response 25 of 35:

Mar 12 22:31 UTC 2020

I love talking about this stuff. Check out Adam Curry (from early MTV)
talking about his journey from building his own modem for his zx80
sinclair to using Mosiac for the first time (I remember doing that from
a floppy disk LOL) and so on. His story is interesting because he had
connections and knew people. But he talks about Gopher and Archie etc.
Fun stuff.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFKOhvUva2Y

response 27 of 35:

Mar 13 15:50 UTC 2020

Venture to a new world:
https://www.webcrawler.com/

Do the Jughead:
http://archie.icm.edu.pl/archie_eng.html

I haven't met anyone in real life that thinks of GeoCities fondly 
but my first domain name was attached to one in 1997.
#biginjapan

Useless knowledge: 
PHP almost destroys the ability to search the web with a Commodore 
64 using Contiki and a NIC+ Ethernet adapter. It worked for a very 
long time though. It is still very possible to visit a very active 
BBS scene using a Commodore WiModem or NIC+ and terminal software 
that is still being updated today like CCGMS Elite. Long live telnet 
on 8-bit. There are even some nice 80-column C128 terminals. 

response 29 of 35:

Mar 14 21:23 UTC 2020

re# 25 and 26
The WWW was out when I first got on the internet but all of the old 
stuff was still popular. I used archie and veronica for gopher,chatted 
using IRC, posted on usenet ( and got all my porn from there) used ftp 
clients to download programs. I used netscape and even ran an old legacy
 version of Mosiac. of course we all telnetted(ssh)into m-net or grex.
To this day I still talk about this to the technicians I train "wellll 
sonny, when I first used the internet..." 

response 31 of 35:

Apr 29 00:51 UTC 2020

Heh, didn't expect to see so much activity on this one :) Since posting this,
I have acquired a Sun SPARCserver 670MP, a friend of mine in California picked
it up and shipped it for me. Quite the beast! The Sun-provided casters of
course detonated instantly :D

At the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, in Chicago, I got talking with a
guy about Sun and AT&T 3B2 stuff, and it turned out he wanted 3B2 Ethernet
boards, which I happened to have, and had a very complete Sun 3/160 to trade.
So now I've got a 68K Sun box. Ended up with the huge grayscale ECL monitor
for it, too, from another conferece-goer.

Picked up a bunch of Sun4 suff from a print shop (like, typemetal and book
making) in Jackson, MI last summer. I actually still support Sun4 for
$day_job, so some of it went toward that effort. The SPARCserver 670MP has
a dead power supply (bad caps) so for now I think I'm going to use one of the
Sun 4/330 boxes with the 670MP CPU board (which is very nearly a
single-board-computer).

I like keeping this old stuff alive, it's fun to hack on stuff from a simpler
time. Tonight, I'm SSHed in from an Altos III dumb terminal (Wyse WY-30 with
different ROMs) hung off my main Linux workstation :)

response 33 of 35:

May 5 03:45 UTC 2020

re 32: Yeah a lot of stuff needs caps nowadays, if you get old enough into
linear supplies you can sometimes reform them, but most switchers seem to
either be fine or the caps are totally gone (usually leaking). There's a fair
bit of this stuff still doing useful work in industry -- in January I did a
SCSI SSD conversion on a SPARCstation 5 that runs a stepper, which is the
machine that patterns silicon wafers for making computer chips. The customer
had looked at several replacements from various manufacturers and decided they
really didn't like any of them and didn't want to rework their process around
a new machine -- plus they cost several million dollars. Hard disks had been
the only real reliability issue with the machine, can't fault 90s SCA drives
for giving up after living in the kinda poorly vented environment of a SPARC
pizzabox :)

response 35 of 35:

Feb 24 23:48 UTC 2022

re #34
Beautiful! The original R2D2 with some o dat RISC architecture