Since vintage computing is supposed to be a spiritual experience, I point out that today, February 3, 2024, the Torah reading for this week is the Ten Commandments. Regardless of your religious tradition or lack thereof, I think we can all agree on these.
Old Vintage Computing Research
Amen.
I mostly agree except with 7, because recap is the most common solution. I understand blanket recapping seems lazy, but it’s actually the opposite. It might seem diligent to find the first / specific bad ones, but “Many shall follow!”
I don’t “get” the following:
Like, what part of the lower half of the laptop screen am I supposed to support and how?
Also, as an ESL speaker, I don’t understand the following sentence:
What’s a G-d?
God, but some people think uttering the word is somehow blasphemous.
As if rewriting the ten commandments isn’t blasphemous enough.
The Biblical way to do that anyway is just lowercase god. Upper case is the one true god etc.
@kurkosdr – I think that is a reference to God, but I’m not certain
The author was alluding to this famous adage “To a man with a Grond everything looks like a nail.”
It’s a warning not to become so obsessed with vintage computing as to loose sight of that fact that some tasks may be better suited to other tools.
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Grond_(hammer)
I would like to add an 11th commandment:
Try to install any must-have period-correct software on the machine before the server hosting it goes down or the activation servers required to activate it disappear. Make sure you have installed any OS, driver, and firmware upgrades. Also, for PCs with rare hardware (3D screens, HD-DVD drives, 3G modems, integrated TV tuners) make sure you have all required drivers and software to use said rare hardware.
For example, I have some stereoscopic 3D games installed on an LG Optimus 3D from Gameloft’s own APK store (not the Play Store) that don’t exist anymore. I am not sure whether even the APK files I have still work or need to phone home.
Similarly, I bought copies of PowerDVD 19 Ultra and WinDVD 12 to play Blu-Ray 3D movies on laptops with Blu-Ray drivers and 3D screens before they became unavailable for purchase.
And then there are people collecting Sun SPARC workstations who thought they could always get firmware updates for any machines they come across since Sun’s FTP mirror was widely mirrored, but then Oracle came along and started locking those firmware updates behind paywalls and sending cease and desist warnings to all the mirrors.