Notices by vga256 (vga256@dialup.cafe)

happy to report that after some nginx configuration url rewrite magic the globaltalk kiki now uses easy permalinks!

say goodbye to https://globaltalk.network/index.php?page=history
say hello to https://globaltalk.network/history
:D

#globaltalk #marchintosh

back in the early and mid-90s, getting on the net meant you were a university student, or had corporate access through a big company. getting online wasn't easy.

worse, even if you had a dialup number and login, there was no such thing as a tcp/ip stack built-in to Windows 3.1.

even if you *did* have a winsock stack, you'd still need a file downloading protocol, gopher client, world wide web client, ftp client, email client. just getting your machine off the ground was nearly impossible unless you could grab these from a local BBS

to make things simpler, universities began offering dial-up internet software packages to their students and staff.

in 1994, my mom was an undergrad student at the University of Alberta. our family had just bought an IBM PS/1 with a 2400 baud modem, and i was abusing the hell out of our single phone line at night visiting local BBSes.

she somehow found out that the university was selling internet dial-up software for $10 to students, and brought home the diskette pack with her. along with a USR Sportster 14.4k modem, she gave me the install diskettes as a valentine's day gift.

it had a slick setup program that enabled SLIP using Trumpet Winsock, and provided a local (free!) dial-up number for access.

after 25 years, i finally tracked down a few versions of those diskettes. i've imaged them and uploaded them all to IA.

the first version of the dial-up package in 1994 was called WinSLIP. it had no PPP support yet, but contained some really cool shareware internet utilities like HGopher and NCSA Mosaic. this would have been the earliest programs offered for Windows 3.1

WinSLIP/MSKermit 1994/95:
https://archive.org/details/ua_winslip

The second version of the software was renamed to NetSurf. It stripped out most of the obscure shareware sadly, and replaced them with Netscape 2 and Eudora Light. The new version of Trumpet Winsock offered PPP which was a huge improvement:

NetSurf 1996/97:
https://archive.org/details/ua_netsurf_96

Now well into the Windows 95 era, the 1997/98 software was shipped on a CD with a hilarious "multimedia" installer/help program designed in Macromedia Director:

NetSurf 1997/98:
https://archive.org/details/netsurf-97-starter-kit

I hope this brings back some memories for fellow U of A alumni :)

#softwarePreservation #webPreservation #win31 #worldWideWeb #yeg #bbs #alberta

😆

#bbs

and of course, the renowned Software Creations BBS, home of many shareware game publishers like 3d realms, apogee and id software

#doom #dosgaming

just found a treasure trove of extremely obscure BBS history stashed away on IA

thank you hard-working book scanners for preserving this rarity.

if you're familiar with BBSing in the 90s, you'll remember just how fast the vast majority of boards disappeared in 1995. it went from multinode 24/7 bbses to disconnected phone numbers in just a few months

this book accounts for the very small number of BBSes that made the transition from telco-only to "telBBS" or telnettable/web-accessible boards

3/4 of the book is a carefully curated list of 500 boards with screenshots of their homepages and bbs login/title screens. most importantly, the URLs of these boards is preserved so we have a chance to look them up on WBM some day.

#bbs #webHistory #smallweb #books

13 years ago, my wife at the time and i were going through a rough period. we decided to hit the reset button on our marriage by driving south with no particular plan or destination. just two weeks away from home to get our bearings, and spend some time with each other.

along that two week drive, we stopped at every used bookstore we stumbled upon along our route through montana, idaho, washington, and arizona.

we ended up getting as far as Nogales, Mexico before turning around at the border crossing and heading home.

the best of the bookstores was found on our very last stop before crossing the US-Can border, in Butte, Montana.

Second Edition Books didn't look like much from the outside - a long brick and stucco building, painted over with a vile shade of pepto bismol. a little crate of old books propping open the door promised a treasure trove inside.

a treasure trove it was. you always know a bookstore is going to be great when they've run out of books on the shelves, and start piling them on the floors in the aisles.

it was the end of the trip - my wife was sick of me, she was eager to get home, anticipating the divorce that would come two weeks later

i spent two hours walking every aisle and shelf in that store, looking for the perfect memento mori.

i found it crammed in a barely-visited corner of the room, devoted to the history of California: a 1929 edition of The Gold Hunters by J.D. Borthwick.

a recounting of his years trying to pan for gold in the 1849 california gold rush, borthwick's memoir is part solo adventure, part cultural ethnography of the SF bay area.

i was overjoyed to find this book today, double-stacked behind a dozen others in my shelf. i hadn't read it since i bought it 13 years ago to the day.

if you ever find yourself in Montana, make the drive to Butte's uptown core to visit Second Edition Books. it won't disappoint you.

https://secondeditionbooksbutte.com

#books #bookstodon

what an exceptional soptware library on this mega darve

#sega #consoleGaming #retroGaming

@toxi 🤮 the best thing i did in the past 10 years, aside from leaving twitter, was getting rid of WP on my production server.

it literally meant writing a new CMS from scratch to replace it, and was worth every hour of my life spent doing it. 😆

does anyone else remember the exact POST sequence sounds for the first HDD they ever owned?

mine turned out to be - after an hour of research - a Western Digital WD-383 (aka. Tandon TM-383) RLL 30mb hdd, belonging to my family's first PC: a 1989 Amstrad PC2086/30 8Mhz XT.

the exact sequence of chitters, judders and beeps is burned into my brain. sadly, there are no recordings of that particular drive stored online. it's smaller cousin, the Tandon TM-252 has plenty of videos - unfortunately it has a slightly different self-test cycle.

awesome: Beastie/Leon McNeill just open sourced their Ultima III colour Macintosh port, all written in Think C!

This is the "Lairware" version that was sold at lairware.com, and received many updates over the years - eventually gaining OS X/Intel 32-bit support. The source appears to be an Xcode project with a mix of think C and cocoa.

great job, Leon!

https://github.com/beastie/ultima3

#openSource #foss #macintosh #vintageApple #retrogaming

today’s ridiculous retrojunk find: my childhood dream modem - a 56k USR Courier 😻
it did hard time as a Telus business admin modem in its previous life
#retroComputing

every time i feel guilty about buying a $50 half dead retrocomputer, i remind myself that i've got friends and family that think nothing of spending $10k on a new V8 engine block for their 1950s truck restoration. 😅

thanks to the videogame history foundation, we now have audio extracted from a DAT tape that was recorded during the production of Ultima VII: The Black Gate.

voiced by Bill Johnson, the tape contains one hour of The Guardian taunting the avatar. the first minute is the exact monologue used in the intro to the game.

source: https://archive.gamehistory.org/item/f08cd613-0509-488e-a5e7-160bcbe15117

#ultima #dosgaming

@captainarcee congrats! 👏

post your #WellLovedBook

back in 1997, my parents were going through a separation and i had freshly graduated high school. my mom took me on a road trip to the US to visit my father.

on our first day, we stopped in Drumheller AB to check out a little bookstore on main street. (long gone now). inside, i found a bright red box set of the Lord of the Rings books. i was broke, and my mom bought it for me. i knew nothing about the series aside from seeing the bakshi cartoon as a kid.

i spent the next week in the passenger seat absolutely riveted. and for the past 28 years have read the series every year without fail.

the first book is my favourite and has travelled with me from south america to alaska. i cherish all of the roadwear it has accumulated over the years - especially those yellowed curled pages.

thanks mom.

#books #bookstodon #WellLovedBook

TIL the original Interplay productions logo was supposed to spell IP

never once noticed that in 30 years

#retroComputing

two summers ago i rescued an hp laserjet 4V from an acreage barn.

the 4V is the hulking, supermax cousin of the 4M which many of you probably used in schools and offices decades ago

this printer handles up to 30.5cm / 12-inch wide paper, which - for the first time in my life - i need to use in order to print out a cribbage board carpentry template for my mom.

this is the first time the printer has been turned on in 20+ years. the "warming up" smell is reminiscent of high school macintosh labs and principal's offices.

today i finally learned where that office space joke came from.

#printers #retroComputing

bill atkinson's 25th anniversary of hypercard talk at the berkeley macintosh user's group does such a wonderful job of communicating how important it was to allow people to express themselves through software authoring, instead of leaving software development to programmers

"Some of the stacks I was most interested in were stacks that were really kind of ugly, but they did exactly what this person needed. There was no way in hell a programmer would have ever been interested. There was no market to write that for.

But this guy had something to do with his astronomy gear - something that helped him point his telescope. He knew what he needed; he wasn't a programmer, but he could make it.

Some of the stacks did not have a lot of aesthetic polish. I used to say: some of these stacks, only a mother could love, but those mothers loved them."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejdgTVj7ZG8

#hypercard #macintosh #vintageApple

enjoyed reading @jbcrawford's historical overview of residential networking - especially the coverage of farallon/apple PhoneNet

https://computer.rip/2025-02-02-residential-networking-over-telephone.html

#macintosh #vintageApple

if you're into the history of Ultima, Origin Systems and ebooks, andrea contato has released his Through the Moongate Part 1 (200 pages) for free for the next few days

i'll spare you a book review - but yes, it's worth reading. it got a poor quality translation from italian, but the stories are still enjoyable.

https://www.amazon.com/Through-Moongate-Richard-Garriott-Systems-ebook/dp/B07SKKTSNQ

#books #ultima #gamePreservation #history