[lovely jazzy intro music]
Greetings and welcome to an LGR Valentine’s Day... thing!
Sure why not, because we’re taking a look at 101 Love Letters,
sold by Great Bear Technology in 1995.
It’s a Windows PC application providing “words to express your love,”
with “full word processing capabilities.”
Mm, fancy!
“Express yourself in the name of love.”
“Tell him you still care."
"Disclose your passionate feelings.”
“Share your admiration for your family."
"Invite her off on a romantic weekend.”
“Why whisper sweet nothings, when you can write sizzling somethings?”
Ooh, good point, sounds hot.
I gotta say, this whole package is really doin’ it for me: big beautiful box, copious
marketing copy, and ah, is that the bear, the great bear of the company’s namesake?
A cupid polar bear?
I just have no idea what with programs like this, but '101 Love Letters?'
This has gotta be something special.
After all, nothing says “I love you” like a letter
written by some unknown person in Moraga, California.
Check out these example letters:
“Darling first name, there was a time when the thought
of seeking someone to love was at the bottom of my list.
A solitary walk on the beach was more attractive than being wrapped in a lover’s arms.
There just existed too many complications in loving.
I had no need to care for anyone other than myself.”
Yeah I dunno, sounds like a pretty sweet gig to me.
Oh here’s their other chosen example: “My dearest love, there is so much to say I don’t
know if I’ll ever find all the words or the time to tell you.
How can I in one lifetime give you all the love I have to give?
Everything I do is for you.
Every thought that comes to mind is of you.
Each day I live, I spend in the delight of your...”
...pancakes.
Right, let’s open up the box and see what kinda [disk crashes to the ground]
Jeez, barely even got into the box and I’ve already lost control of my disk.
Ahh here we go, it comes on a delightful little 3.5” floppy disk.
I’d rather have a 5.25,” but you know what they say about disk size not mattering.
Anyway, next up is the disk’s protective sleeve -- always use protection.
Along with instructions on how to get started as quickly as possible.
No instructions required for finishing.
You also get a fold-out card offering a lifetime of free benefits, ooh, how friendly.
And finally you got some, uh, very 90s stationery.
This one looking like a bedspread from Laura Ashley and the other one’s generic enough
that you don’t have to use it for wedding announcements.
So that’s handy.
Oh and there’s a remarkably beefy catalog of stationery, some more stationery,
even more stationery, and yet more stationery.
Enough with the foreplay, let’s get this thing installed on a Windows 3.1 PC and write
ourselves some pre-written love letters.
[soothing saxophone plays]
All right first thing to do is get the program installed and [chuckles]
You know that’s not ever a good sign.
That’s okay though, it seems it did actually copy everything over.
So we’ll just open up the program here and it looks like that we can -- okay, well.
Okay let’s try a different Windows 3.1 PC here and
this time [chuckles] Okay.
When it comes to low-budget Windows 3.1 applications, just don’t do it!
Not even once.
I tried this on two different Windows 3.1 PCs and two different DOS emulators running
3.1 and both suffered the same errors on all the settings and configurations I tried.
The real hardware got the general protection fault, among others,
and the emulators would divide by zero.
Ah that’s inspiring, I’m gonna write my own love letter, let’s see here.
Roses are red, violets are heroes.
I love you so much, I’m dividing by zeros.
So after continuing to fiddle around just to try to get the thing to install properly,
much less run.
I ended up giving it a shot on Windows 98SE on a whim on my Megaluminum Monster build.
And heh, y’know go figure, it works!
Even though it’s from several years in the future from when this program was made.
So y’know whatever, I dunno man.
It’s not running perfectly but we can at least check out 101 Lover Letters finally,
so yeah, here’s what you do!
Right, um, 101 Love Letters for Windows 3.1 running on Windows 98SE!
Here it is, in all its mid-1990s budget software glory.
And as described on the box, it really is just an assortment of love-centric correspondence
templates paired with an exceptionally unexceptional word processor.
Each of the premade lovey-dubby form letters are divided up into a number of categories
ranging from serious, to silly, to sultry, to somewhat stalkery.
There are letters themed around things like asking for a second date, apologizing for
screwing up, rekindling an old flame, talking to your partner about AIDS, venting romantic
frustrations, expressing admiration to friends and family.
And quite the assortment of letters about trying to attain love, too.
Like, a lot of those, yeah.
While there’s only a single letter for telling your kids you love them, there’s half a
dozen letters for revealing you have the hots for someone who barely knows you exist.
Perhaps it’s just me but I’m sensing a target demographic here.
Anyway, it’s time to choose a letter, either by selecting directly from those listed or
by searching for specific words and phrases contained within them.
Once you’ve chosen the perfect lovely little letter, opening it up provides a tool for
filling in the letter’s blanks.
Kinda like Mad Libs for uninspired cassanovas, you just fill in things like your address,
your name, the subject’s name, and any pronouns, unique events, dates, locations, and so on.
Unfortunately, the program still isn’t quite working as it should, because you can’t
actually see the entire letter on-screen at once.
There’s no word wrapping option and no scrollbar for revealing the text off to the right, so
you have to edit the text line by line to see everything.
Not only that, but the fonts and formatting don’t function at all
so yeah, something’s screwy here.
Ha! Right on time, I thought you’d forgotten about me, General Protection Fault.
Say hello to Lieutenant Divide By Zero for me.
Oh wait there they are, never mind!
Seriously, this is one badly-made application from top to bottom.
Real hardware, emulation, virtual machines, doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t work reliably on any of the solutions I tried
with tons of glitches, crashes, and general wonkiness every step of the way.
Eh, whatever though, I was able to squeeze out a few complete love letters regardless.
At this point you can either print out the letter directly or save it to a plain text
file or a Microsoft Write-compatible document.
And due to the font and formatting issues going on, the letter exporting process is
completely screwed, with the resulting documents
consisting of gigantic 127 point typefaces, bold text and italics all enabled.
Clippit, help!
I’m trying to make a YouTube video, what do I do?
“You can stop whining about old computer software and get a life.”
Ahh yes.
Or I can just manually edit the document and fix all the formatting myself,
because everything is broken.
Much like the hearts of whatever poor souls ended up buying this program back in the day.
Now to print out my fantastically well-made love letters
on this even lovelier dot matrix printer and bam!
Romance, here I come!
[dot matrix printer prints dots in a matrix]
-Perfect.
And that is 101 Love Letters from 1995 by Great Bear Technologies.
It sure is a great bear to use, they got that right.
I have no doubt that part of the problem stems from the fact that I couldn’t get it to
run on Windows 3.1, but either way
it’s just a shoddily put together piece of software unfortunately.
Yeah I know, it’s an off-brand budget-priced mid-90s PC application
offering somewhat inauthentic words of romance.
What exactly did I expect, right?
Yeah, see, I’d still at least like the program to work on the system it was intended for,
Windows 3.1!
And since I’m feeling frisky, it’d be nice if there perhaps a bit less of the dividing
by zero crashing, that’d be nice too.
And even without these bugs that may or may not be a problem on my end,
it’s still kind of a crappy product.
As a word processor it is objectively lackluster, an experience on par with or even worse than
Microsoft Write, and that came for free with Windows.
And as a collection of love letters, well, I guess it’s better than nothing?
Though so many of them rely on trite clichéd expressions, uninspired out-of-date prose,
and of course, awkwardly seeking the affection of strangers.
Heh, and as an internet person that frequently receives unsolicited letters of affection
from strangers, I can’t say I’m a fan of that particular romantic strategy.
I swear, some of the emails I’ve gotten read exactly like what you see here, complete
with people’s real full names and phone numbers
and addresses and everything, it gets weird.
Even ignoring that though, I’ve never felt the need to fill out a form letter in order
to express my affection in any of the relationships I’ve been in.
If I’m feeling a thing, I say the thing, it’s pretty straightforward.
Now I’m not knockin’ your style if you do rely on pre-written love letters.
I dunno, maybe you’ve had success with programs like this and I’m the weird one here.
But personally I found nothing about 101 Love Letters very useful or inspiring, even for 1995.
I could see sending some of these letters to a friend in jest,
assuming they were already in on the joke, but sending them seriously?
Nah man.
The letters are cheesy and the program is broken.
This is simply one of those 1990s Windows applications
that really isn’t worth revisiting at all anymore.
Unless you’re making a silly YouTube video about it for Valentine’s Day because the
other thing you planned on covering fell through, and in that case, it’s fantastic!
And if this episode of LGR got you in the mood for more steamy streaming video about
old computer programs and stuff, then have I got news for you.
That’s what I do, all the time!
So try out my older videos or check back in a week for more LGR.
And as always, thanks for watching!