akoster

Quote from the bottom: “To keep up with decreasing computer memory capacity and disk space, many other functions and files have been eliminated in Emacs 30.2.”

Honesty, not such a wild proposition in 2026 with new hardware generations offering the same or less RAM and storage!

Nice Eternal September reference:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended...

Sometimes I’ll search .edu or .ac.* domains for tutorials, code, old physics and math graphics and Java applets. Often these sites are narrow in scope, but every once in a while, you come across a gem like this! I wonder if there’s a directory of high-quality college and university professor websites , though a web search for now does the trick (at least while it’s still public and not restricted to current students or faculty).

Thankfully their forums are quite active with folks sharing lots of sample code [0]. I was able to get some assistance with getting their SQLite library to work. Also the wiki has quite a few tutorials - when I get some more time I hope to check out this pas2js Electron tutorial. That would be something quite useful to go from a WYSIWYG RAD IDE design to a working JavaScript web app running in a browser.

[0] https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php [1] https://wiki.freepascal.org/lazarus_pas2js_integration

Thanks for sharing! I'm glad Microsoft is still providing active development for WinForms and on recent .NET Core versions and not just .NET Framework, although the later seems to still be supported indefinitely (for now?). [0]

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/microso...

I agree! I still sometimes use LibreOffice Base for quick prototyping [0] or Microsoft Access if I am on Windows. It uses HSQLDB by default but you can connect to several external JDBC, ODBC and ADO compatible databases, though I often use DBeaver for that purpose. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice_Base

[1] https://dbeaver.io/

Interesting given NYC's population still hasn't recovered from its early 2020 high [0], rent and home prices keep rising (and fast). There are many reasons discussed here: pied-a-terre's, foreign investors, lack of new construction and inventory at affordable levels contributing to low vacancy [1] but still hard to fathom at a naive supply and demand level, shouldn't ~300k less people and several new residential buildings finishing construction in the past few years contribute to lower not higher prices? [2]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/nyregion/nyc-population-2...

[1] https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vac...

[2] https://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/dcp/assets/files/pdf/data-t... (page 3)

Housing is also pricey in NJ adjacent to NYC in cities like Jersey City and Hoboken, but its a ferry / PATH train away from Manhattan.

I think I found MYOB but not Best Books here: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2021-m-y-o-b-v5-0-1 Is the interface similar for Best Books? and also in color?

They are part of the "smolnet" if I am using that terminology correctly (including the Gemini protocol https://geminiprotocol.net/). Other sites I will browse or lurk include, Lemmy (join-lemmy.org) Reddit alternative, Mastodon, BlueSky, SDF.org 's IRC, Matrix, some Telegram communities, lobste.rs, HN and ideally IRL at 2600 meetings https://www.2600.com/meetings, conferences, Linux User Groups (LUGs) etc. I still browse Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram occasionally. For 1:1 communication I most often use SMS texting/iMessage, regular phone calls, FaceTime video, and Facebook Messenger to talk to other American friends, family, etc. To talk with technical people and folks abroad, I'll use email, Telegram, Viber, Skype, Signal, WhatsApp, and rarely Instagram Messenger, all of which I need to get better at staying on top of.

I still put DVD and/or Blu-ray drives in all PCs I personally build for myself and my family. This is due to the fact that we transferred dozens of old captured 16 mm and 8 mm film reels, scanned photo prints, negatives and slides as well as Video8, Hi8, Digital8 and VHS videocassettes to M-DISC DVD and some to Blu-ray. While I uploaded most of this content to Flickr and Google Photos while they were offering 1TB and unlimited storage (at reduced quality) respectfully, after both services curtailed their offerings, I realize the value in having a local, offline, physical copy of these precious memories. Thankfully my local computer store Micro Center still sells a few PC cases with 5.25 inch bays as well as optical media and disk drives.

Additionally, I find it useful for live booting GNU/Linux distributions such as MX Linux Workbench [0] or WinPE environments such as Hiren's Boot CD [1] without dedicating a flash drive for the purpose, which I may accidentally overwrite. And at the office, I have encountered several broken USB ports and while optical disk drive bays are often quite fragile, they tend to be in working order since they are often underutilized.

[0] https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-21-1-respin-workbench-released/

[1] http://hirensbootcd.org/

I used to use M-DISCs [0] since they advertise using a more robust recording technology, but they have been harder to find at Micro Center [1] and the manufacturing process may have changed with a certain manufacturer [3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

[1] https://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?N=429...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_ver...

From the release notes, it appears this may be the last release with i386 / 32-bit Intel x86 (as well as 32-bit armv6 and PowerPC) support.

“FreeBSD 15.0 is not expected to include support for 32-bit platforms other than armv7. The armv6, i386, and powerpc platforms are deprecated and will be removed. 64-bit systems will still be able to run older 32-bit binaries.“

Source: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/relnotes/

When I moved to New York City, I began talking to people on the bus, subway and while running errands. I met so many interesting people- a man who was originally from the same town as some of my ancestors, many people from my native SoCal and even one I went to elementary school with 3000 miles away. My cousin's wife, a native of the Upper East Side, said real New Yorkers never talk to strangers in public but I am very content being a fake (and apparently more gregarious) local.

That must have been painfully slow but rewarding if and when everything finally worked! I definitely was spoiled trying Fedora Core 6 on a Pentium III with 512MB of RAM, a SoundBlaster Live!, an ATI Rage 128 graphics card, a WD Caviar 40GB IDE HDD, 2x IDE optical drives (a SONY DVD-ROM drive and a SAMSUNG CD-RW drive) and a 3Com Ethernet PCI card without any major (if any) hiccups! (The machine had a 3Com 56k PCI modem but we had just switched to SBCGlobal ADSL (either 128, 256 or 512kbps down) in 2006 which I used to download the live CD ISO(s). I remember being very confused that our 10/100 Linksys Ethernet hub was now being used to distribute the always-on internet between our family desktop and my laptop in addition to sharing files over SMB / Windows File Sharing / Network Neighborhood.)

Great story and thanks for sharing! As someone newer to mailing lists, how did (or do) you use them without flooding your inbox? Lots of rules/filters and directories? Using mutt, alpine or gnus? I appreciate the USENET newsgroups perspective of having a separate directory (other than your inbox) to read and respond to posts but it seems not many projects use NNTP these days.

Thanks for sharing! And glad to hear you are still using Slackware! (which still seems to have drivers for just about everything!) If you recall, where did you purchase your Slackware and BSD disk sets? I recall Micro Center and Fry's Electronics both sold some Linux and BSD distributions on DVDs but I never saw too many folks buying them (then again, this was circa 2010). And that's a great comment about the return policy! I'm curious when the law was changed (unless it was a per-state thing, assuming you are from/in the US).

Also with regards to UUCP, it appears there are some modern uses for it [0]. I have no perspective with regards to UUCP but from someone who used it (if it doesn't bring back painful memories), do you recall what you used it for or what using it was like? Essentially email + USENET newsgroups + FTP wrapped into one protocol?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Current_uses_and_legacy

I agree! Although I just had a kernel panic on my first boot after installing Slackware 15.0 on a Ryzen 5700G chip / B550 board. Likely due to LILO + EFI (or defaulting to CSM / legacy BIOS boot?) + an NVMe SSD + MBR partition table. I hope to chroot into it and figure out whats wrong since the installer ISO booted and ran without any hiccups. But I agree that in general, I have only count on one hand the times I couldn't load X11, lost network connectivity, or couldn't boot after an update or installing new hardware. We definitely are in the year of (the relatively compatible) Linux desktop(s) :-P

I'm thankful I never experienced that. My family switched from AOL dial up to an AT&T ADSL connection (either started out as 128, 256 or 512kbps down circa 2006 IIRC). It still didn't make downloading FreeBSD and Fedora Core 6 ISOs easy but it definitely was doable in a reasonable amount of time!

I guess not unlike the software sets [0] Slackware seems to still use these days. Hearing this definitely makes me understand how spoiled we are to have reliable and inexpensive flash media, optical disks and network connections! I imagine just getting the base OS set downloaded, imaged and installed was a chore! And that's too bad to hear about the ISP idea. I've heard of stories of how one could run a small and viable ISP out of a garage or small office with descent wiring and a bank of modems. I'm glad a few providers still exist like Sonic.net, Xmission Internet and Panix.com and hope with the way things are going with funding for wiring and Internet connectivity (at least in the USA) we might be in such an era again in the future (hopefully!)

Thanks for sharing! This is the first I've heard of Lasermoon / Linux-FT but it appears that was a popular option back in the day based on these references [0][1][2][3][4][5][6]. How did it compare with Slackware? Or Yggradsil [7] or SLS [8] if you happened to have used those? Also, 4MB doesn't seem like a huge jump from Windows 3.0's minimum required 1MB of RAM or 2MB with Multimedia Extensions [9], but perhaps 4MB was often what common PCs had back in 1991/1992?

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/03/linux_distro_hopping/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26503724

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36682277

[3] https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/61777/Linux-FT/

[4] https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/139

[5] https://www.linux.co.cr/distributions/review/1995/0416.html

[6] https://techmonitor.ai/technology/lasermoon_touts_inexpensiv...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0#System_requirement...

Thanks for sharing! I take it that was a hand-me-down laptop? My first PC I could call my own was a hand-me-down 6-year-old Toshiba Tecra Pentium II laptop with a 5GB IDE HDD and 192 MB of RAM running Windows 98 SE I received when I was maybe 10. I wish I would have installed Linux or had a compiler handy to learn how to write "real" software (as opposed to Logo in a MicroWorlds Pro environment), though eventually I discovered Linux from a friend's dad recommendation to try Fedora Core 6. IIRC it was painful downloading the ISO(s) over a 512kbps DSL connection, which had a copy of GCC!

> I've been working with Linux in one form or another for 30 years now! I almost can't believe it's been that long.

Congrats on that personal milestone! Quite amazing for something community-developed and supported throughout several generations of hardware and changing technologies!

> Though I haven't used Slackware since the late 90's, I might take another look. I would encourage it! The latest stable 15.0 release has pipewire and many other modern improvements, and I have been using the -current rolling release on my desktop PC without any hiccups since early 2022!

Great story and thanks for sharing! $400 is a lot for a RAM upgrade! Did that upgrade double your ram to 8MB or something greater perhaps?

Likewise! I appreciate how the developers set sensible defaults and a descent package selection for general productivity within the installer defaults but I have often found myself building many packages from scratch from scripts on SlackBuilds.org. It forces me to learn while not loosing too much productivity compiling everything from scratch - though I hope to try to set up LFS one of these days!

A small world indeed! I'm in the process of rebooting my engineering career and hoping forcing myself to use Slackware may help in a small way!

Back in 2015, I worked with Pentium III -class Cyrix processors on a legacy but still supported and in-production embedded system released in the mid 2000s AFAIK. But I never came across a Cyrix-based consumer PC or laptop (growing up in Southern California). Were Cyrix processors common on consumer PCs in India?

Thanks for sharing! Could you elaborate more? I was unaware there was any Linux distribution that was compatible with anything but 386-class processors?

This sounds like it was a bit before my time but looks like there are some references to that FTP site on this HN thread here [0] and TLDP article here [1]. Though GitHub/GitLab/SourceForge.net are similar, I miss the flexibility and simplicity of FTP sites and mirrors (though I only experienced the tail-end of that era AFAIK.) I'm glad to see that there are many Slackware FTP mirrors still online [2] such as OSUOSL [3] and XMission Internet [4] but perhaps these are less like the FTP sites containing much more than packages and source code?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28565745

[1] https://tldp.org/HOWTO/META-FAQ-2.html

[2] https://mirrors.slackware.com/mirrorlist/

[3] ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware

[4] ftp://mirrors.xmission.com/slackware/

I can only imagine, specially back when hardware and drivers were much bigger concerns for many! I find it quite amazing that Slackware 7 released in late 1999 [0] never had an end-of-life (EOL) specified according to Wikipedia [1] but Slackware 8.1 released in mid-2002 [2] received updates until August 1, 2012 [3], over 10-years of support which I find quite impressive for a non-enterprise-oriented distribution! That's not to mention the consistency and minimal interface and tooling changes between releases to this day.

[0] http://www.slackware.com/lists/archive/viewer.php?l=slackwar...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware

[2] http://www.slackware.com/lists/archive/viewer.php?l=slackwar...

[3] https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-8.1/Change...

I can only imagine (sans any floppy disk or drive reliability issues)!

Some links just in case you want to re-live the experience :-P

http://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-3.3/bootdsk...

https://www.floppydisk.com/