The Simtel.net MS-DOS Collection
lanet.lv
lanet.lv
Keith passed away in 2017, aged 80 ( https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/freep/obituary.aspx?n=keit... )
I was happy to have met him and thanked him for his services.
At 61 years of age passing away is for me a thought that appears more and more often in consciousness. Yet it's not scary or something I dread.
Has that always been the case for you, or is it something that has gotten easier to think about as you've aged?
Over the last five years or so, my perspective has changed such that I don't feel any need to accomplish big things or act in ways that are self-aggrandizing. One of the things I work on from time to time is trying to dissolve a sense of ego.
I think all of life comes down to luck, at a very high level or in a very abstract sense. I don't believe in free will, and I don't think anyone knows why they are doing what they are doing in any meaningful way. I do think the brain confabulates great stories for ourselves and others to explain our actions in the world.
I have mentioned this before, but I like the "Chill Step" recordings of Alan Watts on YouTube. Maybe his philosophy is just a comforting story, but honestly, would anyone want a story that prevented them from being at ease in the world?
Thank you for that question.
I'm increasingly subscribing to the philosophy "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity".
Like, people who work for Google and Facebook. It's all a big deal for them. For me, it's "meh", whatever. I'm not saying those people aren't bright, of course, but being intelligent doesn't mean you know everything. I've thought that the coolest place to work for would probably be NASA, actually.
I also believe that nobody can know many things for sure, especially when it comes to the political arena and the future. Ideas which are so sure in other people's minds seem more like facets of a larger picture to me. Some things I know will be disastrous, other things I think "meh, give it a shot, sounds wacky, but it might just work".
I do believe in free will, though.
I'll introduce a story about him: My father was unable to get ahold of my mother (with me inside) who had made an emergency visit due to me putting up such a fuss being trapped and wanting out. She was not home when he got home from work. He tried calling the hospital but either no one picked up or could help him. It was at that point that he reached out to some friends he had on the ham radio who managed to contact another radio enthusiast who lived nearby the hospital who was able to walk over and confirm that she was indeed there. At which point he got in his Dodge Omni and drove into town.
I remember thinking it remarkable when he described this to me years later as perfectly reasonable and that he had to reach out from the Adirondacks to someone in Mississippi who then reached out to someone back in the Adirondacks due to practicalities I still don't really understand. Something about how it was more reliable to communicate past a certain distance than someone very close to you.
I think I ended up all right, birthed 10 days late. Poor mom.
In general, I think amateur radio operators are still mostly like that. Most of the hams I know respect the hobby and its rules, and will gladly relay emergency traffic without delay. Many do even more, including being members of groups like ARES and RACES.
73 DE KJ7RDV
In the mid 2000s, a radio station near me (WFNX) broadcasted a great morning show while I was in school. I ponied up for a PATA-to-CompactFlash adapter and a 2GB CompactFlash card (probably $50 at that point), downloaded Digital SoundSystem from Simtel, hooked up an FM radio to the sound card of a Packard Bell 386, and used Digital SoundSystem (I believe from the "sound" collection) to record the radio on boot. When I got home from school, I'd unplug the card (which was hanging out the front by the ribbon cable), plug it into my computer, and listen.
For most of the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was running PClock (from the "clocks" collection) on an old Dell Latitude as my alarm clock. As my then-girlfriend was unhappy with sleeping three feet from a laptop screen, I later relegated it to my mantle clock in the living room. It no longer runs PClock, but actually is still my mantle clock.
At some point I was browsing through and stumbled on the APM utilities, not knowing that MS-DOS would run the CPU at full steam. Several changes to autoexec.bat's later, I probably saved a good deal off my electric bill.
Good times!
Screenshots at: https://www.danielsays.com/ssg-dossw-ss410.html
It was maintained by people working for the US Army at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The first atomic bomb site (Trinity) is nearby:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simtel
Getting access to the SIMTEL CD-ROM was a fantastic revelation for me - so much glorious source code. Especially the turbopas/vga directories - but really, that whole CD-ROM kept me busy and learning for years.
https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/simteln...
(envy100.zip)
It was a program that provided 37 or so extension functions for batch scripts. Many of them that performed an expression evaluation left a result value in the environment of the parent process. Details and source code can be found in this old blog post:
https://www.mailsend-online.com/blog/envy.html
This really takes me back.
I remember the magical feeling of getting random checks in the mail from folks that used it.
sunsite.lanet.lv’s server IP address could not be found.
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This mirror of Simtel.net is closed due to lack of hardware.
You can find all of these files (except deleted old ones) at other mirrors. For Latvian visitors Swedish mirror is recomended:
ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/simtelnet/
For the web interface of Simtel.net archives look at
http://www.simtel.net/
http://www.lanet.lv/simtel.net/msdos/txtutl-bydate.html fixtxt.zip
So many people sharing their creations for the first time -- anyone could code up a new app. Felt like a simpler time.