Win95 would default to 640x480 at some low color depth if there were nothing but vesa drivers to work with.

Made for a fun first hour after a fresh install.

Back then i had a habit of building up a cache of drivers and common software on drive, later dumped to CDs at irregular intervals, just to lessen the rebuild time.

Funny thing is that i kinda miss those days.

Back then i could pull the drive from a computer, cram it into another, and more often than not 9x would boot. It may give me that vesa only resolution etc, but it would boot.

These days it feels like it would just as well throw a hissy fit ascii screen about missing drivers, or something about the license not being verifiable.

I thought maybe Linux would rekindle this, but sadly it seems the DE devs are driving even it head first into the pavement. This so that they can use the GPU to draw all their bling bling widgets and paper over the kernel output with a HD logo...