you mean!
you completely missed the metaphor.
Jinx put 630k in low RAM! Jinx put 630k in low RAM!
Space Camp. Because the 80s.