1 Persons are tagged with #retro

#retro

danie10@squeet.me
Danie

How to Browse the Web in Your Linux Terminal With Lynx

A Terminal window showing how a website renders in plain text. There are various links in green font, and the text of post excerpts is shown below the links.
There is no shortage of feature-rich browsers available today, but most offer largely the same experience. Lynx is a web browser that only displays text, offering a unique and ad-free way to browse the Internet in the Linux terminal.

Lynx is a text-only browser that is designed to allow terminal-based systems to access web pages on the Internet. As it relates to Linux, Lynx is a web browser that runs in the Terminal. Lynx can access any web page available on the Internet just like your normal browser can, though it does have some limitations.

Well, this was certainly a “blast from the past” experience for me! I remember first logging on to BBSs back in the day when everything was text based. I still remember the excitement of the first graphical browser, which arrived whilst sites were all still only serving text.

But apart from the retro feel of all of this, there is something to be said about the speed of just loading text vs tons of graphics and JavaScript code. And yes, tracking code and cookies etc just don’t exist with this interface.

I found it already installed on my Manjaro Linux (not sure if I installed it a time back) and it actually loaded my local news site and I could navigate articles. But yes, it is going to break on many of the modern sites, so it’s not going to replace graphical browsers I’m sure.

Wonder if we will see some demand in future that sites are required to still serve usable text versions as well? This form of browsing is ideal for example for people with sight impairments, or those with very limited data connections.

I tested it on my own blog, and the featured image for this post (at my blog site) shows what the site renders as in Lynx. It is perfectly usable, and I can navigate easily in and out of my blog posts.

See howtogeek.com/browse-the-web-w…
#Blog, #browsers, #Lynx, #retro, #technology

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danie10@squeet.me
Danie

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Old DOS based word processor showing some sample text, and the shortcut key type menus in use back in the day.
Before WordPerfect, the most popular work processor was WordStar. Now, the last ever DOS version has been bundled and set free by one of its biggest fans.

One forgets today how massive WordPerfect and WordStar were in their days. In fact, anyone younger than around 35 or 40 years old won’t know anything except for Microsoft Word. WordStar is probably also “well” known for its odd shortcut keys. Back in its day, we did not have a mouse, so everything revolved around keyboard shortcuts.

Yes, Microsoft really did make everyone a bit lazy, as it’s no secret that if you know your common keyboard shortcuts in any app, you can work a lot faster than the person that also uses their mouse or the menu to do everything. Which is why those, who really know their command line, are going to work must faster than their counterparts using a GUI app.

But that’s the world we live in today

So, this old WordStar app will actually run in Windows, macOS and even Linux (with the suitable DOS emulator).

See theregister.com/2024/08/06/wor…
#Blog, #retro, #technology, #WordStar

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hackbyte@friendica.utzer.de
hackbyte (friendica) 13HB1

Now, for something completely different: (mid lenght post)

Years, actually decades ago, as i was a very young padawan, discovering and in tiny part shaping (a _VERY_ tiny part of) the early internet (world wide web way back then).

A unix guru gave his shine to me .. and told me a nice lesson, i never forgot, and with the help of the almighty internet relay chat (IRCNet) even was able to improve upon a tiny bit.

Way back then, you mainly had ps and top to list and manage your processes on a Unix based system.

Modern fancy stuff like killall didn't exist for a while, not to name pgrep even. (We're talking mid to late 90ies here).

So, this unix guru came over to me to tell me a nice trick for my linux boxes at home.. I won't repeat the original one, but will skip directly to the (just slighty) improved one;

It's a bash function called psg (procname)

psg () 
{
 /bin/ps xau | /bin/grep COMMAND\\\|$1 | /bin/grep -v grep
}

As you can imagine, psg stands for "ps grep". You can use it with the name of the process, the pid or even a part of its commandline to get exactly only processes listed which match your grep.

You don't need to remember any commandline parameters or anything at all (unlike pgrep) .. but just fire and forget, take what you get. (It's truly KISS-compliant;)

The "original version" i got told skipped the header from the ps command and just spat out the processes, but i liked to have the header preserved. So at some time i questioned people in #linux.de on IRCNet about how to improve the grep cmd(s) for that reason.

And here we are ... you're welcome to use psg anytime you want..... and preserve the lore! ;)

#Unix #Unices #Unixes #Linux #Retro #Retrocomputing #NextStep #Bash #Script #Lore #KISS #RandomShit ;)

P.s.: What i was shaping? Ouh shoot..... i was employed to write down early html (1.1) to implement the wet dreams of some few graphics designers from their macintosh with photoshop.... We didn't have frames .. but we had tables!! (yeah i know. ;))

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danie10@squeet.me
Danie

40 years later, Kontrabant 2 for ZX Spectrum is rebroadcast on FM in Slovenia

Retro style 8-bit computer game title screen with title Kontrabant 2 and copyright 1984 Z Turk in M Kmet. The image shows what looks like a street barrier in the foreground with a yellow coloured road stretching into the distance with test 2000 at the end. On both sides are various buildings from a castle, a government office, houses, etc.
Software is almost impossibly easy to download, distribute, and access compared to 40 years ago. Everything is bigger, faster, and more flexible, but there’s a certain charm to the ways of diskettes and cassettes that is hard to recapture. That doesn’t mean we can’t try.

By the time you read this, it’s likely that Kontrabant 2 will have already hit the airwaves on Radio Študent in Slovenia. At 9:30 pm Slovenia time (UTC+2 in Daylight Savings Time), if you are tuned to 89.3 FM, hitting record on a cassette tape will capture a buzzing sound that will run until just over 50KB have been transmitted. If all went well, you can load the tape into your working ZX Spectrum or bring it to the Computer History Museum in Slovenia and use theirs to try it out.

The game is in Serbian, as it was originally made for what was then Yugoslavia, for ZX Spectrums mostly smuggled in from Western Europe.

My ZX81 also loaded programs from audio tape cassettes and I remember that some computer shows back then on TV also had a short audio broadcast to allow users to record the audio, and load it into the computers afterwards.

But if you don’t have the computer, missed the broadcast, and can speak Serbian, you can play Kontrabant 2 on the Internet Archive’s emulator.

See arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05…
#Blog, #gaming, #retro, #Slovenia, #technology, #zxspectrum

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danie10@squeet.me
Danie

The Internet Archive has hundreds of full usable Palmpilot apps that you can run in your browser

A Palmpilot about screen with text: About HanDBase. HanDBase V1.10 UNREGISTERED by DDH Software sales@ddhsoftware.com For more Palmpilot software go to http://www.ddhsoftware.com or call +1561-432-7DDH for a free catalog. Bittons at the bottom show as OK and Register with a time of 30 days left shown.
This really brings back memories, and I was even able to run the HanDBase app, which was a database app you could use to easily create a database with properly defined fields etc. The apps all run in proper Palmpilot or Palm OS emulators, so you do get the actual feeling of using the device right down to the Graffiti writing (which took me a few minutes to get used to again (it’s been a good 30 years since I last used a Palmpilot).

Partly the power behind Palm was the ability to install 3rd party community apps, and there were really some very good ones. It may look awfully simple today but that was the limitation of the graphics and devices of the time. This was long before smartphones and up to this point we mostly only had dumb fixed ROM pocket organisers.

See archive.org/details/softwareli…
#Blog, #palmpilot, #retro, #technology

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