71–80 of 128 posts
Never had cable but I still figure MSNBC is part of this long-abandoned system and wonder why it's still on the air, some kind of zombie?
So nice. I bloody wish we still had numeric IDs instead of email addresses and nicknames.
I'm from the UK and in my forties, and I've never heard of 'Cix'. Just me?
I remember Cix, though I never had it. We had Demon giving me access to this incredible Internet thing, on the super fast 14.4kbps modem!
I later migrated to Demon, which was originally formed by members of the Cix "tenner-a-month club" - a group that banded together to get real internet, instead of using Cix's curated internet gateways. Demon was a great ISP, until they were taken over by Scottish Power.
MSN was one of those things that you played around with because it came with MSN and you used the free trial (like you did for every ISP you could find back then). But I didn't know anyone who really used it past that.
There was a 'second' MSN, that was just a dial-up ISP. Very popular for including the $400 rebate when you bought a new computer at a retail store, you also got 2 years of a MSN dial-up contract to pay the $400 back.
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I always roll my eyes when people sneer at the "forced" hardware upgrade Windows 11 requires. Even when I patiently explain to them what it's for The entire point of the mandated minimum requirements was hardware that had silicon level mitigation support for Meltdown and Spectre type attacks. Something that impacted both AMD and Intel CPU's and still has new variants popping up (we're on what, Spectre v4 by now?) The…
No it's not, no one not running a shared cloud service cares about such things. Why doesn't Microsoft explain exactly why they require new CPUs, what in TPM 2.0 they're using that's not in 1.2, etc.
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It's our Personal Computer, not Microsoft's. But since discovering the peaceful i3WM on Debian the need to boot into the telemetry riddled spyware called Windows has been minimized. Need TPM? Use ProxMox and run Win11 without the 'required' hardware in an isolated network.
I always roll my eyes when people sneer at the "forced" hardware upgrade Windows 11 requires. Even when I patiently explain to them what it's for The entire point of the mandated minimum requirements was hardware that had silicon level mitigation support for Meltdown and Spectre type attacks. Something that impacted both AMD and Intel CPU's and still has new variants popping up (we're on what, Spectre v4 by now?) The…
Forcing hardware obsoletion in favour of those "hardened" platforms has two benefits, as far as certain groups of interest are concerned:
- turning existing machines into ewaste, so people buy new machines, so the money making wheels keep turning for hardware manufacturers
- normalising stronger "trusted computing" (in the Plutonium/DRM sense) capabilities, which is of course a concern for a number of groups interested in controlling what will be running on your machine.
Make no mistake, it appears that Doctorow's article on the war on general purpose computers is becoming more and more compelling as the time goes on. Some of us see forced obsolescence of older machines with weaker "security" norms as a part of that fight - on the side of the enemy.
IMO, undoing/re-thinking the last 30 years of CPU progress might just be the thing we need. We need to re-examine our foundations and fix them.
> And so The Microsoft Network wasn't a program you loaded like CompuServe. It was part of the OS, with folder icons that looked just like real folders. It was a kind of version of the Web where you could browse online data the same way you browsed your file system. This is what made it cool. Microsoft <3 Plan 9?
I believe it was "shell extensions". There's still a few of these lying around. You can even add your own ones: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/nse-imp... It's not so easy to add to the filesystem , but you can make things show up in Explorer that you can click on.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/repars...
It would be nice to rsync to send/retrieve emails and manage my inbox. Maybe the original MSN concept needs to be revisited?
It was... proprietary . The common "walled garden". Everybody thought they could make a walled garden people would like better than the open internet. IBM had SNA, DEC had DECnet, Compuserve, WELL, ... None lamented.
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While Microsoft may well not have understood it (as a corporate entity, or indeed key decision makers at the firm) it was a done deal long before 1995. I date it to late 1991/ early 1992 when JIPS stops being a pilot service. Background, by 1990 there are two popular global networking technologies, the Internet Protocol suite of Unix adjacent technologies born in the US, and the X.25 suite of technologies popular in…
I do remember this not-quite-internet at university in the 90s. Telnet was "spad" and FTP was "hhcp". If you wanted to connect to a real FTP server, you had to send hhcp requests to "ft-relay" and the FTP hostname was the first folder name under the root.
Here is a link to a site describing a system that you could use (probably considerably earlier than 1997) to access the Internet (in this case an FTP server) despite only yourself having X.25, via hhcp: