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A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

old.bigcat.space

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Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#131
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is there to talk about really? Hook up a USB floppy drive to an IIS machine, select the floppy as the source for the site and voila. Takes 1 minute to set up if you have a USB floppy drive hanging around.

The site loaded for me. So I can tell you; it does not use IIS. And it's running on a 386 so I doubt there's any USB involved. What he pulled off is a lot more interesting than what you're describing. It was a fun thing he did to see if he could and when, to his apparent delight, it worked he decided to share his results. As someone who grew up in the era of floppy disks and constant worry about disk space and perfor…

Thank you for the clarification. I too find this interesting, especially because it runs on win 3.x. The floppy part is a bit unorthodox, but cool nonetheless!

Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#132
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DOS does: https://home.csulb.edu/~murdock/buffers.html

I can't remember how buffers in DOS work, but that page seems to indicate that for input purposes they're used as some kind of a read-ahead buffer. That doesn't sound quite the same as keeping recently or commonly accessed data in RAM to speed repeated access. DOS did have SmartDrive [1], though, which IIRC provided a more typical disk cache. I wouldn't think it was loaded in the default configuration, though I'm not…

As said in that page and the documentation, the read-ahead is the [,X] part, which is actually disabled by default in every DOS past 6.x (incl FreeDOS). The first part is the number of primary buffers which is indeed "for keeping recently read data in RAM".

Smartdrv, like Fastopen, just allows disk buffers to survive a Close File call. Normally DOS only does close-to-open consistency i.e. buffers are flushed on close. Smartdrv specifically also allows write-back rather than write-through.

And, anyway: yes, Smartdrv is enabled by default in 6.x installs with enough memory.

Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#133
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely a website that doesn’t exist but is left to the imagination of the reader Is the final stop

https://www.zombo.com/

Happy to see it converted from the old flash applet.

Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#134
post #56
post #10

Reminds me of that blog/magazine who went fully solar and stopped thinking about uptime. What a time to be alive. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

Which reminds me of a catastrophe movie, where all countries launched all their nukes, and earth became radioactively poisoned. A submarine survived, looking for signs of life, and they received sporadic messages like "the whales are fine" (which made sense to them since whales live under-water). They went to the origin of the signal, only to find a computer turning on and off because of its solar panel, sending mess…

Which sort of reminds me of SOMA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(video_game)

Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick++: A fair percentage of electricity in the world is powered by other stars, because Uranium didn’t come from our star.

Ah, coool. But it's still fair to say it's solar powered, right ? Just not our sun ?

Not really. The transuranics are believed to be mostly created during supernovas (core-collapse supernova nucleosynthesis) and neutron star mergers.

Those events are not particularly similar to our sun's normal solar radiation.

I think you are grasping at straws (although I'll be honest I don't know what that literally means). And I think the word solar really only applies to our own sun.

Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#136
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't remember how buffers in DOS work, but that page seems to indicate that for input purposes they're used as some kind of a read-ahead buffer. That doesn't sound quite the same as keeping recently or commonly accessed data in RAM to speed repeated access. DOS did have SmartDrive [1], though, which IIRC provided a more typical disk cache. I wouldn't think it was loaded in the default configuration, though I'm not…

As said in that page and the documentation, the read-ahead is the [,X] part, which is actually disabled by default in every DOS past 6.x (incl FreeDOS). The first part is the number of primary buffers which is indeed "for keeping recently read data in RAM". Smartdrv, like Fastopen, just allows disk buffers to survive a Close File call. Normally DOS only does close-to-open consistency i.e. buffers are flushed on close…

Okay, thanks for the clarification.

Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, coool. But it's still fair to say it's solar powered, right ? Just not our sun ?

Not really. The transuranics are believed to be mostly created during supernovas (core-collapse supernova nucleosynthesis) and neutron star mergers. Those events are not particularly similar to our sun's normal solar radiation. I think you are grasping at straws (although I'll be honest I don't know what that literally means). And I think the word solar really only applies to our own sun.

Thanks for the explanation :).

> I think you are grasping at straws (although I'll be honest I don't know what that literally means).

Yup, I tried all I could ^^.

> And I think the word solar really only applies to our own sun.

So be it then. In scifi they always talked about sol-3 anyway and caspix-9, etc..

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