davefischer @ davefischer @beehaw.org

Artist / hacker from Providence, USA.

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171

Joined

2 yr. ago

Booting from tape to do a clean install.

To play with fractals or cellular automata in the 80s, you read a description in Scientific American, and then wrote your own version at home. Good times.

Even Dwarfs Started Small

Worked with a murderer who was living under a fake name, back in the 90s. But he was actually fine.

There were probably terrible people at that job, but I don't remember... Oh, the first actual real, live creationist I ever met was at that job.

No, except for software that represented data in virtual punched cards under the covers, for communicating with remote systems. (None of which used punched cards anymore.)

Old. Just caught the tail end of the era of big machines.

Learnt Unix on a VAX 11/750. Used text terminals for a long time.

There's SO MANY Alice adaptations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Films_and_television_programmes_based_on_Alice_in_Wonderland

I had a 3g modem in my cisco router that I used to use for that, but when they shut down the 3g network I was never able to find another cheap sms-only service for the 4g version of the cisco modem. (So I switched to wifi & xmpp.)

I wrote my own software to use it, talking to the raw modem interface. Which, interestingly, uses an extension of the old "AT" modem command set. Weird.

Being able to write shell scripts that access sms is fantastic, I miss it.

Bigbug - robot uprising comedy. Killer.

Mansa Musa

Whoa, never heard of that. Nice.

I think about that a lot. On usenet, I had lots of friends. On modern forums, every conversation is sitting down with a bunch of strangers.

Maybe it's just my memory is shot because I'm old? Ha ha.

While most of us remember usenet from the 90s, it actually started in 1980, so that's 43 years.

This is the theme song from the children's sci-fi TV series "Guest From The Future", adapted from the long-running series of books: Alisa Seleznyova.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJB_kRkwUOk

The lead actress was also in a film from the same series, which is MUCH better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4DGPsqgkG8

About to dive into The Tin Drum again. Last read it 30 years ago...

Once you get into serious quantity, getting a "plain" (Read-only) CD or DVD manufactured is much cheaper than rewritable. AOL was junkmail-bombing the entire country.

There's one little twist in this story that isn't mentioned, and I've never quite understood. When the NSFnet started to upgrade from the T1 backbone to the T3 backbone in 1990, they formed a company called ANS (Advanced Network and Services) to run it.

When the T3 backbone got shut down in 1995, (most of) ANS was sold to... AOL.

Weird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Network_and_Services

I have a CNC router for work, but I do use it for random things around the house occasionally. Building shelves is suddenly a lot easier...

I have a non-functioning ASR-33, and an almost-functioning DECwriter III.

I've bought about a half dozen of those dedicated boards. Very nice to be able to trivially attach switches & buttons to the computer.