I made a quick plugin to also run stuff from path, and am currently working on a proper ssh plugin for that - extending them is a bit more involved than the simple rofi/wofi scripts, but there's a lot more things an anyrun plugin can do.
I've been using (or, in some cases, trying to use) that when it was brand new. Kernel side was relatively easy - but there was a lot of compiling custom versions of XFree86 trying to get acceleration working properly.
On the one hand a bit sad to see that kind of history I've experienced myself go - on the other hand, it's probably been a decade since I've last used something without KMS, and the ease of use of modern KMS drivers is way ahead of all the older stuff.
A few years before Ubuntu quite a few companies tried doing their own distributions. Back then it still was common to sell them in a proper software box - CDs or DVDs, manuals and some swag, at minimum stickers, but quite often also pins or some other stuff.
On exhibitions they'd often give away full boxes to get people to try - sometimes the current version, sometimes the last release. I still have a bunch of those in the garage - I think Corel (yes, the painting program guys) should be one of them.
Will be interesting how much that'll cost - but generally it looks like we're finally approaching a point where you can buy small systems with enough RAM and network bandwidth for cheap enough that it makes sense to create ceph OSDs with just one or two disks attached each.
It's hard to tell from the outside - but at the beginning it mainly looked like pressure from the investors. I wouldn't be surprised if there'd been a lot of activity from them behind the scenes, and the "90% leaving" part wasn't really "standing up for Altman", but more "follow the money", with investors possibly pressuring employees in various ways.
There were some rumours that he was pushing the commercial side too fast, potentially ignoring ethical issues. Given Altmans lobbying against AI regulation in the EU I find that plausible.
Since now apparently the investors won it proves that the special structure of for-profit owned by non-profit intended to keep them honest does not work - and we urgently need to have regulation in place, as self-regulation does not work.
They were interesting, but only good for a very narrow purpose - not really a good thing when the trend back then was going away from special purpose machines toward general purpose.
intel didn't plan it to be just a special purpose CPU - but it just ended up that way. That they gave their first customers free Alpha workstations for crosscompiling code as that was faster than native compilation should tell you everything you need to know about suitability of itanic as general purpose system.
There's a lot of enterprise stuff that only ships as binaries. I had some fun in the late 00s trying to find the most recent distribution still shipping packages for egcs as that was the only compiler supported by the Lotus Domino SDK.
(For the younger ones here: There was some disagreement about gcc development, which resulted in the egcs fork. It got merged back into mainline gcc by he late 90s already, though)
At the time when the Loki ports happened it was a great thing - before that you pretty much had doom and quake available. Nowadays things are better with steam, but it's quite likely that we'll see some stuff break there in a few years as well, at least for older games.
Installing 25 year old binaries on Linux is rather interesting - relevant for stuff like some of the old Loki ports. Problem is mostly that they've been written with kernel 2.2 in mind, which does have different behaviour for quite a few things - you generally can find old libc versions compatible with the binary, but those libc versions don't necessarily play nice with the kernel.
There are some compatibility flags which made things work last time I checked - but not sure if that's the case, and it definitely won't work forever, given that 32bit x86 support is likely to be dropped eventually.
Windows NT 3.5 and later NT 4 had C2 security certifications - assuming the system was not connected to a network, and didn't have floppy drives (this was before USB was a thing).
Which is not that useful for a device I don't really look at, and is covered by my hand when in use. I can continue using my trackball while it is charging, though.
Ethernet is awesome. Super fast, doesn't matter how many people are using it,
You wanted to say "Switched Ethernet is awesome". The big problem of Etherpad before that was the large collision domain, which made things miserable with high load. What Ethernet had going for it before that was the low price - which is why you've seen 10base2 setups commonly in homes, while companies often preferred something like Token Ring.
It wasn't really a replacement - Ethernet was never tied to specific media, and various cabling standards coexisted for a long time. For about a decade you had 10baseT, 10base2, 10base5 and 10baseF deployments in parallel.
I guess when you mention coax you're thinking about 10base2 - the thin black cables with T-pieces end terminator plugs common in home setups - which only arrived shortly before 10baseT. The first commercially available cabling was 10base5 - those thick yellow cables you'd attach a system to with AUI transceivers. Which still were around as backbone cables in some places until the early 00s.
The really big change in network infrastructure was the introduction of switches instead of hubs - before that you had a collision domain spanning the complete network, now the collision domain was reduced to two devices. Which improved responsiveness of loaded networks to the point where many started switching over from token ring - which in later years also commonly was run over twisted pair, so in many cases switching was possible without touching the cables.
There is news for internal consumption, and news for a global audience. Both is available via internet nowadays - there's pretty much no local newspaper without internet presence nowadays.
After my Russian wife was browsing the internal news yesterday to see what level of information is provided over there she mentioned that their solution in the abortion debate is to have everyone give birth, and just give up the kids to be raised by the state if you don't want them.
Also there seems to be a proposal to exclude women from higher education unless they've given birth.
Instead of rofi I'd recommend using anyrun.
I made a quick plugin to also run stuff from path, and am currently working on a proper ssh plugin for that - extending them is a bit more involved than the simple rofi/wofi scripts, but there's a lot more things an anyrun plugin can do.