I got hired at Best Buy based on the computer knowledge I already had. The store I applied to only had two computer tech positions, and both were filled. Instead I worked in the computer and software departments for several months until one of the two techs quit. I moved into the repair booth the next day.
My job in the tech booth was to do whatever customers asked me to do. We had a posted list of services we offered like hardware installation and virus removal, and for $50/hour, we would do just about anything they asked.
Today when we connect USB devices to our computers, “things just work.” Occasionally we may have to provide drivers, but more often than not, our computers just figure out what’s going on and take care of things for us. This was not the case in 1995. In 1995, people purchased modems and took them home and spent a day or two struggling with DMA and IRQ settings and jumpers and COM ports and an entire spaghetti mess of commands and drivers and installation files before throwing in the towel, throwing the whole mess in their car, and bringing it all back to Best Buy for people like me to fix.
Customers at the booth were split evenly between men and women. Men usually came in seeking help with hardware installation. Women usually needed help installing software. Almost daily, women would come up to the booth with their giant desktop PC inside a shopping cart and a game that they bought for their kid that they couldn’t get to run. After paying $50 for a new PC game, they would pay Best Buy $29.95 to install it for them. Think about that.
(For what it’s worth, women most frequently dropped off their computers and would then go shopping, while men would stand at the booth the entire time “picking our brains.”)
Without getting into the nitty-gritty details, computers back then running DOS had 640k of conventional memory to work with. Every driver you loaded into memory came out of that 640k chunk, so your CD-ROM driver might use 20k, a mouse driver might use another 10k, and so on. It wasn’t uncommon to end up with somewhere around 550k of free conventional memory after loading all your drivers. Most of the games provided the amount of free conventional RAM it required to install and run — a number that (a) almost no customer ever knew, and (b) few customers had the knowledge to change. Putting a sticker on the side of California Games informing customers that the game required 565kb of conventional RAM meant nothing to anyone, until they got it home and discovered it wouldn’t run.
There were a lot of different ways to free up space within that 640k block of memory. You had upper memory, extended memory, memory managers, and all kinds of tricks that sometimes worked together, but more often than not caused conflicts. Some games wouldn’t work without expanded memory and others wouldn’t work with it. In regards of “ease of use” for average customers, it was a pretty awful time. By loading drivers “high” you could move some of them into an additional 384k block of reserved memory, but that was all you had to work it.
And so, every day, people brought their computers into Best Buy with a defeated look on their face, asking me to install games for them. They would drop their computer off in the booth and go shopping while I worked on installing the game for them. (I would also typically make a copy of the game for myself, but that’s a story for another time.)
Modifying the configuration on people’s computers was very tedious and time consuming. Microsoft had a command called MEMMAKER that was supposed to automate the process, but more often than not it just made matters worse. Sometimes MEMMAKER would get one game to work and break others they already had installed. I spent a lot of time manually shuffling people’s drivers around in memory and performing all sorts of tricks in order to make their games work.
And then I discovered Multimedia Cloaking, from Helix.
Even if your old DOS computer had 4, 8, or a whopping 16 megs of RAM, by default, all of your drivers resided in that little 640k block of conventional memory (and 384k of upper memory), which wasn’t a lot of room. There was no way to load your drivers into extended memory (all that other RAM you paid for!), but that’s exactly what Helix’s Multimedia Cloaking did.
You can read the technical details on Wikipedia if you want, but here’s the takeaway. Instead of taking up 20k of that precious 640k for your CD-ROM drivers, Helix was able to load a 1k driver into conventional RAM and put another driver up into extended memory, where there was lots of free space. The small driver communicated with the larger driver, and DOS was none the wiser. Helix’s Multimedia Cloaking replaced three commonly used drivers that took up a lot of conventional memory (CD-ROM, mouse, and smart drive), which freed up a lot of conventional memory — enough to make most games run.
You didn’t have to understand any of this to use the product. All you had to do was buy the program (probably $50), install it, and Helix would replace all your default drivers with its own updated ones, reconfigure your autoexec.bat and config.sys files, and you would be good to go. Instantly you would free up another 30-40k of conventional memory. It was a miracle program.
What I discovered was while I was spending all of my time in the tech booth struggling to manually edit people’s configuration files, the other computer tech was simply installing Helix software on customer’s computers. He had found the software over in our software department and had brought it to the booth and begun installing it on customer’s computers. It worked, and so he did it again, and again, and again.
If you brought your computer to our Best Buy location in the mid-90s needing help with getting a game to run, chances are you left with a working game and a pirated copy of Helix’s Multimedia Cloaking software.
I always remember this story when I read news articles or hear about companies doing “something” unethical. Often it is the actions of one single employee that get applied to the entire company. Had the two of us been caught or if someone had complained, I’m sure the story would have been “Best Buy installing pirated software on customer computers,” when in reality Best Buy had no knowledge of what we were up to.