Nightfox wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

One thing I'm still not comfortable with regarding web apps is that if your internet service goes down, you'll be unable to access/run those programs. I still like to have locally-installed software.

I wrote a book using Google Docs, and even when I was without internet
access, could still access the doc and make offline changes. I haven't tried that with Microsoft365 yet.


... When in doubt, predict that the trend will continue.
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

esc wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

It's time to embrace the horror. The web Microsoft365 apps run pretty
well and provide a much fuller experience than G Suite - and run well
on Linux browsers.

I'm not sure I agree about the M365 vs GSuite - I have been on GSuite since January and previously on Microsoft products and I far and away prefer GSuite for collaboration. But I guess it's subjective. *shrug*

You bring up a good point. Collaboration is much more complicated (to me) under 365 than in G Suite. The office apps in Microsoft 365, both the web
apps and desktop apps feel much more functional than their G suite counterparts.

That being said, I much prefer G suite at home for the simplicity. I can
enter sheets.new in a browser and make a basic spreadsheet, for example. My home app needs are much simpler than at work.

My killer app is still Outlook, though - with a full-fledged mobile client like Nine, I can use my notes field for data capture and fully populate the tasks and calendar, and do most of my organization in one app. If G suite
gave tasks a solid app, it'd be a contender for me.


... When in doubt, predict that the trend will continue.
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

Weatherman wrote to Poindexter Fortran <=-

Fortunately, Google made the right decision to continue to allow the
early adopters with custom domains on the legacy free tier. It is suprising to me that Microsoft pricing is lower than Google in that
space.

I had an early legacy free tier account, and back around 2010 they offered a free trial of the paid features - and sneakily, no way to go back to the
free tier.

Before that decision was made, I was ready to ditch Google and host my
own email again. I had everything ready to go - as there is no way I
will pay business rates for personal/family access. For some unknown reason, Google doesn't offer a family plan at all for G Suite. Very
odd and in my opinion, they could get more revenue if they did offer a family tier like Microsoft.

Yeah, with a home use license from your company (which most likely uses Microsoft 365), 5 licenses for the full Outlook experience, plus all of the usual web and desktop apps and 1TB of OneDrive space per user is $69/year, which is hard to beat. I've been trying to move off of Google One, but it's hard to do. Habits are hard to break.


... When in doubt, predict that the trend will continue.
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

Weatherman wrote to Poindexter Fortran <=-

Using eCS to manage a modern virtual environment - that rocks!

eCS and Arca OS both run fine on ESXi 6.7. I have never found an operating system that doesn't run in a virtual environment.

I tried in Proxmox and could install eCS but not boot. I should try again,
as I was probably one of the earliest adopters of OS/2 around here. I used OS/2 1.2 before it had a GUI!


... DESQview/386 - the only way to multitask!
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

Warpslide wrote to Nightfox <=-

We recently explored various Microsoft cloud offerings, one of them
being something called "Universal Print". This moves your print server
to the cloud and also lets you set permissions for your various
locations as to who can print where, all kind of neat.

Until you realize that if you loose internet access, you can't print.
You could be sitting right next to a printer, on the same network, but
if your location loses internet access, no printing for you.

My mom used Google Cloud Print until they deprecated it, and she commented
on how long it took some time to print. I explained that the print job went from her kitchen, to Mountain View, then to her den. :)

Cloud print sounds interesting, when you figure that companies usually have business class service, redundant circuits, and maybe even 4G backup. I'd guess that Universal print also gives you the ability to track and account
for print jobs, which is big business at companies like law firms that bill time and materials to clients.

As an aside, I spent last week moving my company out of their old office, as we're going remote. A cloud data/applications security company is subleasing our office space. All of the cars in the parking lot when I went in one last time were Teslas, Mercedes, and electric Mercedes. I'm in the wrong field!

Cloud security wrapped around big providers is big business.




... Powered By Celeron (Tualatin). Engineered for the future.
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

killer wrote to Warpslide <=-

Surprising what actually gets implemented. Feel like at times it is security through obscurity. Once IBM gets their hands in a cookie jar they have a tendency to keep a tight grip on things.

There are a lot of non-supported OSes running in embedded and offline environments. A lot of small voicemail systems are running on OS/2 or
Windows NT. As long as they never touch the internet, they *just* *work*.


... Powered By Celeron (Tualatin). Engineered for the future.
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

killer wrote to Atreyu <=-

Makes spying on your competitors so much easier when their data is all stored in the cloud and they don't notice the extra resource
consumption as your are indexing their data.

Cloud phishing is becoming more and more pervasive - once you get in,
lateral movement can reveal a lot.

Get good at cloud security and you'll be well-employed.


... Powered By Celeron (Tualatin). Engineered for the future.
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

Google started in the cloud. Microsoft is dragging everyone, kicking and screaming to the cloud. It is all about the control and recurring revenue. The
old model of buy hardware or an OS and keep that running for 15+ years is not
acceptable to companies these days.

I don't mind the cloud, as long as I can choose who my masters are. I am
using Proton as my provider right now.

--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v7.0
* Origin: Inland Utopia BBS * Ontario, California (21:4/108)

My killer app is still Outlook, though - with a full-fledged mobile
client like Nine, I can use my notes field for data capture and fully populate the tasks and calendar, and do most of my organization in one
app. If G suite gave tasks a solid app, it'd be a contender for me.

Sometimes it can be what a person is more accustomed to using. I always thought Groupwise calendar was much better than Outlook, but I also way more used to using Groupwise years ago.

I am a big fan of Gmail, which is why I was very torn on what was happening at Google concerning them not having a family tier option and wanting the charge business rates to hobbiests and family users. I'm glad they decided to leave things alone. I was never against paying a reasonable amount for a family tier, but that option doesn't exist. The main reason myself and many use the legacy tier is for the custom domain name option.

As a general rule, the cloud scares me when you have a very few having such control of communications on the Internet. This is why I'm also a huge supporter of all things Web3 - decentralized Internet.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

I had an early legacy free tier account, and back around 2010 they
offered a free trial of the paid features - and sneakily, no way to go
back to the free tier.

I think there was a way to go back to the free tier for those that changed to playing plan and then they backed off the removal of the free tier.

I never changed anything because I was ready to ditch them completely. I had exported everything from Google. I still have the Exchange Server VM configured and ready at home if the need arises again.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

I tried in Proxmox and could install eCS but not boot. I should try
again, as I was probably one of the earliest adopters of OS/2 around
here. I used OS/2 1.2 before it had a GUI!

Ensure you use JFS as the file system. Not sure that HPFS will boot properly in any virtual environment.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

I don't mind the cloud, as long as I can choose who my masters are. I am using Proton as my provider right now.

I don't mind the cloud either, as long as I'm the cloud. In a round about way, I am my own cloud. I also run a web3 node for dapps in the Flux network. Anything to move us towards a decentralized Internet is a positive for me.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

*** Quoting Weatherman from a message to Poindexter Fortran ***

Sometimes it can be what a person is more accustomed to using. I
always thought Groupwise calendar was much better than Outlook, but I
also way more used to using Groupwise years ago.

Groupwise! There's a name I haven't thought about in awhile. I worked at a place that was still running Groupwise when I started there in 2009. I dragged them away from that to Exchange (and later Office 365).

When we went to Exchange/Outlook the most common question I got was "how do I know if they've read my email" as with Groupwise you could check to see if
the message had both been delivered & then read if you were sending to
someone internal. I showed them how to ask for read receipts in Outlook but they complained "it's not the same!".


Jay

... Real knowledge is to know the extent of ones ignorance

--- Telegard v3.09.g2-sp4/mL
* Origin: Northern Realms | tg.nrbbs.net | 289-424-5180 (21:3/110.1)

I wrote a book using Google Docs, and even when I was without internet access, could still access the doc and make offline changes. I haven't tried that with Microsoft365 yet.

You can't tease a book like that without sharing a link ;)

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Groupwise! There's a name I haven't thought about in awhile. I worked at a place that was still running Groupwise when I started there in 2009. I dragged them away from that to Exchange (and later Office 365).

When we went to Exchange/Outlook the most common question I got was "how
do I
know if they've read my email" as with Groupwise you could check to see if the message had both been delivered & then read if you were sending to someone internal. I showed them how to ask for read receipts in Outlook
but they complained "it's not the same!".

Probably because I used Groupwise for many years, I would agree that read receipt isn't the same as how Groupwise handled message status. You didn't have to do anything special and it just worked. I also think the calendar was more advanced than Exchange for many years.

I remember when it was called Word Perfect Office. The very first large enterprise that I worked was using DOS menu and Word Perfect Office - which included the email platform that was eventually purchased by Novell and renamed to Groupwise. The main directory when you install it was still WPDOMAIN - for Word Perfect.

There might be some customers still using it. I will say I have seen very large Groupwise installs years ago. That was one of the most used email systems around here back then.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

On 05 Nov 22 07:34:00, Poindexter Fortran said the following to Atreyu:

My spin on it was that OS/2 multitasked DOS apps amazingly well (being able to run DOS windows with Novell drivers while still having lots of memory, running lots of DOS windows, and so on...) but as soon as hardware continued to improve, that became moot.

Agreed... thats what happened here. I got a little tired of working for my OS instead of the other way around. Having to buy OS/2-friendly hardware at the time. Everyone else I knew was enjoying their Windows computers.

I remember very well being at a friends apartment in 2001 and being shown Windows 2000 with everything it could do. RDP, Tape backup, networking that worked properly... sealed the deal for me. OS/2 was gone the next day.

Atreyu

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
* Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)

On 06 Nov 22 09:20:30, Weatherman said the following to Atreyu:

Our organization used the Blackberry for many years before standardizing on the iPhone (gasp). I am the ONLY rebel in the 20k+ organization that has a company paid android. Not only do I deviate on the mobile phone, but on the mobile carrier. Everyone with company phones use Verizon and I use Sprint/T-Mobile.

I like my Iphone SE, 1st gen as I have no compelling reason to upgrade.

Probably because I've grown very accustomed to its UI and the Mail app.
Apple got it right... at least for me.

Novell was awesome back in the day. I was a CNE and used to administer larg Novell networks back in the 3.12 days and even 4.10 days. I performed many large 3.12->4.10 migrations to Novell NDS back in the day. NDS was better b

Wow thats impressive! I never caught on to Novell. I actually didn't really get into serious networking stuff until Windows NT4 / 2000.

Atreyu

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
* Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)

On 06 Nov 22 09:31:35, Weatherman said the following to Atreyu:

Yes, but unfortunately Microsoft has been creating far too many "Wizards" th now make things more complicated on the more recent operating systems than t previous versions. It takes more clicks to just edit your IP address on Windows these days. They need a global "disable all wizards" toggle!

What absolutely kills me... makes me laugh... actually laugh from the belly... are Powershell fanatics. These are seriously people from another planet.

I've worked with PS, written some scripts with it and mannnnnn... the syntax for the most basic of operation I found to be Rube Goldberg convoluted in design and execution.

They've completely missed the joke... that you're spending countless hours on a command prompt of a "Windows" OS. Just like Windows Server installs without the GUI. It completely goes against the whole point of a GUI, the whole name.

Atreyu

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
* Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)

On 06 Nov 22 09:36:55, Weatherman said the following to Atreyu:

I will find a way to run everything on Linux if all the future modern OS are tied to the cloud. More than half the population only really need a browser so the Chrome OS is good enough for them.

Same here, I'll be dragged kicking and screaming into installing Linux... actually I do like the BSD variants. NetBSD and FreeBSD. They just seem a
bit more mature and meant for long-term stability.

Atreyu

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
* Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)

I like my Iphone SE, 1st gen as I have no compelling reason to upgrade.

I'm using a Samsung Galaxy Note 9, which is fairly old at this point in time. I use is mainly for apps and rarely as a phone.

Wow thats impressive! I never caught on to Novell. I actually didn't
really get into serious networking stuff until Windows NT4 / 2000.

I actually started my IT career with mainframes, DECs, and other mid-range systems like AS/400s and Sperry. My first IT jobs was with a major bank and they had almost 100% IBM hardware.

My 2nd IT job I did lots of work on setting up data communications on mainframes, AS/400s, and Digital (DEC) systems. I worked on the large network of systems for a major gym/fitness club back then.

My 3rd IT job got me more into client/server PC networking (which is where I wanted to be). Huge Netware environment, started as many 3.12 Netware servers and ended up consolidating them into NDS 4.11 HA clusters. Novell was way better at networking large enterprises vs Microsoft back then.

I still remember starting the Active Directory domain for the organization where I am now. I ran it on an old PC in my office with just a few PCs on it. Now there are 15k+ devices connected to it and running on many domain controllers.

Once I moved more into data networking, that was lots of fun too. Designing large scale networks is loads of fun with all the various connectivity and redundancy. One of the coolest things done in the past 3 years is adding a technology called OTV (overlay transport virtualization). Fancy term for a VPN on steroids. It allows you to run the same VLANs/networks at the same time in two data centers on routed network links. You can even route the same networks on both sides at the same time. Perfect for HA in VMware.
- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

What absolutely kills me... makes me laugh... actually laugh from the belly... are Powershell fanatics. These are seriously people from another planet.
I've worked with PS, written some scripts with it and mannnnnn... the
syntax for the most basic of operation I found to be Rube Goldberg convoluted in design and execution.

They've completely missed the joke... that you're spending countless hours on
a command prompt of a "Windows" OS. Just like Windows Server installs without
the GUI. It completely goes against the whole point of a GUI, the whole name.

I agree that powershell has a convoluted syntax that makes some of the 200 character command line options in Linux look basic. The execution of powershell is a mess.

I understand why Microsoft created this - all in the name of "automation and scripting". Why not use APIs, or any other straight forward method towards automation.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

Same here, I'll be dragged kicking and screaming into installing Linux... actually I do like the BSD variants. NetBSD and FreeBSD. They just seem a bit more mature and meant for long-term stability.

I was probably one of the only people on earth running Home Assistant completely on a Windows 10 VM at one point in time. It was not an easy process getting it all working there since I was very non-standard, but it worked (at least for a while).

A few years ago I threw in the towel and moved to the Home Assistant OS (which is basically a custom Linux built just for this use case). Things work way easier for me now and I am happy I switched. Not because I like one OS over the OS, but more because some apps are written for certain platforms. I use what makes the most sense for the particular app.

That is how I ended up running so many different operating systems in my ESXi environment.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

On 05 Nov 2022, Nightfox said the following...

One thing I'm still not comfortable with regarding web apps is that if your internet service goes down, you'll be unable to access/run those programs. I still like to have locally-installed software. Otherwise,
if software is all web-based (or otherwise runs from an internet
server), we wouldn't need much more than dumb terminals at home (whereas typically it's a good thing to have your own storage and processing
power at home).. In some ways, it seems like computing is coming full-circle.

Nightfox

I completely agree. Keep the power at home. If you want a web app then host it locally and access it across the internet. Nextcloud offers all the goodies Google has and you can do it on a PI if you don't have a server sitting around.

|23|04Dr|16|12Claw
|16|14Sysop |12Noverdu |14BBS |04(|14Noverdu.com|04)
|10Standard Ports for SSH/Telnet Web/HTTP://|14Noverdu.com:808
|20|15fsxNet/MRC Chat/Registered Doors!/50Nodes/No Time Use! Stay On!|16|07

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Noverdu BBS (21:1/210)

On 07 Nov 22 08:10:08, Weatherman said the following to Atreyu:

I agree that powershell has a convoluted syntax that makes some of the 200 character command line options in Linux look basic. The execution of powershell is a mess.

I understand why Microsoft created this - all in the name of "automation and scripting". Why not use APIs, or any other straight forward method towards automation.

The one scripting language I actually didn't mind, was Rexx on OS/2.

Atreyu

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
* Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)

Am 06.11.22 schrieb Weatherman@21:1/132.0 in FSX_GEN:

Hallo Weatherman,

eCS and Arca OS both run fine on ESXi 6.7. I have never found an operating system that doesn't run in a virtual environment.

AFAIK OS/2 v1.3 won't run that easily in a virtual environment,
because it was 'optimized' for a 286 processor.

Regards,
Anna

--- OpenXP 5.0.56
* Origin: Imzadi Box Point (21:3/127.1)

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: boraxman to Nightfox on Sun Nov 06 2022 09:55 pm

It's weird, the whole point of the "Personal Computer" was that we would get to own our computers, and run our own local software without having to worry about timeshare, or using someone elses system. It seems as if they are wanting to undo the whole "Personal Computer" thing and move us back to using other peoples machines which they control.

I've had basically the same thought. It's a weird situation.

Software developers truly suck, for creating this terrible situation. Our

I imagine it has more to do with them doing what their employer wants, rather than choosing themselves that this was a good idea. I'm a software developer professionally, and it wouldn't be my first choice.

Nightfox

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Nightfox on Sun Nov 06 2022 07:14 am

One thing I'm still not comfortable with regarding web apps is that
if your internet service goes down, you'll be unable to access/run
those programs. I still like to have locally-installed software.

I wrote a book using Google Docs, and even when I was without internet access, could still access the doc and make offline changes. I haven't tried that with Microsoft365 yet.

That's encouraging.

Nightfox

On 07 Nov 2022 at 09:41a, Nightfox pondered and said...

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: boraxman to Nightfox on Sun Nov 06 2022 09:55 pm

It's weird, the whole point of the "Personal Computer" was that we wo get to own our computers, and run our own local software without havi worry about timeshare, or using someone elses system. It seems as if are wanting to undo the whole "Personal Computer" thing and move us b to using other peoples machines which they control.

I've had basically the same thought. It's a weird situation.

Software developers truly suck, for creating this terrible situation.

I imagine it has more to do with them doing what their employer wants, rather than choosing themselves that this was a good idea. I'm a
software developer professionally, and it wouldn't be my first choice.

Nightfox

Understandable, but nevertheless, here we are. Perhaps I should say instead "software industry", to exonerate those devs who know they aren't building the best solution.

... There is an exception to every rule, except this one.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

esc wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

I wrote a book using Google Docs, and even when I was without internet access, could still access the doc and make offline changes. I haven't tried that with Microsoft365 yet.

You can't tease a book like that without sharing a link ;)

It was a post-apocalyptic novel I wrote during NANOWRIMO a few years ago.
I've been meaning to clean it up and publish it on Amazon for a while...


... Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

Warpslide wrote to Weatherman <=-

Groupwise! There's a name I haven't thought about in awhile. I worked
at a place that was still running Groupwise when I started there in
2009. I dragged them away from that to Exchange (and later Office
365).

I'm dating myself - I worked at a mac/windows shop in the early '90s, and my boss had a plan to replace a mac-based email system called QuickMail with WordPerfect Office, an earlier version of Groupwise. It took so long to try and customize it for what we were going to use that people got tired of waiting, and we set up a BSD box with Qpopper and bought copies of Eudora
Pro for the office. Turns out that we didn't need groupware, just email -
and Eudora/POP3 worked great.

I have the Eudora sound on my phone for new mail, still. :)


... Listen in total darkness, very quietly
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

Atreyu wrote to Weatherman <=-

Wow thats impressive! I never caught on to Novell. I actually didn't really get into serious networking stuff until Windows NT4 / 2000.

I ran Novell networks in the 90s, and went to their corporate office in San Jose for user group meetings. I was in awe of their campus, grassy walkways, ponds, volleyball courts, employee center with dry cleaning, day care, a cafeteria with high chairs so you could have breakfast/lunch with your kids, and the scale of it all.

Many years later, I worked at that same campus. Novell was long gone by that point, and I'd had a sneaking suspicion that I'd been there before. It
didn't occur to me until later it was the same space.


... Listen in total darkness, very quietly
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

Weatherman wrote to Atreyu <=-

past 3 years is adding a technology called OTV (overlay transport virtualization). Fancy term for a VPN on steroids. It allows you to
run the same VLANs/networks at the same time in two data centers on
routed network links. You can even route the same networks on both
sides at the same time. Perfect for HA in VMware.

Sounds like something we're doing at work with our SD-WAN and firewalls. We were able to extend a subnet from one office to another during a server migration. Pretty wild stuff, the last time I did networking as part of my
job networks were physically isolated.


... Listen in total darkness, very quietly
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Warpslide on Mon Nov 07 2022 06:29 am

I'm dating myself - I worked at a mac/windows shop in the early '90s, and my boss had a plan to replace a mac-based email system called QuickMail with WordPerfect Office, an earlier version of Groupwise. It took so long to try and customize it for what we were going to use that people got tired of waiting, and we set up a BSD box with Qpopper and bought copies of Eudora Pro for the office. Turns out that we didn't need groupware, just email - and Eudora/POP3 worked great.

I have the Eudora sound on my phone for new mail, still. :)

:) I remember that sound. When I started using the internet in 1995, I installed the free Eudora email client, which seemed decent. I used that for quite a while, but then I remember Eudora starting to nag to buy the full version. I then switched to Mozilla Thunderbird (which was able to import my Eudora email), and I didn't look back.

Nightfox

It was a post-apocalyptic novel I wrote during NANOWRIMO a few years
ago. I've been meaning to clean it up and publish it on Amazon for a while...

Impressive you got this done! I've always wanted to do NANOWRIMO but November is such a busy month, work-wise, it's always a crunch to get things done by the end of the year. How did you find the experience writing?

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

I completely agree. Keep the power at home. If you want a web app then
host it locally and access it across the internet. Nextcloud offers all
the goodies Google has and you can do it on a PI if you don't have a
server sitting around.

+1 Nextcloud. That is another thing I setup here on my own personal cloud which runs in my basement.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

The one scripting language I actually didn't mind, was Rexx on OS/2.

I never did much with Rexx. I have done some basic Python stuff while working with Home Assistant over the years. Nothing super complicated, since I never have considered myself anything close to a coder. A modder yes, coder not so much.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

AFAIK OS/2 v1.3 won't run that easily in a virtual environment,
because it was 'optimized' for a 286 processor.

I never tried it. I should see if I can get a DOS 5.0 VM fired up just for the hell of it.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

Sounds like something we're doing at work with our SD-WAN and firewalls.
We were able to extend a subnet from one office to another during a
server migration. Pretty wild stuff, the last time I did networking as
part of my job networks were physically isolated.

Virtualization was a game changer, as is flash storage to SANs. We went from having explosive growth of pizza box severs taking up loads of space and power, to a few racks of high end blades that are fiber channel attached to flash storage arrays.

The entire data center can run in a few racks. You can have petabytes of storage in a single rack. No more city blocks of old mainframe DASD. My cell phone has more storage than many mainframe systems did back in the late 80s.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

Matthew Munson wrote to All <=-

Since Windows 11 does not accept my Ryzen 1700x, should I upgrade it to
a 3700x on my B350-Prime Plus motherboard (i flashed my bios for this)
and perhaps buy a 1tb ssd to upgrade my storage at the same time.

I would advise you to stop for a sec and ask yourself *why* you are
thinking of upgrading your hardware. If the only reason is to run Windows
11, I'd advise you to stick with your hardware and run a different OS. It should be easy-peasy to find a copy of Windows 10. Since that used to work,
why not save yourself the money and just run Windows 10?

Of course, there are a couple of us (Gamgee, me) whose automatic advice
would be to run Linux on it, but I get the feeling you don't want to make
that big a change. So the next logical question is, why change your working system?


-+- Brightening your day. -Bex <3

... Trillian: My whole planet destroyed because you thought someone wanted your
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.49

Exodus wrote to Gamgee <=-

Wipe that virus-laden "OS" off the computer, install Linux, and keep on moving forward. Cost = 0.

I love the version of Ubuntu that has ADS in the terminal window ....
that was classy for whoever did that.

I don't remember that at all, but I am not big on Ubuntu in general. Still, what was your point?


-+- Brightening your day. -Bex <3

... Mushu: Stand watch, Mushu, while I blow our secret with my stupid girly habi
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.49

Gamgee wrote to Nightfox <=-

Just a weak attempt at humor. I'm anti-Windows and sometimes can't
resist poking at it... ;-)

SAME!!! But everyone already knew that. (:


-+- Brightening your day. -Bex <3

... "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.49

I don't remember that at all, but I am not big on Ubuntu in general. Still, what was your point?

Yeah - don't think there have ever been ads in the terminal window.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

It's weird, the whole point of the "Personal Computer" was that we would get to own our computers, and run our own local software without having
to worry about timeshare, or using someone elses system. It seems as if they are wanting to undo the whole "Personal Computer" thing and move us back to using other peoples machines which they control.

Everything is cyclical. Computing and related technologies are no different. There will be another evolution and we will swing back the other way honestly. Just the simple fact that Internet access is not always around will force people to move away from the cloud eventually.

Killer

... Makethe taglines go awaaaaaaay

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/15 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)

just keeps growing as everything connects to the network these days. It won't be long until my toilet will be able to count flushes per day and will be on my home LAN.

What?! Five extra flushes today! That will be 5 DOGE penalty per flush!

... If evolution were a fact then cats would use can openers.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/15 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)

I remember hearing that before. Do you know if the ATMs are still using OS/2 or was that just back in the day?

I think a large number are still using it. The multimedia ones are the ones most likely using embedded Windows, but if they are still old school text interface most likely OS/2 still.

... He's two disks short of a full backup

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/15 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)

You bring up a good point. Collaboration is much more complicated (to
me) under 365 than in G Suite. The office apps in Microsoft 365, both
the web apps and desktop apps feel much more functional than their G suite counterparts.

Well Sharepain the tool used for collaboration there, which is decidedly painful to use and most people can't get it setup properly.

... Beer doesn't tell you how to have sex.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/15 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)

What?! Five extra flushes today! That will be 5 DOGE penalty per flush!

I'm sure there could be an excessive use tax added for the "over 5 flushes per day" homes. Really bad if you have the stomach flu. Or if you happen to drink lots of beer, like me.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

I think a large number are still using it. The multimedia ones are the
ones most likely using embedded Windows, but if they are still old school text interface most likely OS/2 still.

I rarely use ATMs, but most of the ones around here that I have seen these days are the video/multimedia ones.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

killer wrote to boraxman <=-

different. There will be another evolution and we will swing back the other way honestly. Just the simple fact that Internet access is not always around will force people to move away from the cloud eventually.

Depends on where you are. I'm interested in seeing ultralight laptops with built-in 4G/5G networking; in a metropolitan area that would be pretty
great.


... Do the words need changing?
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

On 11/2/22 02:00, acn wrote:

You know... I don't ever remember the Linux crowd ever going after
OS/2. There was this odd level of calm, a mutual respect between
the two.

Maybe because some of the Linux people once used OS/2...
That's at least my story.

Used to work OS/2 support for iomega... of course I remember very
little, about the only thing I really didn't like about OS/2 was that everything you wanted to do outside run windows compat software was
costly and that the configuration file(s) were beyond massive.

I switched back and forth a lot in the late 90's, with Windows 2000 (not
ME), I pretty much didn't look back... I'm running Linux for my personal desktop now, an M1 air for my personal laptop, and work laptop is
Windows 10, but working mostly in WSL(2) + Docker + VS Code.

Honestly there's aspects I like(d) about almost every OS I've ever used.
--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1@roughneckbbs.com
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com (21:3/149)

On 11/2/22 03:10, boraxman wrote:

I am likely just going to buy a 5600G processor to replace the 1700x.

Ha, and here I am running an AMD Phenom II. That CPU you're getting
rid of would run rings around my *main* rig. Kids these days with
their newfangled processor doohickeys!

I'm kind of the opposite end... I did hold on to my i7 4790K for about 5 years... currently running an r9 5950X, RTX 3080 (10gb), 128gb ram, 2tb samsung 980 pro (linux drive), and hoping to see an r9 7950X3D in the
spring, and will upgrade to that in march/april assuming it exists.
--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1@roughneckbbs.com
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com (21:3/149)

BY: Tracker1(21:3/149)


|11T|09> |10I'm kind of the opposite end... I did hold on to my i7 4790K for about 5|07
|11T|09> |07
|11T|09> |10years... currently running an r9 5950X, RTX 3080 (10gb), 128gb ram, 2tb |07
|11T|09> |10samsung 980 pro (linux drive), and hoping to see an r9 7950X3D in the |07
|11T|09> |10spring, and will upgrade to that in march/april assuming it exists.|07
I will need to get a new motherboard, 32gb of ram, move the processor and fan to teh new motherboard. 2tb ssd stick. and possibly a 1tb platter ssd drive with a 6700 XT fraogucs card.


--- WWIV 5.8.0.3608
* Origin: inland utopia * california * iutopia.duckdns.org:2023 (21:4/108)

Honestly there's aspects I like(d) about almost every OS I've ever used.

I get a kick out of trying old OSes to see if there are things I like. I'm particularly fond of AmigaOS. There are several things in AmigaOS that I enjoy that I haven't seen implemented elsewhere. It was truly before its time, considering all that was possible with it so long ago.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Am 17.11.22 schrieb Tracker1@21:3/149 in FSX_GEN:

Hallo Tracker1,

Used to work OS/2 support for iomega...

Oh, nice :) I'm still playing around with Zip drives, at the moment
I'm using a SCSI one on my Amiga 1200.
But my OS/2 PC also has an internal one (IDE version from NEC).
It has been a while since the last time I turned it on, but it did
work, also when running OS/2 :)

of course I remember very little, about the only thing I really
didn't like about OS/2 was that everything you wanted to do outside
run windows compat software was costly and that the configuration
file(s) were beyond massive.

Yep, that's true...

[...]

Honestly there's aspects I like(d) about almost every OS I've ever used.

That's true, even Windows has some nice aspects, although it's harder
to remember which ones it are than on other OSes :)

Regards,
Anna

--- OpenXP 5.0.56
* Origin: Imzadi Box Point (21:3/127.1)

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: esc to Tracker1 on Thu Nov 17 2022 07:24 pm

I get a kick out of trying old OSes to see if there are things I like. I'm particularly fond of AmigaOS. There are several things in AmigaOS that I enjoy that I haven't seen implemented elsewhere. It was truly before its time, considering all that was possible with it so long ago.

Yeah, in the mid-late 90s, I used to like trying different operating systems, mainly for x86 PCs, since that's what I had. At one point, I had a multi-boot setup on my PC with Windows 9x, OS/2, and Linux. Now I think it's funny to think that was on a 4.5GB hard drive, which is small by today's standards..

Nightfox

On 18 Nov 22 09:38:08, Nightfox said the following to Esc:

Yeah, in the mid-late 90s, I used to like trying different operating systems mainly for x86 PCs, since that's what I had. At one point, I had a multi-bo setup on my PC with Windows 9x, OS/2, and Linux. Now I think it's funny to think that was on a 4.5GB hard drive, which is small by today's standards..

I thought a 20 megabyte hard drive for my Tandy was "big" at the time...

Atreyu

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
* Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)

On 17 Nov 22 16:55:14, Tracker1 said the following to Acn:

I switched back and forth a lot in the late 90's, with Windows 2000 (not ME), I pretty much didn't look back... I'm running Linux for my personal

I know I blabbed about this a few times but I was the exact same... Windows 2000 just "sold" me on how good it was at the time.

I could set up a basic VPN and RDP into my system from anywhere, do proper backups to a tape drive because it had Ntbackup built-in. These things were outrageously expensive for OS/2 or impossible, or just halfassed.

Atreyu

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
* Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)

Yeah, in the mid-late 90s, I used to like trying different operating systems, mainly for x86 PCs, since that's what I had. At one point, I
had a multi-boot setup on my PC with Windows 9x, OS/2, and Linux. Now I think it's funny to think that was on a 4.5GB hard drive, which is small by today's standards..

Ha, that's nuts. Yeah. I remember back when having a 300mb spare HD was like...endless amounts of storage that I could never fathom of filling up.

Another interesting thing to think about here is RAM. It's amazing to think how much optimization was done to make things work with the amount of memory we had access to.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: esc to Nightfox on Fri Nov 18 2022 03:12 pm

Now I think it's funny to think that was on a 4.5GB hard drive,
which is small by today's standards..

Ha, that's nuts. Yeah. I remember back when having a 300mb spare HD was like...endless amounts of storage that I could never fathom of filling up.

That's true.. When buying a larger hard drive, I always felt like it would be hard to fill it all up, but it seems it always gets filled up eventually.

Another interesting thing to think about here is RAM. It's amazing to think how much optimization was done to make things work with the amount of memory we had access to.

That's true too. It's interesting to learn what programmers did in the 80s with so little RAM available on computers & similar devices back then. And these days, when computers could have 32GB, 64GB, or more RAM (and it's a lot less expensive than it used to be), we don't need to worry so much about that anymore.

Nightfox

I thought a 20 megabyte hard drive for my Tandy was "big" at the time...

I thought having an external 3.5" drive for my Apple //c was "big" back in the early 80s. After running my BBS on just (2) 5 1/4 floppy drives, that was a huge gain in storage.

I would have never thought back then that I'd be sitting here now with well over 100TB, and gone from a 300 baud modem to 1Gbps fiber.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

On 18 Nov 22 19:29:59, Weatherman said the following to Atreyu:

I would have never thought back then that I'd be sitting here now with well over 100TB, and gone from a 300 baud modem to 1Gbps fiber.

Ha! I'm not quite there yet but getting there!

Atreyu

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
* Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)

I thought a 20 megabyte hard drive for my Tandy was "big" at the time...

First HD I had was with the 286 I got for the BBS, a 40Mb job. It seemed
huge at the time, and being DOS 3.3 it was a 30 and 10Mb partition setup.
Prior to this I'd only ever had 140k or 800k floppies.

It didn't really take to long before it didn't seem to large any more though, back then the file areas grew exponentially. While I was really only loading Apple II stuff, the handbrake was all for having DOS stuff too. Ended up with the floppy holding file areas briefly.

Spec


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: Good Luck and drive offensively! (21:3/101)

Ha! I'm not quite there yet but getting there!

I should be receiving the rest of my storage order today. I couldn't resist the 14TB Western Digital enterprise Ultrastor drives (which are really the legacy HGST drives) for $140 each. I bought all (9) of the ones listed.

I still have (8) 6TB drives, around (40) 3TB drives, and (50) or so 2TB drives. The 2TB drives are sitting in several very heavy boxes collecting dust at the moment.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

First HD I had was with the 286 I got for the BBS, a 40Mb job. It seemed huge at the time, and being DOS 3.3 it was a 30 and 10Mb partition setup. Prior to this I'd only ever had 140k or 800k floppies.

Exactly the same for me, too. My first hard drive was when I bought my 286-12 system after selling all my Apple // stuff. It has 2MB of RAM (which was a ton back then), and my first hard drive which was a full height 40MB drive (Seagate).

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

Tracker1 wrote to boraxman <=-

I'm kind of the opposite end... I did hold on to my i7 4790K for about
5 years... currently running an r9 5950X, RTX 3080 (10gb), 128gb ram,
2tb samsung 980 pro (linux drive), and hoping to see an r9 7950X3D in
the spring, and will upgrade to that in march/april assuming it exists.

I'm pretty trailing edge - I just bought a system with an i7 4790 earlier
this year, replacing a 10 year-old Core2 Duo that I'd upgraded to a Core2
Quad a few years before.


... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here...
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

BY: esc(21:4/173)


|11e|09> |10I get a kick out of trying old OSes to see if there are things I like.|07
|11e|09> |10I'm particularly fond of AmigaOS. There are several things in AmigaOS|07
|11e|09> |10that I enjoy that I haven't seen implemented elsewhere. It was truly|07
|11e|09> |10before its time, considering all that was possible with it so long ago.|07
Does that mean we can run AmigaOS with VirtualBox?


--- WWIV 5.8.0.3608
* Origin: inland utopia * california * iutopia.duckdns.org:2023 (21:4/108)

On 19 Nov 2022 at 07:54p, Spectre pondered and said...

I thought a 20 megabyte hard drive for my Tandy was "big" at the time

First HD I had was with the 286 I got for the BBS, a 40Mb job. It seemed huge at the time, and being DOS 3.3 it was a 30 and 10Mb partition setup. Prior to this I'd only ever had 140k or 800k floppies.

I think my first purchased PC had a whopping 20 megabyte HDD in it, and I recall spending a lot of coin on it at the time. I also remember being focused on trying to get the latest and greatest modem for the computer so that I could call out (and allow others to call my Renegade BBS) at speed.

The fun was listening to the incoming calls and figuring out who had faster modems at the time.

Kerr Avon [Blake's 7] 'I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid and I'm not going' avon[at]bbs.nz | bbs.nz | fsxnet.nz

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

On 19 Nov 2022 at 07:20a, Weatherman pondered and said...

Exactly the same for me, too. My first hard drive was when I bought my 286-12 system after selling all my Apple // stuff. It has 2MB of RAM (which was a ton back then), and my first hard drive which was a full height 40MB drive (Seagate).

I'm trying to recall the specs of my earlier computers, it was either a 386 or perhaps a 486 dx system... made by a crowd now long gone in New Zealand.. I think they were called PC General..... then the next system was by PC Direct.... New Zealand computer companies had such imaginative names heh :)

Kerr Avon [Blake's 7] 'I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid and I'm not going' avon[at]bbs.nz | bbs.nz | fsxnet.nz

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Does that mean we can run AmigaOS with VirtualBox?

Not exactly, but there are plenty of great emulators out there - WinUAE if you use Windows, FS-UAE for linux/macos.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

I'm trying to recall the specs of my earlier computers, it was either a
386 or perhaps a 486 dx system... made by a crowd now long gone in New Zealand.. I think they were called PC General..... then the next system
was by PC Direct.... New Zealand computer companies had such imaginative names heh :)

I still have pictures somewhere of the monster sized 286-12 tower case that I used back then. It was as tall as my desk when sitting on the floor. It even had the "turbo" button on it.

I used the same case for many years as I upgraded/swapped motherboards to several different 386 systems, then to 486, then to pentium, etc. Since the case was so large, I later used it as my data server case.

These days my data server and vmware servers are all 4U Supermicro systems. I love the supermicro systems. They are a data hoarder's dream platform.

Speaking of which, I have (9) 14TB drives sitting on my desk next to me right now. Once I get that new array in place, it will take over a week to copy all the data.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

Atreyu wrote to Tracker1 <=-

I could set up a basic VPN and RDP into my system from anywhere, do
proper backups to a tape drive because it had Ntbackup built-in. These things were outrageously expensive for OS/2 or impossible, or just halfassed.

I bought Famatech's remote administrator program when I was administering Windows NT4 and 2000 servers, and still use it to this day on the BBS.

I still try to block out those days of swapping DDS and DLT tapes by hand. :)



... What mistakes did you make last time?
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

Weatherman wrote to Atreyu <=-

I would have never thought back then that I'd be sitting here now with well over 100TB, and gone from a 300 baud modem to 1Gbps fiber.

The first incarnation of realitycheckBBS had 2 30 mb drives and 2 mb of RAM. Hard to fathom that it did mostly what I'm doing now on a VM with 2 cores, 3 GB of RAM and 100 GB of disk. Of course it would fill up the disk during a Fido mail run and crap itself, but what the heck...

I used to have to unpack Fido mail packets into separate directories per echomail area, with *.msg files for each message, then import those into the message base. Took up twice the amount of disk space for what I'd import.




... What mistakes did you make last time?
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

Hello Atreyu,

18 Nov 22 17:44, you wrote to Tracker1:

On 17 Nov 22 16:55:14, Tracker1 said the following to Acn:

I switched back and forth a lot in the late 90's, with Windows 2000
(not ME), I pretty much didn't look back... I'm running Linux for
my personal

I know I blabbed about this a few times but I was the exact same...
Windows 2000 just "sold" me on how good it was at the time.

I could set up a basic VPN and RDP into my system from anywhere, do
proper backups to a tape drive because it had Ntbackup built-in. These things were outrageously expensive for OS/2 or impossible, or just halfassed.

do you run OS/2 or ArcaOS?
what r u using 4 rdp under os/2?

Regards,
--
dp

telnet://bbs.roonsbbs.hu:1212 <<=-

... 10:57pm up 2 days, 17:20:24, load: 84 processes, 290 threads.
--- GoldED/2 1.1.4.7+EMX
* Origin: Roon's BBS - Budapest, HUNGARY (21:4/148)

On 20 Nov 2022 at 08:51a, Weatherman pondered and said...

Speaking of which, I have (9) 14TB drives sitting on my desk next to me right now. Once I get that new array in place, it will take over a week to copy all the data.

Now that is a lot of data :)

I noted in recent days an international standards group has met to create new names for even larger amounts of data... can't recall the new names but it covers stuff like ten to the power of twenty six etc..

Kerr Avon [Blake's 7] 'I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid and I'm not going' avon[at]bbs.nz | bbs.nz | fsxnet.nz

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

On 20 Nov 22 21:05:49, Roon said the following to Atreyu:

do you run OS/2 or ArcaOS?

Neither, I used to run OS2

Atreyu

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
* Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)

The first incarnation of realitycheckBBS had 2 30 mb drives and 2 mb of RAM. Hard to fathom that it did mostly what I'm doing now on a VM with 2 cores, 3 GB of RAM and 100 GB of disk. Of course it would fill up the
disk during a Fido mail run and crap itself, but what the heck...

I used to have to unpack Fido mail packets into separate directories per echomail area, with *.msg files for each message, then import those into the message base. Took up twice the amount of disk space for what I'd import.

In my early sysop BBS days, I had a total of (5) message areas and only 20 messages each. Anything more would fill up the (2) 5 1/4 floppies.

Once I went from Apple to PC and ran an early version of WWIV, I had more storage and a hard drive. Joining WWIVnet back in the late 80s, I had plenty of storage for all the message areas. I was not in any FTN/Fido network back then and there was no support for it in WWIV.

It wasn't until around the early-mid 90s when there were programs created to allow FTN networks to work with WWIV. I was a very early adopter of that with WWIVTOSS (and still use it today).

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

Speaking of which, I have (9) 14TB drives sitting on my desk next to

me We> right now. Once I get that new array in place, it will take over a week We> to copy all the data.

Now that is a lot of data :)

My plan is to eventually create a (10) drive RAID5 array of 14TB drives + keep an extra as a on-hand spare. For now, I'll start with the 98TB usable and keep one for spare, and buy more when I see good pricing.

I should be able to remove all my 3TB drives and keep them for spares for my other servers that still use them.

Once I get all this in place, I should have around 200TB of running storage on the (3) servers, plus have plenty of spare drives for swapping.

I am my own cloud storage provider. :)

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

On 11/18/22 10:44, Atreyu wrote:

I know I blabbed about this a few times but I was the exact same...
Windows 2000 just "sold" me on how good it was at the time.

I could set up a basic VPN and RDP into my system from anywhere, do
proper backups to a tape drive because it had Ntbackup built-in.
These things were outrageously expensive for OS/2 or impossible, or
just halfassed.

Got even better with Litestep, remember a pretty custom UI, that really
just felt exactly how I wanted... using a lightly customized Ubuntu
Budgie setup currently. I remember Windows 2000 pretty fondly, didn't
play games on it... kept a dual boot of win98se for a long while to play
games (until XP SP3, when I finally jumped to XP)... since then played
with Linux... Really like WSL2 in Win10+, but with Win11, just irritated
me a bit too much... Linux does most of what I need now, and I don't
game too much, so sticking to what works native or via steam is okay
with me.
--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1@roughneckbbs.com
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com (21:3/149)

On 11/19/22 16:42, poindexter FORTRAN wrote:

I bought Famatech's remote administrator program when I was administering Windows NT4 and 2000 servers, and still use it to this day on the BBS.

I still try to block out those days of swapping DDS and DLT tapes by hand.
:)

Ran recovery ops for a mid sized company for a while in the later 90s...
man even with a multi-tape changing backup system, it's still nasty
AF... I don't recall the tech, but figured out how to do snapshotting
(NT4 era) on the main storage server (EMC, iirc) and that was far easier
99% of the time than dealing with the often borked backups.
--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1@roughneckbbs.com
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com (21:3/149)

Weatherman wrote to Avon <=-

My plan is to eventually create a (10) drive RAID5 array of 14TB
drives + keep an extra as a on-hand spare. For now, I'll start
with the 98TB usable and keep one for spare, and buy more when I
see good pricing.

I should be able to remove all my 3TB drives and keep them for
spares for my other servers that still use them.

Once I get all this in place, I should have around 200TB of
running storage on the (3) servers, plus have plenty of spare
drives for swapping.

I am my own cloud storage provider. :)

What do you use all this storage space for? Is this a business thing,
or just for home use?



... Gone crazy, be back later, please leave message.
=== MultiMail/Linux v0.52
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)

On 20 Nov 22 20:26:50, Tracker1 said the following to Poindexter Fortran:

Ran recovery ops for a mid sized company for a while in the later 90s... man even with a multi-tape changing backup system, it's still nasty
AF... I don't recall the tech, but figured out how to do snapshotting
(NT4 era) on the main storage server (EMC, iirc) and that was far easier 99% of the time than dealing with the often borked backups.

You're probably referring to Volume Snapshot or image-based backups, which is what I use here today.

Reinstalling Windows (or any OS) is just simply out of the question and not something I've had to do for a long time.

Atreyu

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
* Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)

On 20 Nov 22 20:17:52, Tracker1 said the following to Atreyu:

Got even better with Litestep, remember a pretty custom UI, that really just felt exactly how I wanted... using a lightly customized Ubuntu
Budgie setup currently. I remember Windows 2000 pretty fondly, didn't
play games on it... kept a dual boot of win98se for a long while to play games (until XP SP3, when I finally jumped to XP)... since then played
with Linux... Really like WSL2 in Win10+, but with Win11, just irritated
me a bit too much... Linux does most of what I need now, and I don't
game too much, so sticking to what works native or via steam is okay
with me.

I can't stand the lack of taskbar-labels in Windows 11... and I refuse to install some buggy halfassed shareware crap to "fix it". I often have many windows open at once on a workstation with six monitors. Breaking the taskbar functionality was unacceptable.

I actually thought XP and Server 2003 were the "best" that M$ was ever to crank out. Everything beyond that just got to be eye-candy or trying to do everything except act like an OS. Windows 10 talks to me as if we're friends and it wants to do things on its terms, not mine. Candy Crush and Xbox on the start menu of a professional-grade OS put an end to my love for windows.

I'm not a gamer... well, more of a retro-gamer if and when I have the time and thats either MS-DOS games or my old NES and Genesis consoles. I bought one
of those new multi-carts for both that have a rediculous amount of memory and pretty much every game in existance for them.

Atreyu

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
* Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)

Ran recovery ops for a mid sized company for a while in the later 90s...
man even with a multi-tape changing backup system, it's still nasty
AF... I don't recall the tech, but figured out how to do snapshotting
(NT4 era) on the main storage server (EMC, iirc) and that was far easier
99% of the time than dealing with the often borked backups.

I remember back in the 90s using Compaq DAT tape autoloaders for enterprise backups for all the Netware servers. Once the backups exceeded the amount of tapes in the DAT autoloaders, we moved on to Compaq DLT tape drives.

These days we have finally moved away from tapes. Everything is disk snapshots or some type of disk based backup.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

What do you use all this storage space for? Is this a business thing,
or just for home use?

It is for home use, but I do run several Internet based systems for various thing. I also use it the very same way that Google Photos works, for photo/video backups for our phones. I just have an app on our phones that auto SFTPs new files in photo/video directories to my server.

So I'm basically my own cloud. I also am a data hoarder, so I download tons of content. Lots of old TV shows and things like that.

Some of the storage is for disk backups of all my server VMs, physical PCs, etc, too. And I keep 31 backups of each (one month worth), just to be safe.

The backups use almost 24TB by itself. I also have weeks for of DVR data for my security cameras. Video takes up lots of storage.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

I can't stand the lack of taskbar-labels in Windows 11... and I refuse to install some buggy halfassed shareware crap to "fix it". I often have many windows open at once on a workstation with six monitors. Breaking the taskbar functionality was unacceptable.

I actually thought XP and Server 2003 were the "best" that M$ was ever to crank out. Everything beyond that just got to be eye-candy or trying to do

I agree that Windows XP and Server 2003 had the best interface. Windows 11 reminds me of Windows 8, where so many people hated the taskbar and menu that loads of people ran a shareware program to fix it.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

On 21 Nov 22 08:54:15, Weatherman said the following to Atreyu:

I agree that Windows XP and Server 2003 had the best interface. Windows 11 reminds me of Windows 8, where so many people hated the taskbar and menu tha loads of people ran a shareware program to fix it.

It wasn't just the interface that was good in XP/2003, it was also the OS largely staying the F out of my way and letting me focus on programs.

In this household computers work for me and not the other way around. And nobody nags me to do anything. I hate being nagged. Windows 10 and 11 always nag about something. Worse than the exwife. OS updates in particular. Theres ALWAYS some stupid OS update or Dot-net fiasco to the tune of 500mb~2gb worth of downloading. At least once or twice a month. Unacceptable.

And its 2022 and even with these lovely massive updates, the GUI is still horribly broken when you go to rename a file on an SMB share and something happens to the network connection; the entire explorer process crashes and
any other related operations crash. No warning, no explanation, nothing, not even an "unknown error" logged anywhere.

Linux is no better with some of this stuff... I just wish there was a modern OS that would act like an OS, talk like an OS and stop looking cute or trying to be my buddy. And doesn't need constant updates. Talks like a computer and just runs my bloody programs.

Atreyu

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
* Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)

Weatherman wrote to Gamgee <=-

What do you use all this storage space for? Is this a business thing,
or just for home use?

It is for home use, but I do run several Internet based systems
for various thing. I also use it the very same way that Google
Photos works, for photo/video backups for our phones. I just
have an app on our phones that auto SFTPs new files in
photo/video directories to my server.

So I'm basically my own cloud. I also am a data hoarder, so I
download tons of content. Lots of old TV shows and things like
that.

Some of the storage is for disk backups of all my server VMs,
physical PCs, etc, too. And I keep 31 backups of each (one month
worth), just to be safe.

The backups use almost 24TB by itself. I also have weeks for of
DVR data for my security cameras. Video takes up lots of
storage.

Wow, very cool. Is the auto-SFTP app on the phone a custom/private
thing, or is it a publicly available app? I might be interested in
trying that.


... Gone crazy, be back later, please leave message.
=== MultiMail/Linux v0.52
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* Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)

Tracker1 wrote to Atreyu <=-

Got even better with Litestep, remember a pretty custom UI, that really just felt exactly how I wanted...

I loved Litestep when I was running single-core laptops and trying to save
as many resources as possible. Thought about running it again in an XP VM
I've got, don't know how it would do under Windows 10.


... "He who is without oil, shall cast the first rod."-Compressions 8.7:1.
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

I still try to block out those days of swapping DDS and DLT tapes by hand.

Was it really that bad? Guess it depends on how many tapes you're talking. I always found them better than sliced bread so long as you had SCSI. A
business I used to work for was bought out by a much larger company, must at least 25 years back now.. they insisted on backups nightly, and got someone
to install a DAT drive, none of the office staff new how to drive it though,
so they were doing one backup per tape... :) Probably would've been able to fit a weeks worth on a single tape.

Spec


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: Good Luck and drive offensively! (21:3/101)

In this household computers work for me and not the other way around. And nobody nags me to do anything. I hate being nagged. Windows 10 and 11
always nag about something. Worse than the exwife. OS updates in
particular. Theres ALWAYS some stupid OS update or Dot-net fiasco to the tune of 500mb~2gb worth of downloading. At least once or twice a month. Unacceptable.

The .NET are the worst - taking loads of time for updates. When you have thousands of servers to patch, this is a constant nightmare. That is why so many platforms have moved away from Windows Server and created custom "appliances". The OS is just something to boot up the application.

And its 2022 and even with these lovely massive updates, the GUI is still horribly broken when you go to rename a file on an SMB share and something happens to the network connection; the entire explorer process crashes and any other related operations crash. No warning, no explanation, nothing,
not even an "unknown error" logged anywhere.

I see the same thing on Windows 10 from time to time. Probably some bug in explorer where it crashes and reloads the desktop.

Linux is no better with some of this stuff... I just wish there was a
modern OS that would act like an OS, talk like an OS and stop looking cute or trying
to be my buddy. And doesn't need constant updates. Talks like a computer
and just runs my bloody programs.

Just like how Apple took hold of the phone market, the vast majority of people are not technical. They just want some fancy looking pretty thing that has flashy icons and loves to charge their credit card everytime they click anything.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

Wow, very cool. Is the auto-SFTP app on the phone a custom/private
thing, or is it a publicly available app? I might be interested in
trying that.

Yes, it is called FolderSync (for android). I can sync folders via SFTP from phones to directories on my server at home. No need for Google photos or any other cloud system.

I would much rather control my own data, anyway.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

Weatherman wrote to Gamgee <=-

Wow, very cool. Is the auto-SFTP app on the phone a custom/private
thing, or is it a publicly available app? I might be interested in
trying that.

Yes, it is called FolderSync (for android). I can sync folders
via SFTP from phones to directories on my server at home. No
need for Google photos or any other cloud system.

Thanks. I see similar apps available for iOS, gonna look into this.

I would much rather control my own data, anyway.

Me too.


... Daddy, what does "now formatting drive C:" mean?
=== MultiMail/Linux v0.52
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)

BY: Weatherman(21:1/132)


|11W|09> |10It wasn't until around the early-mid 90s when there were programs|07
|11W|09> |10created to allow FTN networks to work with WWIV. I was a very early|07
|11W|09> |10adopter of that with WWIVTOSS (and still use it today).|07
I was one of the diehards who was one of the first few people to join othernets in other parts of the world. I had like 10 othernets thanks to internet transport.

But I am glad technology is opening up to all of us.

--- WWIV 5.8.0.3608
* Origin: inland utopia * california * iutopia.duckdns.org:2023 (21:4/108)

I was a very early|07 |11W|09> |10adopter of that with WWIVTOSS (and
still use it today).|07 I was one of the diehards who was one of the
first few people to join othernets in other parts of the world. I had
like 10 othernets thanks to internet transport.

But I am glad technology is opening up to all of us.

Same with me. I was one of the very early WWIV systems that had FTN, Usenet, Internet based WWIVnet transfers, network file transfers (via Filenet), etc. Lots of good times working with some really smart people over the years. Morgul, Frank Reid, and Rushfan to name a few.

- Mark
   
--- WWIVToss v.1.52
* Origin: http://www.weather-station.org * Bel Air, MD -USA (21:1/132.0)

Main reason I'm turned off games. Spending $000's to play the same type of games I've already played.

I got a switch for the kids instead. That will suffice.

I picked up a 3DS recently, and then won a fairly-inexpensive auction for a bunch of games for the system.

On the one hand, they're shutting off the ability to purchase anything more on the 3DS as of March 2023 or so, but on the other, at the end of life for a system is one of the nice times to buy.

But hard to find other people who actively play it.

But I suppose that's different from computer gaming. I mostly haven't bothered there, but spent lots on a computer because I wanted to be able to run demoscene productions (and hopefully eventually make some), and, well, that requires something that can play the latest games.

So I guess I still have the expensive habit, if for a different reason.

But I do think your approach is a very good one -- you should be able to enjoy the games just as much, but at a small fraction of the cost. Definitely a good idea.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: Adept to boraxman on Thu Dec 01 2022 09:13 pm

But I suppose that's different from computer gaming. I mostly haven't bothered there, but spent lots on a computer because I wanted to be able to run demoscene productions (and hopefully eventually make some), and, well, that requires something that can play the latest games.

Over the years, PCs have been where I've played the most games. I've had consoles (and currently still have a Nintendo Wii that I bought years ago), but it always seemed to be a little easier and less expensive to get PC games if you wanted to. Shareware games have existed for a long time, and although limited, you can at least play a little bit of the game for free before you decide to buy the full version. And there's always freeware games too. There were never any freeware games for consoles in the 80s and 90s; I'm not sure about newer consoles where you can download games online.

Nightfox

On the one hand, they're shutting off the ability to purchase anything more on the 3DS as of March 2023 or so, but on the other, at the end of life for a system is one of the nice times to buy.

The original XBox is one of my all time favorite consoles, and enthusiasts have resurrected the xboxlive store (or whatever it is) in a community supported way. It's super cool and my description here is pretty reductive to the reality but perhaps there will be some community effort for the 3DS at some point. I agree the 3DS is an amazing gaming platform, and there are /so/ many classic games for it which are all just phenomenal.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Main reason I'm turned off games. Spending $000's to play the same t of games I've already played.

I got a switch for the kids instead. That will suffice.

I picked up a 3DS recently, and then won a fairly-inexpensive auction
for a bunch of games for the system.

On the one hand, they're shutting off the ability to purchase anything more on the 3DS as of March 2023 or so, but on the other, at the end of life for a system is one of the nice times to buy.

But hard to find other people who actively play it.

But I suppose that's different from computer gaming. I mostly haven't bothered there, but spent lots on a computer because I wanted to be able to run demoscene productions (and hopefully eventually make some), and, well, that requires something that can play the latest games.

So I guess I still have the expensive habit, if for a different reason.

But I do think your approach is a very good one -- you should be able to enjoy the games just as much, but at a small fraction of the cost. Definitely a good idea.

I'm the only one who really is "into gaming", and even then, it is not that much. Part of the reason I stopped (apart from getting older, having a family, etc), is that I don't really want to use Windows as I consider Microsoft pretty evil. Linux runs most of what I'm interested in, Wine/Proton fills the gaps.

The reality is that games would be the ONLY reason I'd need to update my computer, so if I'm happy to play on the Switch, then my PC has years more life to it.

However, the Demoscene is something else and to be honest, its something I've wanted to get back into, though I've never made demos, only enjoyed watching them.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

BY: Adept(21:2/108)


|11A|09> |10On the one hand, they're shutting off the ability to purchase anything|07
|11A|09> |10more on the 3DS as of March 2023 or so, but on the other, at the end of|07
|11A|09> |10life for a system is one of the nice times to buy.|07
Im thinking about buying 100 bucks of 3ds games before the shut down. I might write a buyers guide.


--- WWIV 5.8.0.3614
* Origin: inland utopia * california * iutopia.duckdns.org:2023 (21:4/108)

The original XBox is one of my all time favorite consoles, and
enthusiasts have resurrected the xboxlive store (or whatever it is) in a community supported way. It's super cool and my description here is
pretty reductive to the reality but perhaps there will be some community effort for the 3DS at some point. I agree the 3DS is an amazing gaming platform, and there are /so/ many classic games for it which are all
just phenomenal.

I hope you're right, though I also wonder how much Nintendo would allow such things to happen.

Which is kind of a backward way of saying that I think that Microsoft probably deserves some credit for how they've handled gaming things.

Though maybe the XBox stuff was accidental -- you'd know better than me.

But nice to know there are lots of phenomenal 3DS games.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

I'm the only one who really is "into gaming", and even then, it is not that much. Part of the reason I stopped (apart from getting older,
having a family, etc), is that I don't really want to use Windows as I consider Microsoft pretty evil. Linux runs most of what I'm interested in, Wine/Proton fills the gaps.

Yeah, there are multiple ways of doing gaming, and many ways to do it on a budget. And even to do it the expensive ways, and not destroy your budget, if you're lucky enough to have a bit of spare income.

And nice that Linux works for you. I've run Linux from time to time, and obviously use it on servers, but am way more fine with Windows and Microsoft than I was in the past.

But that's probably because I'm way more bothered by what the other tech giants have been up to. And Windows just seems like less of an oppressive monopoly than it once was.

But it's still neat when people manage to make Linux work for them, whatever the situation is.

However, the Demoscene is something else and to be honest, its something I've wanted to get back into, though I've never made demos, only enjoyed watching them.

Yeah, and you probably need more of a computer for that than creating a demo, depending on what route you go.

E.g., a lot of people code for older systems, or make something using Pico-8. Which, while it's not old, certainly feels like it could be.

But I've wanted to play around with newer things. And, well, be able to use Unreal Engine, even if I wouldn't necessarily only use it.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

Im thinking about buying 100 bucks of 3ds games before the shut down. I might write a buyers guide.

Nice! Would be neat if you did, and be sure to share it here (or a link to it) when/if you do.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

I hope you're right, though I also wonder how much Nintendo would allow such things to happen.

You raise an interesting point! They've always been pretty active shutting down random third party versions of their IP. Shame, really.

But nice to know there are lots of phenomenal 3DS games.

Prior to the 3DS, when they had the DS and DS Lite, I was on deployment. The great thing about the DS/DS-Lite was that multiple people with a console could wirelessly tether to one another, and oftentimes only one person needed to have a cart for everyone else to play live. We used to play Mario Kart all the time...it was an awesome way to pass the time, for sure.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

The great thing about the DS/DS-Lite was that multiple people with a console could wirelessly tether to one another, and oftentimes only one person needed to have a cart for everyone else to play live. We used to play Mario Kart all the time...it was an awesome way to pass the time,
for sure.

That _does_ seem pretty neat, and _signifcantly_ easier to setup than getting a console and a TV.

And I imagine you could even make the claim that it was an essential part of bonding with your unit, too. :)

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

E.g., a lot of people code for older systems, or make something using Pico-8. Which, while it's not old, certainly feels like it could be.

But I've wanted to play around with newer things. And, well, be able to use Unreal Engine, even if I wouldn't necessarily only use it.

I do prefer the older hardware. IT seems more interesting, because its not as opaque. The new iPhone doesn't interest me because its so hard to get to the underlying hardware. The original IBM PC? Now that is interesting because I can control every aspect of that machine.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

I do prefer the older hardware. IT seems more interesting, because its not as opaque. The new iPhone doesn't interest me because its so hard
to get to the underlying hardware. The original IBM PC? Now that is interesting because I can control every aspect of that machine.

Yeah, and some people are working on _very_ impressive things on those older systems. E.g., the 286 demo that Trixter put out at Evoke.

My inclinations tend to lie elsewhere, either with ANSI, or just with doing enough coding to make something interesting, artistically. And using old systems just means that I'd have to spend more time exploring the hardware than thinking about the artistic aspects.

Though I do still have a bit of fascination with embedded systems, but not enough to have coded much of interest with it.

Still, most likely the next bigger Demoscene project I'll end up doing will involve ANSI-style graphics, but in systems where it's absolutely unnecessary to use ANSI-style graphics.

But I'd really just be going toward my strengths. I don't work in the game industry, so there are plenty of coders in the scene who will just always be significantly better than me, due to the amount of experience they have.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

boraxman wrote to Adept <=-

The original IBM PC? Now that is
interesting because I can control every aspect of that machine.

True. I started with a Commodore 64, but it wasn't until I got a PC-XT clone that things really got interesting. There were virtually *no* ports on the motherboard, everything was done with add-on cards. So, you could incrementally upgrade it easily. I started with replacing the 8088 CPU with
a V20, getting a math co-processor for my CS classwork, upgrading the hard drive and controller to RLL to get more space, then replacing the
motherboard with an AT/287, inheriting a card that added memory to the
system along with more I/O... by the time I was done the only things left original were the power supply and the case.


... All of my certifications are self-signed.
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

The original IBM PC? Now that is
interesting because I can control every aspect of that machine.

True. I started with a Commodore 64, but it wasn't until I got a PC-XT clone that things really got interesting. There were virtually *no*
ports on the motherboard, everything was done with add-on cards. So,
you could incrementally upgrade it easily. I started with replacing the 8088 CPU with a V20, getting a math co-processor for my CS classwork, upgrading the hard drive and controller to RLL to get more space, then replacing the motherboard with an AT/287, inheriting a card that added memory to the system along with more I/O... by the time I was done the only things left original were the power supply and the case.

Same. I wanted to do graphics on the Commodore 64, and program in "machine code" but books were hard to come by. It wasn't until a couple of years later, when I had a 386, and an assembler, and books, where I could really feel that FINALLY I was able to really access the hardware.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

I don't mind windows 11, it's much nicer than windows 10, but the hardware requirements suck.

The one thing I absolutely hated about Win11 was the right-click flyout menu in file explorer. Burying all the useful options in submenus requiring more clicking around was pretty lame.

(I'm behind on messages, so perhaps this already got talked about)

What I'm struggling with, with Win11, along with what you're saying, are other minor annoyances that I don't understand.

E.g., there's a default widget, that I would actively like -- if it didn't automatically open on hover. They introduced it that way on Win10, but then eventually included a way to make it not open on hover. Then made the same decision with Win11 to have it open on hover, but figured that defaulting it to the corner was enough.

And another minor thing, is that there are different things that happen when you click on the speaker icon, whether it's a left or right click. So I misclick, then do the right click, and the second click comes up behind the first. So I click out of both, then do the click I wanted.

And all of these are things that were handled differently in Win10, and I don't see any compelling reason for them to have changed it.

And, in the case of the widget, "do not open on hover" should _always_ be an option, for anything more than a tooltip.

But, in general, Win11 seems fine to me. I can't say I particularly _care_ about how it's different from Win10, but largely it does what I want, and I can ignore it most of the time.

And that's the state I want for an OS. Basically stop thinking about it.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

On 07 Dec 2022 at 01:19p, Adept pondered and said...

(I'm behind on messages, so perhaps this already got talked about)

If it helps I am too :)

What I'm struggling with, with Win11, along with what you're saying, are

I haven't used Win 11 as yet but my hunch is I may ride it out until the next OS version is released then try to move to that.. but time will tell I guess.

But, in general, Win11 seems fine to me. I can't say I particularly
_care_ about how it's different from Win10, but largely it does what I want, and I can ignore it most of the time.

And that's the state I want for an OS. Basically stop thinking about it.

sounds totally fair and reasonable :)

Pondering chocolate is far more fun :)

Kerr Avon [Blake's 7] 'I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid and I'm not going' avon[at]bbs.nz | bbs.nz | fsxnet.nz

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

I haven't used Win 11 as yet but my hunch is I may ride it out until the next OS version is released then try to move to that.. but time will
tell I guess.

I think Win 11 is only slightly different from Win 10. I would have to go looking to find differences that matter.

So it seems reasonable to me for people to skip the version. I'm really only running it because I got new computers this year, and it seemed more reasonable to have systems that were running Win 11 immediately.

Pondering chocolate is far more fun :)

It _is_.

I've gotten a variety of chocolate, and will eat some while typing this message, though I think the interesting food item I've been doing is my wine and gin advent calendars.

It's neat to try a couple new things each day, write down a short review, take some pictures, etc.

Eventually I'll get the info into my wine wiki, which, while it's more work than I'd like, is a part of the fun of trying out various alcohols.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

Adept wrote to Avon <=-

So it seems reasonable to me for people to skip the version. I'm really only running it because I got new computers this year, and it seemed
more reasonable to have systems that were running Win 11 immediately.

Windows 10 runs fine here, and Windows 11 won't run because this system doesn't have a TPM chip. It's a home model, I'm guessing lots of people will be unable to upgrade, and in 2025 they'll have to push the EOL date out further.

I don't think the whole Windows-Industrial complex works the way it used to, where a new Windows version would drive hardware purchases, which would run the newer versions of Windows and Office better.


... Repetition is a form of change
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

BY: poindexter FORTRAN(21:4/122)


|11pF|09> |10doesn't have a TPM chip. It's a home model, I'm guessing lots of people|07
|11pF|09> |10will |07
|11pF|09> |10be unable to upgrade, and in 2025 they'll have to push the EOL date out |07
its enviromentally irresposible what they did. Such as making ryzen 1st generation not supported. My motherboard has the proper tpm chip.

I would of just added 1 more Intel chip to be supported the 7th gen, and the ryzen 1st gen at least.

|11pF|09> |10further.|07
|11pF|09> |07
|11pF|09> |10I don't think the whole Windows-Industrial complex works the way it used|07
They should just make a better operating system. Maybe it was a conspiracy to drive new hardware sales. I might have to upgrade my desktop to have a PCI 4.0 bus at the minimum.

I will likely wait another six months if I want to convert the chip off my motherboard to a 550 AMD mb, put 32gb of 3600 ddr4 ram and a 2tb m2 stick with a 1tb ssd regular drive and I will be content with that.
I currently have a ryzen 5700x.


--- WWIV 5.8.0.3616
* Origin: inland utopia * california * iutopia.duckdns.org:2023 (21:4/108)

I've gotten a variety of chocolate, and will eat some while typing this message, though I think the interesting food item I've been doing is my wine and gin advent calendars.

We recently decided to make our own chocolates after stumbling across a YouTube video. We had a blast - we borrowed a tempering machine from a friend and bought some molds from Amazon and we made our own peanut butter cups, genaches, sea salt caramels...it was a ton of fun. A ton of work, too!

But I really grew to respect how much effort it takes to temper chocolate, it's a labor of love. I also now realize how much of a ripoff boxes of chocolates are. And being able to control the light/dark mix, filling, etc., was really cool. I highly recommend trying this some time.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Windows 10 runs fine here, and Windows 11 won't run because this system doesn't have a TPM chip. It's a home model, I'm guessing lots of people will be unable to upgrade, and in 2025 they'll have to push the EOL
date out further.

I struggle to figure out the killer feature Windows is bringing to the table nowadays in most use cases. Now that computers are front-ends for the internet, there don't appear to be many interesting differentiators. I think the following are probably the core remaining major use cases:
- Gaming (linux is coming along but is still a ways off and may never catch up) - Office (though doing everything in the cloud is rendering this redundant)
- Ease/compatibility (my 67 year old father would have no idea how to install and use linux on his own)
- Supported applications (everything basically works in Windows)

Aside from that, I think people probably use Windows because it's a known quantity and has basic understood principles at this point simply due to the history of its use.

This isn't to bash on Windows...I actually loved WSL when it came out and tried /hard/ to make a proper Windows dev environment. But as I always do, aside from my main gaming rig, I found my way back to linux after a bit. And I even tried Windows 11 and really wanted to like it. Alas it wasn't meant to be.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

They should just make a better operating system. Maybe it was a
conspiracy to drive new hardware sales. I might have to upgrade my
desktop to have a PCI 4.0 bus at the minimum.

You know, this reminds me...I actually for the most part use middle of the road hardware for my daily computing needs, throw linux on it, call it a day...but I spend a small fortune building vintage DOS and Windows 98 machines lol. Those were the real days of meaningful innovation...

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

On 09 Dec 2022 at 11:58a, Adept pondered and said...

So it seems reasonable to me for people to skip the version. I'm really only running it because I got new computers this year, and it seemed
more reasonable to have systems that were running Win 11 immediately.

I'd love a new computer but have to win the lotto first :)

yeah I expect I'll need to move some systems across to Win 10 or 11 sooner than later... but while the lights keep blinkty blinking I'm happy - heh.

Pondering chocolate is far more fun :)

It _is_.

I've gotten a variety of chocolate, and will eat some while typing this message, though I think the interesting food item I've been doing is my wine and gin advent calendars.
It's neat to try a couple new things each day, write down a short
review, take some pictures, etc.
Eventually I'll get the info into my wine wiki, which, while it's more work than I'd like, is a part of the fun of trying out various alcohols.

Ooo... sounds good. For me the challenge would be not scoffing it all before I formed a good review/view else it would all just be "yum"

Kerr Avon [Blake's 7] 'I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid and I'm not going' avon[at]bbs.nz | bbs.nz | fsxnet.nz

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: esc to poindexter FORTRAN on Fri Dec 09 2022 04:08 pm

Now that computers are front-ends for
the internet, there don't appear to be many interesting differentiators. I

I don't think I necessarily agree with that, nor do I think computers should just be front-ends for the internet. Not everything is well suited to run as a web/internet based app. Photo and video processing, software development, and other number-crunching tasks lend themselves to having a powerful computer at home that you can use for those kinds of things. Video games is another example.

Sometimes it seems like some software companies want us to use web apps though, as they can easily charge a subscription fee. In some ways it seems like a step backwards - I remember hearing about people using dumb terminals connected to powerful central mainframe computers in the 60s and 70s.. As computers became smaller, more affordable, and more powerful, it became much easier to have a fairly powerful computer at home that could run software locally, and generally that was seen as a good thing.

I struggle to figure out the killer feature Windows is bringing to the table nowadays in most use cases.

Yeah, I'm not sure any particular computer OS has any killer feature these days. As you said though, Windows just being a known thing means that pretty much all types of software are made for Windows (particularly gaming).

I've seen certain programs that some people just seem to love which are only made for one platform (i.e. Mac-only versions of certain programs), but I don't think there's any limiting factor where it would really need to be platform-specific.

Oddly, I've noticed that a large percentage of people who do photo & video editing and making music (content creators) still seem to prefer Mac, and a lot of web developers seem to like working on a Mac too. I've heard that music software for Mac in general tends to "just work" and have low latency, but (in my limited experience) I haven't seen much problem with latency with Windows music software either.. The web devleopment connection with Mac is one thing I don't quite understand though.

Nightfox

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: Avon to Adept on Sat Dec 10 2022 01:32 pm

yeah I expect I'll need to move some systems across to Win 10 or 11 sooner than later... but while the lights keep blinkty blinking I'm happy - heh.

When is "sooner than later"? :P
Sooner than a time that would be later than what?

Nightfox

I don't think I necessarily agree with that, nor do I think computers should just be front-ends for the internet. Not everything is well
suited to run as a web/internet based app. Photo and video processing, software development, and other number-crunching tasks lend themselves
to having a powerful computer at home that you can use for those kinds
of things. Video games is another example.

Yeah, but if you consider the number of people that use computers, the actual number of people that do any real gaming, development, photoshop, etc., is a pretty small chunk. The majority of people use computers rather casually, in which case computers basically are frontends for the internet.

Sometimes it seems like some software companies want us to use web apps though, as they can easily charge a subscription fee. In some ways it seems like a step backwards - I remember hearing about people using dumb terminals connected to powerful central mainframe computers in the 60s
and 70s.. As computers became smaller, more affordable, and more powerful, it became much easier to have a fairly powerful computer at
home that could run software locally, and generally that was seen as a good thing.

This is true, but it's also much easier to maintain. Build a web app, and then anyone with a browser can basically use it. You don't need to deal with customers downloading and installing things, really you can just offload all that burden onto the web browser itself. At the end of the day it lowers the burden significantly for development.

Yeah, I'm not sure any particular computer OS has any killer feature
these days. As you said though, Windows just being a known thing means that pretty much all types of software are made for Windows
(particularly gaming).

Agree. Honestly for casual web browsing and basic usage, essentially when I'm not doing dev work for my job or BBS stuff or gaming, I tend to use my iPad. It's just easier and gets out of the way.

I've seen certain programs that some people just seem to love which are only made for one platform (i.e. Mac-only versions of certain programs), but I don't think there's any limiting factor where it would really need to be platform-specific.

Agree, however I am sympathetic to game companies refusing to release for linux...it's a pain in the ass building something closed source and trying to support linux as a platform for your software, due to the bespoke nature of what 'linux' means for basically every type of user.

Oddly, I've noticed that a large percentage of people who do photo &
video editing and making music (content creators) still seem to prefer Mac, and a lot of web developers seem to like working on a Mac too.
I've heard that music software for Mac in general tends to "just work"
and have low latency, but (in my limited experience) I haven't seen much problem with latency with Windows music software either.. The web devleopment connection with Mac is one thing I don't quite understand though.

I prefer doing web dev on a Mac, I also prefer photo editing and making music on a Mac. Doing any kind of dev work in Windows has always been a bit of a nightmare for me. I use a Mac for doing dev stuff at work, but it's also an amazing personal computer. I prefer it infinitely over Windows.

For personal stuff, I use linux, unless I want to play a modern game (Windows) or I want to do some creative type things (Mac).

To each their own *shrug*

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: esc to Nightfox on Sat Dec 10 2022 03:23 am

affordable, and more powerful, it became much easier to have a
fairly powerful computer at home that could run software locally,
and generally that was seen as a good thing.

This is true, but it's also much easier to maintain. Build a web app, and then anyone with a browser can basically use it. You don't need to deal with customers downloading and installing things, really you can just offload all that burden onto the web browser itself. At the end of the day it lowers the burden significantly for development.

Web development has its own issues though. You have to test it in multiple web browsers (and perhaps multiple versions of multiple web browsers). And for years, IE was the bane of web development as it had its own bugs and special cases you had to allow for. It seems like a lot of hassle to have to test for multiple browsers & such.

I'm not doing dev work for my job or BBS stuff or gaming, I tend to use my iPad. It's just easier and gets out of the way.

What do you mean by "gets out of the way"?

Agree, however I am sympathetic to game companies refusing to release for linux...it's a pain in the ass building something closed source and trying to support linux as a platform for your software, due to the bespoke nature of what 'linux' means for basically every type of user.

That's true - though I think gaming support is one of the things Linux users have been wanting most. I think it's good that a big gaming company like Steam has been supporting Linux for a little while now.

I prefer doing web dev on a Mac, I also prefer photo editing and making music on a Mac. Doing any kind of dev work in Windows has always been a bit of a nightmare for me. I use a Mac for doing dev stuff at work, but it's also an amazing personal computer. I prefer it infinitely over Windows.

I'm curious how web development was a nightmare on Windows?
The development work I've done is more often back-end, desktop software (usually C# these days, but sometimes C++), and some mobile. I've done a little bit of web development and usually I use Windows and can't say I've encountered any significant problems doing it.

Nightfox

Web development has its own issues though. You have to test it in multiple web browsers (and perhaps multiple versions of multiple web browsers). And for years, IE was the bane of web development as it had its own bugs and special cases you had to allow for. It seems like a
lot of hassle to have to test for multiple browsers & such.

Yeah, this is true, to a point. Nowadays we have things like react which makes a lot of this rather straightforward. But yeah I hear you.

What do you mean by "gets out of the way"?

I open up my iPad, am instantly on the internet, nothing is being advertised to me, all I need to do is tap the Chrome icon and I'm off and doing what I want. When I'm done, I close the thing, and don't have a second thought. It automatically keeps packages up to date, I never need to click a button to upgrade anything, idk, in my experience I can carry the thing around and then instantly be on the internet anywhere with no fuss.

Consider that the iPad has democratized computing for groups of people that have never even owned a computer, similarly the iPhone and other smartphones. And these things don't even come with an instruction manual. /That/ is what I mean about it staying out of the way.

That's true - though I think gaming support is one of the things Linux users have been wanting most. I think it's good that a big gaming
company like Steam has been supporting Linux for a little while now.

The problem is the market share of people asking for gaming support on linux are not assumed to be large enough to warrant dumping dev resources into linux support. So a lot of gaming companies actually assume there'd be a financial loss in adding linux support. Not to mention everyone's linux configuration is a mixed bag...for example, on Steam, you can say "You need Windows 10 with 8gb RAM to run this" or "You need MacOS Yosemite" or something like that. With linux, they can try supporting the most recent Ubuntu LTS, but if you read the support forums for these games you'll notice a lot of people with different flavors of linux complain about compatibility issues.

I do think the Steam Deck has moved the needle a bit in favor of supportability, though, which is great...because I prefer linux and would love to have it for all my gaming needs :)

I'm curious how web development was a nightmare on Windows?
The development work I've done is more often back-end, desktop software (usually C# these days, but sometimes C++), and some mobile. I've done a little bit of web development and usually I use Windows and can't say
I've encountered any significant problems doing it.

My "dev on windows" experience historically has involved installing some 3rd party bash type thing, building a dev environment, wiring it up to work in the bash (git bash or something else), keeping everything in that environment up to date...whereas now WSL does make things a bit easier but man, that thing is a serious resource hog, and I can't traverse the filesystem well from the Windows side (or vice versa)...it's really just an annoyance and things have been much more straightforward for me to just launch my Mac and do a 'brew update' and am ready to go.

In other words, Windows hasn't really prevented me from being able to do anything per se...it just isn't as natural of an experience. In Windows, for me to do web dev, I have to bolt on a bunch of unix-y like stuff to an OS that is built completely different and then wrangle it into dev workflows. Whereas with a Mac, it's already built on BSD, and everything is greatly simplified.

Another example is at my company we supported linux strictly as backend tech for our software and recently have had to build Windows compatibility (again just for our backend stuff). Making things work in Windows has been a total nightmare lol.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: esc to Nightfox on Sat Dec 10 2022 01:13 pm

I'm curious how web development was a nightmare on Windows?

My "dev on windows" experience historically has involved installing some 3rd party bash type thing, building a dev environment, wiring it up to work in the bash (git bash or something else), keeping everything in that environment up to date...whereas now WSL does make things a bit easier but man, that thing is a serious resource hog, and I can't traverse the filesystem well from the Windows side (or vice versa)...it's really just an annoyance and things have been much more straightforward for me to just launch my Mac and do a 'brew update' and am ready to go.

In my experience, I don't recall a time when having a bash shell was needed to do web development, but I suppose some tools may need it. I have seen some editors that support editing files remotely via SSH, but usually that feature is built into the editor or through a plugin (i.e., Visual Studio Code, and even Notepad++ has such a plugin).

I guess I don't really mind installing 3rd party tools.. The way I see it, you pretty much always have to install some tools to do certain types of work anyway. Not everything can be included in the base OS install.

Nightfox

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: esc to poindexter FORTRAN on Fri Dec 09 2022 04:08 pm

I struggle to figure out the killer feature Windows is bringing to the table core remaining major use cases:
- Gaming (linux is coming along but is still a ways off and may never catch

I am not sure, but I suspect you could use Microsoft's Game Pass games on Linux. At least I have heard talk in that regard. If you have a proper Internet connection you can play lots of cloud games (in theory). I don't care for modern games but if this is so then the platform is a stepm closer to being irrelevant.


--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)

Ooo... sounds good. For me the challenge would be not scoffing it all before I formed a good review/view else it would all just be "yum"

There's a reason why I don't review chocolate. :)

Though I _did_ put it in my wine wiki at some point, figuring that it'd be interesting to also add the various fancy chocolates I came across.

But, yeah, bit harder to take a measured approach to it, for me.

That said, "yum" is a perfectly reasonable review. I have several reviews (though not by me, I think, just ones I entered) where the review was, "tasty" or something like that.

Probably the most important aspect anyway. "Hint of blackberries, tobacco, and molasses" are probably not overly useful in the grand scheme of things.

On the other hand, I enjoy referring to "paint thinner" (for many stronger alcohols), "wet dog taste" (for what the back of the tongue part of the taste of a Riesling tastes like (and it may not be the wet dog taste to anyone else -- but it makes sense to me, if I'm describing it to future self)), or "Gobstopper flavor" (which I just enjoy saying, but really _is_ what the smell of some of the gins have reminded me of.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

I am not sure, but I suspect you could use Microsoft's Game Pass games on Linux. At least I have heard talk in that regard. If you have a proper Internet connection you can play lots of cloud games (in theory). I
don't care for modern games but if this is so then the platform is a
stepm closer to being irrelevant.

Interesting. I should check it out. Honestly, I tend to get a bit seasick in a lot of FPS type games, the exception is GTAV, so basically I have a gaming rig running Windows just for that game lol. I also prefer older stuff, and have been a pretty big patron of gog.com (they should build a bench for me for all the money I spent there!).

Any other 'new' games and I really stick to roguelikes, games that "feel" like they existed in the 90s, and Civilization. None of these require massive hardware or anything, in fact many of them function just fine on my linux laptop with onboard intel graphics.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Though I _did_ put it in my wine wiki at some point, figuring that it'd
be interesting to also add the various fancy chocolates I came across.

You have a wine wiki??? Care to share? :)

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Though I _did_ put it in my wine wiki at some point, figuring that it be interesting to also add the various fancy chocolates I came across

You have a wine wiki??? Care to share? :)

It's just a basic Mediawiki install, I'm behind on adding stuff to the wiki, I've only re-tagged a couple of wines for who were the tasters, and all the other caveats (including that it really is just an exercise in cataloging wines (and gins) that I've tasted, or that others around me have tasted.)

I suppose other people _could_ add to it, but it's not an open-editing thing (I have no desire to care about spammers, so adding users is a manual thing. Or, really, a thing I don't do at all, because most other people like the concept, but don't really get caught up in cataloging like I do.

Anyway, http://www.monoceroses.com/wine if you wanted to look.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

esc wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

I struggle to figure out the killer feature Windows is bringing to the table nowadays in most use cases. Now that computers are front-ends for the internet, there don't appear to be many interesting
differentiators.

Momentum, mostly. You mentioned Office support; I don't think it'll be too long before Office is web-first. It exchanges their golden goose (purchasing office app licenses) for a recurring revenue model with a wider market base. Not a bad choice, looking forward.

I know people at work that use the web apps almost exclusively, even though they have the Office suite installed on their laptops.

I've sworn, every time I make a system change, that it'll be the time that I install Linux on my desktop -- but I'm still running Windows, albeit 10
only. We'll see what I do if this PC lasts longer than Windows 10 support.


... Emphasize repetitions
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

esc wrote to Utopian Galt <=-

You know, this reminds me...I actually for the most part use middle of
the road hardware for my daily computing needs, throw linux on it, call
it a day...but I spend a small fortune building vintage DOS and Windows
98 machines lol. Those were the real days of meaningful innovation...

As much as I'd love to hear the solid, satisfying KLIKK! of an AT power supply, I might be more tempted to get a thin client and throw DOS on them, They're cheap, they use modern peripherals, and my understanding is that there's DOS support for most of the cheap network cards with packet drivers.

I think if I went retro, I'd get an old SUN box.


... Emphasize repetitions
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

On 10 Dec 2022 at 01:13p, esc pondered and said...

Consider that the iPad has democratized computing for groups of people that have never even owned a computer, similarly the iPhone and other smartphones. And these things don't even come with an instruction
manual. /That/ is what I mean about it staying out of the way.

The iPad is an amazing tool. I use it to do research; I
can load up a ton of papers on the thing, and use tools
like Notability, LiquidText, and OmniGraffle to annotate,
take notes, design things, etc. It's probably the closest
I've seen to Engelbart's vision being realized.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: esc to Arelor on Sun Dec 11 2022 08:58 pm

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

If you like roguelikes, you may find my roguelike server amusing. I have only three
games in it so far but it is serviceable.

ssh dgamelaunch@operationalsecurity.es (password: Yendor)

--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)

Anyway, http://www.monoceroses.com/wine if you wanted to look.

Very cool! mediawiki for content like this is perfect. I look forward to reading.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Momentum, mostly. You mentioned Office support; I don't think it'll be
too long before Office is web-first. It exchanges their golden goose (purchasing office app licenses) for a recurring revenue model with a wider market base. Not a bad choice, looking forward.

My current employer uses Google suite for everything and honestly doing all Office type stuff in a browser is simpler in many ways. I wish the drive integration was stronger but it all works, which is good. And the multitude of MS Office features that differentiate it from GSuite are not very useful IMO...Office products with feature simplicity is a godsend for me at this point in my career (I spent time in the military watching people agonize over silly slide details, it's nice to avoid this).

I know people at work that use the web apps almost exclusively, even though they have the Office suite installed on their laptops.

I actually pay for Office for my own purposes (O365 I think) and have written wrappers to make it so that I can treat MS Office applications like fully integrated desktop apps in my linux desktop. Double clicking a Word doc will open in a standalone wrapped web Word app :)

I've sworn, every time I make a system change, that it'll be the time
that I install Linux on my desktop -- but I'm still running Windows, albeit 10 only. We'll see what I do if this PC lasts longer than
Windows 10 support.

I upgraded from Win10 to Win11 and tried very hard to like it, but really just kept getting frustrated. I wound up blowing everything away and starting from scratch once again with linux and haven't looked back. I just prefer the level of control I get to exert here.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

As much as I'd love to hear the solid, satisfying KLIKK! of an AT power supply, I might be more tempted to get a thin client and throw DOS on them, They're cheap, they use modern peripherals, and my understanding
is that there's DOS support for most of the cheap network cards with packet drivers.

On the one hand I agree with you but on the other hand, having hardware Voodoo cards, hardware GUS cards, hardware MT32 (and other midi devices), etc., with a real CRT VGA monitor, is an entirely different experience.

I /don't/ claim that it's worth the expense. But man, it's fun, and hobbies by nature aren't typically smart financial decisions. :)

I think if I went retro, I'd get an old SUN box.

We used Sun boxes at the government for a bit and I never really understood why some people are interested. What would an old SUN box do for you? Serious question?

It's like the nextcubes and stuff, they're so expensive, and I don't even know what they would bring to the table. I would love to better understand this.

Recently I've been on an FM Towns kick. I've gotten several from Japanese auction sites in various states of functionality and have managed to cobble together a couple full computers. They are quite a bit of fun, and they look rad.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

The iPad is an amazing tool. I use it to do research; I
can load up a ton of papers on the thing, and use tools
like Notability, LiquidText, and OmniGraffle to annotate,
take notes, design things, etc. It's probably the closest
I've seen to Engelbart's vision being realized.

Agree - I use my iPad constantly, and it can do most computing related things I need to do on a daily basis outside of very specific things (BBSing being one of them).

I have one with the cellular option and being able to just open the screen and be instantly connected, with all the capabilities and applications it brings to bare, is really amazing.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

If you like roguelikes, you may find my roguelike server amusing. I have only three
games in it so far but it is serviceable.

Ah super cool! I have a lot of roguelikes running as doors on my BBS. I /wish/ I could run Brogue but there's no way to do it in 80x25 and the implementation details on my BBS (requiring a bigger screen rez) would be annoying. It's such a masterfully designed game, speaking to the visuals.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
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Very cool! mediawiki for content like this is perfect. I look forward to reading.

Wikis definitely make the whole, "well, this is from Burgundy, but that's also a Pinot Noir, and it was x vintage..." aspect of things a lot easier, as half the fun is finding all the different ways to tag something.

I've made wikis for a couple other purposes, but, yeah, this usage fits pretty naturally.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: esc to Arelor on Mon Dec 12 2022 01:29 pm

If you like roguelikes, you may find my roguelike server amusing. I have
only three
games in it so far but it is serviceable.

Ah super cool! I have a lot of roguelikes running as doors on my BBS. I /wish/ I could run Brogue but
gned game, speaking to the visuals.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

I have thought of setting an actual BBS with Roguelike DOors, but in the end of the day I find
dgamelaunch better if you just want to host terminal games. Besides, dgamelaunch is easy to adapt to
OpenBSD and its sandboxing models.

Brogue is great but it is a bitch to adapt to a multiuser environment. Ideally my server would have a
Brogue version with a common high-score board for Brogue instead of a per-player high score. The web
versions for Brogue do just that but I have not looked into how they do it yet.

--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)

esc wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

My current employer uses Google suite for everything and honestly doing all Office type stuff in a browser is simpler in many ways. I wish the drive integration was stronger but it all works, which is good. And the multitude of MS Office features that differentiate it from GSuite are
not very useful IMO...

With a large company and a team that can help integrate them, Teams, Sharepoint and OneDrive are pretty powerful. There's a new feature called
Loop where you can share office content collaboratively in Teams, in
Outlook, and OneDrive/Sharepoint.

It'd be like being able to copy and paste a table into an email and Teams,
but have the recipient be able to edit it on the fly and update everywhere.

Sharepoint is the one thing lacking in GSuite - a way to create intranet sites. Teams sharing is starting to overtake Sharepoint now, to the point where we're running out of space for it!

For smaller groups, G Suite rocks for simplicity. At home, I find myself
going to docs.new and sheets.new rather than opening Word or Excel.





Office products with feature simplicity is a

godsend for me at this point in my career (I spent time in the military watching people agonize over silly slide details, it's nice to avoid this).

I know people at work that use the web apps almost exclusively, even though they have the Office suite installed on their laptops.

I actually pay for Office for my own purposes (O365 I think) and have written wrappers to make it so that I can treat MS Office applications like fully integrated desktop apps in my linux desktop. Double clicking
a Word doc will open in a standalone wrapped web Word app :)

I've sworn, every time I make a system change, that it'll be the time
that I install Linux on my desktop -- but I'm still running Windows, albeit 10 only. We'll see what I do if this PC lasts longer than
Windows 10 support.

I upgraded from Win10 to Win11 and tried very hard to like it, but
really just kept getting frustrated. I wound up blowing everything away and starting from scratch once again with linux and haven't looked
back. I just prefer the level of control I get to exert here.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

... Emphasize repetitions
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
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esc wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

On the one hand I agree with you but on the other hand, having hardware Voodoo cards, hardware GUS cards, hardware MT32 (and other midi
devices), etc., with a real CRT VGA monitor, is an entirely different experience.

I /don't/ claim that it's worth the expense. But man, it's fun, and hobbies by nature aren't typically smart financial decisions. :)

Oh, I wholeheartedly agree. I worked in a game company back in the '90s, and we were all in on hardware. Luckily, the company paid for hardware and game playing was encouraged. :)

I think if I went retro, I'd get an old SUN box.

We used Sun boxes at the government for a bit and I never really understood why some people are interested. What would an old SUN box do for you? Serious question?

Nostalgia. The hardware is beautiful to me, the SUN type 5 keyboard is one
of the best ever made, and my first *nix gig was supporting SUN hardware in
my server room. I had a Sparc II at my desk at the time with a huge (at the time) 19" monitor. While Windows and Mac were barely multitasking, Solaris
was able to run most of my infrastructure on a couple of boxes.

It's like the nextcubes and stuff, they're so expensive, and I don't
even know what they would bring to the table. I would love to better understand this.

The NeXT (hope I got the capitalization right) had display postscript when everyone else had jaggedy screen letters, keyboards and mice that felt luxurious by comparison to the cheap PC keyboards of the time, and tools to create apps quickly, if memory serves.

Those FM Towns systems you mention are interesting. I think I saw a table of those at the Vintage Computer Fair this year.


--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

I have thought of setting an actual BBS with Roguelike DOors, but in the end of the day I find
dgamelaunch better if you just want to host terminal games. Besides, dgamelaunch is easy to adapt to
OpenBSD and its sandboxing models.

I'd love to learn more about how each of these games is able to share things. Right now the way I am running things locally, each player plays each game in their own private sandbox.

I mean, I think this is technically fine, but I would love to find better near-multiplayer-ish implementation if possible :)

Brogue would be so great if only there was an 80x25 mode I could use. Alas.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

With a large company and a team that can help integrate them, Teams, Sharepoint and OneDrive are pretty powerful. There's a new feature
called Loop where you can share office content collaboratively in
Teams, in Outlook, and OneDrive/Sharepoint.

Perhaps, yeah. My biggest company had 2000 people at its peak. My current one is tipping the scales at under 400 :)

It'd be like being able to copy and paste a table into an email and
Teams, but have the recipient be able to edit it on the fly and update everywhere.

That's pretty cool.

Sharepoint is the one thing lacking in GSuite - a way to create intranet sites. Teams sharing is starting to overtake Sharepoint now, to the
point where we're running out of space for it!

Sharepoint is both a plus and a minus...the flexibility in implementation means everywhere you go has its own navigation style. Which becomes annoying :) The government was obnoxious for how they used Sharepoint for every silly portal and they were all a mess.

For smaller groups, G Suite rocks for simplicity. At home, I find myself going to docs.new and sheets.new rather than opening Word or Excel.

Funny, we are basically at opposite ends on tihs one :) I use gsuite for work and MS for private purposes.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Oh, I wholeheartedly agree. I worked in a game company back in the '90s, and we were all in on hardware. Luckily, the company paid for hardware and game playing was encouraged. :)

Nice! What company, if I may ask? I feel like we've discussed this before but I'm drawing a blank hehe.

Nostalgia. The hardware is beautiful to me, the SUN type 5 keyboard is
one of the best ever made, and my first *nix gig was supporting SUN hardware in my server room. I had a Sparc II at my desk at the time
with a huge (at the time) 19" monitor. While Windows and Mac were
barely multitasking, Solaris was able to run most of my infrastructure
on a couple of boxes.

Ah, gotcha. So, really, the reason I have all the stuff in my game room is for the same reason, I was just curious if there was something specific you'd be able to do with it from a gaming perspective. But this makes sense.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

On 12 Dec 2022 at 01:24p, esc pondered and said...

I think if I went retro, I'd get an old SUN box.

We used Sun boxes at the government for a bit and I never really understood why some people are interested. What would an old SUN box do for you? Serious question?

It's like the nextcubes and stuff, they're so expensive, and I don't
even know what they would bring to the table. I would love to better understand this.

This is all a billion years old, but the software was a
huge differentiator. I remember the first time I logged
into a Sun workstation, being _amazed_ at how much more
functional it was than my (then) top-of-the-line 486 PC.
It was simply no-contest. Same with VAXen running VMS.
You could simply do so much more with the machine, and it
was much more polished and mature; PCs felt like amateur
hour by comparison.

NeXTStep was incredible for its time, with an amazing user
interface. It did not integrate well with machines from
other manufacturers, however, and so they were sort of
like singletons on large networks of Sun, DEC, HP, SGI,
or IBM machines --- many of which had standardized on and
fully supported Sun's RPC layer and services (NIS, NFS).
In that sense, NeXT machines kinda felt like grown-up
Macintoshes, which in some sense, is exactly what they
were. SGIs were the next up.

Still, like I said, it was a long time ago.... I got a
chance to use a Sun machine at the Living Computer Museum
in Seattle on a side-trip from USENIX ATC for the Unix 50th
anniversary. It felt like seeing an old friend after a
long time, but where after a while you kinda realize why
you don't hang out that much anymore.

These days, I don't see much point to using retro hardware,
particularly when you can usually get a similar _experience_
in emulation.

But it was a heady time. Sun machines, in particular, were
built as the machine that the builders wanted to use, and if
you wanted to do serious computer work, science, or engineering
you were using Unix or VMS. People coveted Suns because that
was so much of the software we were all using was written on
and for. The switch from the 4.2/4.3BSD-based SunOS 4 to the
SVR4-based Solaris 2 felt like a big step backwards, though.
And by then DEC was in trouble and a lot of the Alpha designers
were heading to greener pastures; Intel got their compiler
people, AMD got their chip folks. The Pentium was doing by
sheer force of will (and massive capital investment coupled
with volume) what the much smaller, higher-margin RISC vendors
were doing with better technology (that in some cases wasn't
_as_ good: lookin' at you, MIPS soft TLBs). A PC with a Pentium
was only half as good as a SPARCstation or SGI, but a quarter
of the cost, and the trend line was heading towards favoring the
PC within a decade. Linux and the BSDs (and BSDi) were starting
to make x86 machines look pretty competitive. By the time AMD
came out with the Opteron with 64-bit virtual addressing it was
over. The RISC machines remained better _computers_ overall,
particularly in their IO subsystems, but they couldn't compete.

The pre-Web Internet was an amazing, dynamic place, so I can
see the appeal of wanting to recreate the experience with the
machines from that time. It's a shame; had RISC and Unix won,
it would be a very different world.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

On 13 Dec 2022 at 06:47a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

I think if I went retro, I'd get an old SUN box.

We used Sun boxes at the government for a bit and I never really understood why some people are interested. What would an old SUN box for you? Serious question?

Nostalgia. The hardware is beautiful to me, the SUN type 5 keyboard is
one of the best ever made, and my first *nix gig was supporting SUN hardware in my server room. I had a Sparc II at my desk at the time
with a huge (at the time) 19" monitor. While Windows and Mac were
barely multitasking, Solaris was able to run most of my infrastructure
on a couple of boxes.

Bah. Philistines. The Type-4 keyboard was where it was at.

It's like the nextcubes and stuff, they're so expensive, and I don't even know what they would bring to the table. I would love to better understand this.

The NeXT (hope I got the capitalization right) had display postscript
when everyone else had jaggedy screen letters, keyboards and mice that felt luxurious by comparison to the cheap PC keyboards of the time, and tools to create apps quickly, if memory serves.

That's all correct. The first web browser was written on
the NeXT.

It also had a pretty cool kernel architecture; it was basically
Mach underneath, with 4BSD bolted on, and they got to the point
where you could write kernel modules and drivers in Objective-C.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Re: Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
By: esc to Arelor on Tue Dec 13 2022 11:20 am

I have thought of setting an actual BBS with Roguelike DOors, but in th end of the day I find
dgamelaunch better if you just want to host terminal games. Besides, dgamelaunch is easy to adapt to
OpenBSD and its sandboxing models.

I'd love to learn more about how each of these games is able to share things

I mean, I think this is technically fine, but I would love to find better ne

Brogue would be so great if only there was an 80x25 mode I could use. Alas.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

The traditional approach by BSD games was to have the scorefiles and the savefiles in a common foolder (such as /var/games/whatever ) which belonged to a system user (say, _games). Games were setgid so when a user launched the game, the game manipulated the scorefiles directly.

Not the safest approach. OpenBSD has it disabled by default for the default BSDGAMES.

--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)

being something called "Universal Print". This moves your print server to the cloud and also lets you set permissions for your various
locations as to who can print where, all kind of neat.

Until you realize that if you loose internet access, you can't print.
You could be sitting right next to a printer, on the same network, but
if your location loses internet access, no printing for you.

This reminds me of the opposite problem, when I was at a work site in California (I'm based in Germany), and I was trying to print to the printer next to me.

I managed to print to the printer in my office building in Germany.

I imagine there's a use case for that, but it seems limited.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

esc wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

Oh, I wholeheartedly agree. I worked in a game company back in the '90s, and we were all in on hardware. Luckily, the company paid for hardware and game playing was encouraged. :)

Nice! What company, if I may ask? I feel like we've discussed this
before but I'm drawing a blank hehe.

Eidos Interactive. The company that did Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Daikatana,
Final Fantasy 7, Hitman and Thief.





--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

esc wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

With a large company and a team that can help integrate them, Teams, Sharepoint and OneDrive are pretty powerful. There's a new feature
called Loop where you can share office content collaboratively in
Teams, in Outlook, and OneDrive/Sharepoint.

Perhaps, yeah. My biggest company had 2000 people at its peak. My
current one is tipping the scales at under 400 :)

171,000 here. We're one of the biggest Microsoft365 users, from what I've
been told.

My division was maintained up until recently as a subsidiary, we had 20 people. It was the best of both worlds, like working at a startup with the budget of a much bigger company and technical resources I could call on for the more complex issues like SSO, security and so on.

For smaller groups, G Suite rocks for simplicity. At home, I find myself going to docs.new and sheets.new rather than opening Word or Excel.

Funny, we are basically at opposite ends on tihs one :) I use gsuite
for work and MS for private purposes.

I was all MS at home, but when I was laid off a couple of years back, forced myself to use G suite to be proficient at it. Now, there's no going back.


... There are secrets within lies, answers within riddles.
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

tenser wrote to esc <=-

A PC with a Pentium
was only half as good as a SPARCstation or SGI, but a quarter
of the cost, and the trend line was heading towards favoring the
PC within a decade.

In 1999, I ran the web site for a company that used a Sun Enterprise 250 for Oracle and an Ultra 2 for the web front-end running Tomcat. When we expanded the site, I bought several 1u intel boxes and threw Linux on them, and they ran the web site. I'm pretty sure they cost less than another Ultra 2. That was the tipping point for me.


... Convert a melodic element into a rhythmic element
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

On 14 Dec 2022 at 06:35a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

tenser wrote to esc <=-

A PC with a Pentium
was only half as good as a SPARCstation or SGI, but a quarter
of the cost, and the trend line was heading towards favoring the
PC within a decade.

In 1999, I ran the web site for a company that used a Sun Enterprise 250 for Oracle and an Ultra 2 for the web front-end running Tomcat. When we expanded the site, I bought several 1u intel boxes and threw Linux on them, and they ran the web site. I'm pretty sure they cost less than another Ultra 2. That was the tipping point for me.

I bet you're right. A few years later, they were faster
than the Ultra, too.

I was sad when SPARC was canc'd last year, but it was past
time. Register windows and soft TLBs were nifty for the
time, but in the harsh light of experience, proven not to
be as cool as was initially thought.

And it'll live on in the embedded space.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Eidos Interactive. The company that did Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Daikatana, Final Fantasy 7, Hitman and Thief.

Ah, right, we did discuss! I recall telling you I've been playing some of those on my Win98 built machine :)

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

As much as I'd love to hear the solid, satisfying KLIKK! of an AT pow supply, I might be more tempted to get a thin client and throw DOS on them, They're cheap, they use modern peripherals, and my understandi is that there's DOS support for most of the cheap network cards with packet drivers.

On the one hand I agree with you but on the other hand, having hardware Voodoo cards, hardware GUS cards, hardware MT32 (and other midi
devices), etc., with a real CRT VGA monitor, is an entirely different experience.

I /don't/ claim that it's worth the expense. But man, it's fun, and hobbies by nature aren't typically smart financial decisions. :)

It is a different experience, in particular the monitor. Emulation of the sound and video cards is quite good, but the screen makes all the difference. Especially with older computers (ie, CGA amber monitors). There is no way to reproduce the old phosphor screen satisfactorily now.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

On 07 Dec 2022 at 01:19p, Adept pondered and said...

(I'm behind on messages, so perhaps this already got talked about)

If it helps I am too :)

Only a month behind, now! For me, anyway. Less than 500 messages, though.

I feel like I'm living in the past.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)