ZorinFloof @zorinlynx@mastodon.social

This happens to me every now and then. I look for some old file from 20+ years ago, and go down a rabbit hole of nostalgia and I start telling stories of the Bad Old Days.

I hope ya’ll don’t mind. :)

This was from a Motorola pager instruction manual.

Apparently the target market for pagers is obsessed with swallowing things.

It feels funny to be an archaeologist on my own site. But it all got preserved because I’d just move the old stuff out of the way when copying in the new.

AIIIRGGHH Netscape 3.01Gold!!!!

The original 1996 index file is still there.

http://www.fluffmuck.org/index-ancient.html

What blew my mind just now is that the webring link still works, sort of. Apparently Webring had a chain of custody until today and is still active.

It’s funny to think how constrained we were by file sizes in the 90s due to dial-up connections.

A 224KB file would take 55 seconds, almost a minute, to download on a 56K modem. We tried to keep web page images under 20K, and even those would take several seconds!

I stumbled across the original TIF file for FluffMUCK’s web page art, by the late Gene Catlow, and upgraded the image on the site to high resolution.

http://www.fluffmuck.org

Because you know, it’s not 1997 anymore and a 224KB PNG file is no big deal.

Yeah, I think I’ll be staying in Florida thank you.

RT @Dantej21@twitter.com

Unbelievable footage from the pileup on I-70 today. My jaw dropped to the floor first time I saw this video.

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/Dantej21/status/1096550488714170368

So yeah the artist of this is BoingDragon (http://boingdragon.com/).

It took some Usenet sleuthing, but credit has been given! Yaaaaaayy. https://twitter.com/zorinlynx/status/1096453647070912513

I even love the detail that the computers are all connected to each other in a row. This is how many LANs were in the early 90s, using 10base-2 ethernet.

(Good riddance, it had reliability and performance problems like crazy.)

Recent tweets by @pixelkitties@twitter.com reminded me of this old Tiny Toon Adventures fan-art gem.

References to early 90s Internet, Usenet, etc. It rules.

No signature, so I do wonder who the artist is. (any ideas @TheKinkyTurtle@twitter.com @TDot_Babs@twitter.com and others around back then?)

Any way the wind blows... *gong*

The old iPod Touch I have in my car has such a crap battery that it doesn’t last long enough to sync songs to it over WiFi.

Its days may be numbered. :(

Annie, must you drool and then shake your head, spraying me with it??

Silly cat.

I'm surprised to see that "Only web colors" is still a thing.

Does anyone still use 8-bit indexed color displays?

RT @SpiritSonic@twitter.com

RADOM DIGITAL ART TIP: If you use Photoshop and prefer working in RGB, but turn in finals in CMYK, try hitting control+shift+y while you have the color picker open! It'll gray out any area of the spectrum that won't print in CMYK so you don't accidentally use those colors!

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/SpiritSonic/status/1095733508058669056

Roses are grey,
Violets are grey.
You plugged in Y,
But then forgot C.

Funny, I've biked past the spot where I took my Twitter header photo many dozens of times since I took it.

Not ONCE has the lighting again been that good, the water that calm, and the view free of cruise ships blocking the skyline.

Photography is about luck as much as skill.

My first hard drive was 170MB, in my first x86 PC in 1993.

My previous computer was an Apple IIe with 140K floppy disks. 170MB felt like all the space in the world.

Filled it up in less than a year of course. :)

RT @thecoopertom@twitter.com

My first hard drive was 650MB.

How big was your first hard drive? 😉

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1095878819037237248

Even having the three servers, one at a different geographic location, won't help. BOOM, your data is gone.

The drives haven't been on the market long enough to know if and when this might happen. But it scares me a bit.

So, picture this situation: You have a server, a backup server, and an offsite-backup server, all using helium drives purchased around the same time. Over the years the helium diffuses out of the drives.

After a few years you get a cascade of simultaneous drive failures.