51–60 of 93 posts
I had an account there years ago but never really saw the point. I was already SSHing in from a shell, just to end up at another, different one. Kind of whimsical I guess, but ultimately of scant practical use.
It’s much less needed now.
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I had access to a VMS system in my BBS days, and I had no idea it wasn't just some hard to use BBS software. When it clicked that it was a real operating system on a giant machine (I believe 11/380) it changed everything for me!
There was no 11/380 but there was an 11/780.
https://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/samplechapter/0/2/0/5...
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I tried signing up to their mastodon three times and just never received the email accepting me. It's a shame because I wanted to be part of their community
Unless things have changed recently (last year or so), the SDF Mastodon servers are really slow and terrible at federating. They even had an incident where the servers failed, everyone lost their posts and had to start over again. Downtime was terrible. SDF welcomed everyone openly during the initial Mastodon waves, so it was all very Eternal September. If you're joining to make a spare account to participate with SD…
We've completed our first phase of database clean up, thank you for your patience. The impact on performance was heavy, but it was a necessary step. All active users and their posts, profile, connections and media will be migrated to the new servers. Once that has been completed, any remaining data will stay online for further migration and clean up. Our instance is nearly 10 years old of constant daily operation, but we ran into a migration wall which held us back on 4.1.x. Now that it is deprecated, we will do our best to jump to the latest version rather than migrate through. Your support and patience has been greatly appreciated.Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was no 11/380 but there was an 11/780.
Apparently, the only place the VAX 380 exists is in a writing sample by Pearson Education. Otherwise, there is no evidence of DEC ever producing something called "VAX 380". https://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/samplechapter/0/2/0/5...
I run a public unix(openbsd) shell for fun, I call it my social network platform it sort of sucks, no users, ip6 only, a bunch of vm's on an old underpowered router running in my closet. But feel free to stop by and set up a .plan if you have nothing better to do. ssh to applicant@register.public.outband.net instructions at https://www.public.outband.net note that it's ip6 only. It is pretty pointless, nobody needs o…
> nobody needs or wants a unix shell account in this day and age I do. But I do not need just any Unix shell account, I need old and weird ones! I develop and maintain a portable utility (rlwrap) that is aimed at users of older software, who are often also using older or even obsolete systems. For years, I used Polarhome ( http://www.polarhome.com/ ) as a "dinosaur zoo" of obsolete systems (thans, Zoltan!) For every…
a powerpc xserve (running OSX server)
a sparc box (on solaris)
an alpha box (on either VMS or Digital Unix)
a pa-risc box (hp-ux)
a modern power box (Rocky or AIX)
an itanium box (running either VMS or NT depending on what the alpha is running)
a pi cluster (plan 9)
and a commodity x86 server (running OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Debian, Hurd, Redox, Serenity, reactos, and AROS).
and make a MOAP (mother of all pubnixes). if anyone has any hardware they'd like to donate, get in contact :)
I've been fortunate enough to know Stephen Jones of SDF through his running of the local Seattle retro computing event (now rebranded as VCF PNW) He's an absolutely kind soul who is deeply interested in all kinds of retro projects. I wish there were more folks like him in tech generally
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> nobody needs or wants a unix shell account in this day and age > I do. But I do not need just any Unix shell account, I need old and weird ones! I develop and maintain a portable utility (rlwrap) that is aimed at users of older software Thank you, personally. I've used it in several contexts not just old systems, for example rlwrap is recommended with Clojure (okay, perhaps that's a comparatively small audience).
+1, same here, I've used line editors a fair bit (and enjoying line-oriented interface in general), so rlwrap has been an essential tool for me. Many thanks for your work!
I run a public unix(openbsd) shell for fun, I call it my social network platform it sort of sucks, no users, ip6 only, a bunch of vm's on an old underpowered router running in my closet. But feel free to stop by and set up a .plan if you have nothing better to do. ssh to applicant@register.public.outband.net instructions at https://www.public.outband.net note that it's ip6 only. It is pretty pointless, nobody needs o…
> nobody needs or wants a unix shell account in this day and age I do. But I do not need just any Unix shell account, I need old and weird ones! I develop and maintain a portable utility (rlwrap) that is aimed at users of older software, who are often also using older or even obsolete systems. For years, I used Polarhome ( http://www.polarhome.com/ ) as a "dinosaur zoo" of obsolete systems (thans, Zoltan!) For every…
Maybe in the modern age someone could make a "polarhome in a box" that offers a similar gamut of systems, but via preconfigured emulators that you can simply download and run.
Finally got to log into a vms system! I was looking to do that over 20 years ago but never could find one. Somehow I still remembered most of the shell syntax in a book I read about it probably in 2001. Don't ask me ... I don't know how either. Got bored in about 10 minutes but still, another box checked off!
Very cool how they tried to move and preserve many of the living computer museum’s computers before Paul Allens sister could sell them all off. https://wiki.sdf.org/doku.php?id=vintage_systems:lcml_collec...
I remember seeing the TOAD systems when I visited in 2016 long before they closed, it’s very sad that people no longer get to experience computer history in person the same way.