#retro
just a funny retrospective memory...
Way back then, in the early to midst 1990ies, i had some #shell account on some random #bsd system out there in hamburg/germany, on the local telephone lines...
Additionally, i had the luxury of using a local "behördennetz" (governemt network) phone, which gave me access to local calls free of charge..
So i actually sat down, for some few days on end... to list up the contents of /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, reading the #man #page for each and every command available in there...
Did i ever mention that i love #unices and the fact they won over the world overall? ;)
#retro #unix #retrospecive #unices #retrocomputing #RandomShit ;)
50 Years of Text Games book parses the rich history of a foundational genre: Zork and MUD? Sure. But also Universal Paperclips, AI Dungeon, The Oregon Trail, and Lifeline
Reed’s book—which has over 620 pages of analysis, code samples, photographs, maps, flowcharts, footnotes, asides, cross-references, and other details—thoroughly backs up this claim. Text games, in both their earliest parser form and in more modern incarnations, are a fascinating space in which people have pulled off amazing feats, and innovations continue today. Many of the earliest text games mastered key aspects of world-building, narrative shaping, and player choice that some modern games, with exponentially more resources at their disposal, still struggle with.
Reed, a writer and game designer himself, picks one game for every year from 1971 through 2020. He adds an involving dive into the pre-1970s history of experiments, games, and brutally unforgiving code. Each decade also gets its own introduction, and there are summaries of 500 other text games included. Each of the game picks started out as a post on his Substack, though they have been revised and more deeply integrated with their historical context in the book.
There are classics you might expect, like Adventure, MUD, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and Trade Wars. There are definition-stretching inclusions, like the original Choose Your Own Adventure book, The Cave of Time, and Dwarf Fortress. And there are probably at least 20 games most of us have never encountered.
The article linked below contains some answers by Reed about this fascinating book.
See https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/50-years-of-text-games-parses-the-rich-history-of-a-foundational-genre/
#Blog, #gaming, #retro, #technology
Relive the Internet of the ’90s With ‘Neocities’ – Build your next website like it’s not yet 1999
Remember using dialup in the 1990s? Back when the technology was new, the online world wasn’t overrun with corporations, and everyone was basically trying to figure out what the internet even was? If you miss those days and you want to revisit an information superhighway where regular people created quirky online homes for themselves instead of just filling in text boxes on Twitter, rejoice: the old web lives on at Neocities.
Originally launched in 2013 as an effort to save the content on the defunct 1990s website hosting company GeoCities, Neocities has evolved into a network that hosts over 600,000 bespoke web sites created by humans in the old fashioned way: with HTML and Javascript.
Surfing in Neocities (“surfing the net” is what people used to call farting around on your computer) suggests an alternative reality where Web 1.0 never died.
Ironically, it seems that the sites are created by older people, but all by young people consciously choosing an outdated style to call back to a “simpler time” that they didn’t actually experience.
See https://lifehacker.com/relive-the-internet-of-the-90s-with-neocities-1850540482
#Blog, #neocities, #retro, #technology
HP Is Selling a 40-Year-Old HP-15C Calculator Again—For $120
HP calculators just never die! I still have a HP-12C, and a HP-41CV, which both work perfectly well. Yes, you’d think that calculators dead with cellphones around, but if you are regularly calculating numbers it is often easier to still use a dedicated calculator.
There are apparently still enough calculator devotees for HP to resurrect a model that’s been kicking around for over 40 years as a “Collector’s Edition,” complete with a price tag that might have you doing a double take.
First released back in 1982, the HP-15C debuted when HP was still calling itself Hewlett-Packard. And they made really good quality calculators back then. Some even went into space as a backup to assist with critical calculations.
There is a lot of nostalgia around older HP calculators today still.
See https://gizmodo.com/hp-15c-scientific-calculator-collectors-edition-price-r-1850464801
#Blog, #calculator, #HP, #HP15C, #retro, #technology
Agon Light is an 8-bit #microcomputer that combines aspects of #Arduino development boards and #RaspberryPi single-board computers.
look here: https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/agon.html
you can buy it here for 50€: https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/AgonLight2/open-source-hardware
Foto-Bearbeitung am Computer (1987) | Elektronische Bildbearbeitung (EBV) | SRF Archiv - YouTube
Quasi early #photoshop #retro
@Aurin Azadî Der Scanner!
Die Reklame: "DOS International 11 1993 " - ohai.social
Braucht noch jemand ein #modem ?
#retro
https://ohai.social/@die_reklame@mastodon.social/110196160281320782
Vieille affiche métallique, probablement des années 40-50 (?),
Samedi, sur le mur d'un café de la rue Crémazie
"Buvez du café: faites des choses idiotes plus rapidement, avec plus d'énergie"
© Réjean Leroux 2023
Photo du 08 avril — #mywork, #myphoto, #photo, #photographie, #photography, #foto #amateur, #couleur, #gimp, #Montreal, #Montréal, #vintage, #retro, #coffee, #café
Revisiting Borland Turbo C/C++, A Great IDE back in the 90s
“Tough Developer” did this blog recently about looking back at Turbo C and Turbo C++, and also installed an old version to play around with it.
It is a reminder of how far we have come, firstly from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and secondly for those who remember coding with it back then, how advanced it was in its day. Coding before this time was “basically” (yes, I know) standalone text file editing (the days of Emacs and Vim), and you’d debug really from compiler errors.
I’d been programming in Quick Basic for DOS before this, and I only wrote one program in C++ using Borland C++, before I moved on to Visual Basic (with real GUI Windows), and Clipper, Python, etc.
Because there was no Internet yet, nor YouTube, I had to buy paper books to learn from (even though the Borland C++ package came in a massive, cubed foot size box with about 7 or 8 manuals). I still have the three books: Using Borland C++ 3, Tom Swan’s Code Secrets, and The Waite Group’s Turbo C++ Bible.
Maybe I just did not try a hard enough, but the whole C++ syntax never sat well with me. Yes, it wrote really nice tight code, but for some reason I never felt I could just flow with it.
It felt like, back then, that computing was really advancing in leaps and bounds every year or every second year. Graphics cards changed resolution and EGA colour came out, sound went from beeps to real true sound, spreadsheets appeared for the first time, the mouse appeared, graphical interfaces appeared (before Windows even), simulated multitasking appeared, the 640k memory barrier was broken (remember extended RAM and DR DOS?), we progressed from single sided floppy discs to double-sided, stiffy discs, token ring networks (with their T-connectors) appeared and were later replaced by Ethernet, 10MB MFM hard drives, and finally USB ports.
Today, graphics are already so good, storage is so abundant, processors so powerful, so most new innovations are just incremental in nature, and hardly noticed. As I heard on the LTT channel the other day, a user will notice moving from 60Hz refresh rate to a 120Hz monitor, but they will really struggle to notice improvements from 144Hz to 240Hz even though it is double the refresh rate.
Apart from a bit bigger and a bit better, the only big advancement that I remember from the last 15 years or so is SSD drives coming out (super light power, much more robust, and superfast). Even webcams and optical mice had already started to appear 20 to 24 years ago.
See https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5358258/Revisiting-Borland-Turbo-C-Cplusplus-A-Great-IDE-b
#Blog, #BorlandC++, #coding, #retro, #technology