Yeah - idea is "remote management". It's tricky because packet drivers were never written with multiple applications running simultaneously in mind, DESQview is one big monstrous hack on 286, and both httpd and ftpd use direct screen writes which can't be virtualised on 286.
I'll be testing a newer version of the httpd which uses bios screen writes, and a second NIC and packet driver for ftpd - but no idea if it's going to work :)
Two network cards is a good idea. I went looking for a DESQview API a packet driver (or wrapper) could interface with, I found https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/computing/general/xdi.tec but the detailed documentation doesn't seem to be on the web.
I mean, no one ever called it a “mini floppy”. I never heard that term until I visited this website, and I spent more than a decade using 5.25” floppies. I realize they are smaller than 8” floppies, but they were still called floppies.
They were in fact called mini floppies (or, to be correct, "minifloppy") when they were introduced. You just didn't start using them early enough. The term disappeared relatively early.
I'm now looking at an article about Shugart (the floppy drive maker) in the December issue of Byte Magazine, and I quote:
"The latest news from Silicon Valley, now confirmed from its source, is the Shugart Associates Minifloppy ["minifloppy" is a Shugart trademark] disk drive for small systems."
This is about the new 5 1/4" floppies.
I see the term used as late as in the Byte issue about the IBM PC in 1982, and possibly later. It wasn't before the 3.5" floppy arrived that the term completely fell out of use about the 5 1/4" floppy.
I see the term used as late as in the Byte issue about the IBM PC in 1982, and possibly later. It wasn't before the 3.5" floppy arrived that the term completely fell out of use about the 5 1/4" floppy.
It lived on even longer in marketing and packaging. The image below is of a pack of HD 5,25" disks -- judging by the overall design of it I would wager it's from the very late 80s or early 90s. Still Mini Floppy Disks.
> It wasn't before the 3.5" floppy arrived that the term completely fell out of use about the 5 1/4" floppy.
I guess it depends on which audience or circles you ran in. I'll admit to have not gotten into computing until 1981, and then as a teen, but in that time, at that place (US, South), in my audience... literally no one used the term "minifloppy".
And by "3.5" floppy arrived..." I'm using the phrase to mean in use by something the consumer might see and be able to buy; not "invented". I had an original 1984 Mac hot off the shelf as soon as it was available, and that's the "arrived" point for me.
In 1984 you would indeed see ads for the Macintosh, with its glorious 3.5" drives.
And yes, people in general wouldn't use the term "minifloppy" in normal conversation (except, possibly, old-timers mostly used to "real" floppies, the 8" ones. But even I wouldn't, even though I - just barely - started using computers and floppies before the invention of 5 1/4" drives), you wouldn't say "Please hand me the minifloppy". Just ".. the floppy". You don't use a long term when a short will do.
But, as einr said, it lived on for longer in marketing and packaging.
> I guess it depends on which audience or circles you ran in
This matches my experience, too. East Coast USA late 70s and early 80s. We called them disks, diskettes, and floppies. i didn't know anyone with the 8" variety, and 3.5" came later.
When I started it was all 5 1/4"s, and those were "floppies" to me and my peers.
I never used an 8", but I have seen one firsthand. Friend of mine from high school had one as his father had some sort of older machine at home that used them. It looked (to me) comically large.
It may not be the colloquial name but it surely was used. And of course only knowing 5.25s and 3.5s, it sure looked weird that the bigger one was called "mini".
Similarly 3.5" disks were formally called "micro floppy disks" and often used to often be called that on packaging though, so it all makes sense: minicomputer/microcomputer <-> mini floppy/micro floppy ;)
I haven't heard this term, either. I've always heard 5.25" floppies referred to as "diskettes", because they were a smaller diminutive version of 8" disks.
And kids these days think that Firefox taking up 8G of RAM is perfectly fine.
The site seems responsive, even though HN must be generating a fair bit of traffic. It's quite impressive what that little machine is doing.
I had a ZX81, with 1k of memory. After university I went to work as an accountant. So, mid- to late- 80's. The firm was going all techie, and some of the accountants were issued laptops. I was astounded to learn that the laptop contained the required software and was capable of storing the client's data.
It gives me inspiration to keep pressing ahead with my RP2040 retro-computer.
Little update: in the early 90's I started my PhD and did a little computer lab assistance work. One class was a bunch of nurse trainees. Floppies were ideal for storing their work on. They also made great coffee mats. I suggested that perhaps the floppies should be treated with a bit more love and care than that. Privately I mused what would happen if I fell ill, I jokingly wondered what treatment I would receive if I were a patient. The operation was a failure, but on the upside, he makes a great doorstop.
Look into something called Geos for the Commodore 64. It’s a full Macintosh competitor GUI OS with apps on a 2mhz 8 bit machine with 64k of RAM.
Yes it’s pretty minimal but things like it remind us just how wasteful so much of modern software is. A great deal of our bloat has reasonable explanations like a lot more data, lots more features, high DPI displays, etc but much of it is just lazy programming and too many layers of abstraction.
In the mid-1970s, a machine with 64k of RAM could support up to eight simultaneous users. And the apps were written in BASIC. That's how a lot of small businesses rolled with MAI Basic Four machines.
A 286 PC was powerful enough for many people to use it as their workstation in the late 80's. My first PC was a 486, and it was already basically doing the same stuff we do today on a laptop, just with A LOT less memory and much lower screen resolution. It was very responsive too (except when trying to connect to the internet via the phone line)!
When I was young and had a TRS-80 Model I, we used to manually flip the disk over (after cutting a write-protect notch out on the other side) to write on both sides. I remember wishing I had a Model 4 so that I didn't have to do that. I'm not sure if that's a false memory.
We definitely did that with the Commodore 64. Not sure if any 1541 or later disk drives did double-sided disks, but the "flippy" disk was a great trick.
Sorry, I'm cheating. Floppy contents are copied to RAM disk at boot ;)
It was a requested feature by people who may be spending time in that room (which is otherwise quiet)..
Presumably it was only offered on high density 1.2 MB 5.25" floppies, so not that bad compared to the 1.68 MB weirdo DMF-formatted 3.5" floppies Windows 95 was normally delivered on.
Still, would be interesting to see a photo of those 5.25" Windows 95 disks.
Pretty sure it was 1.2MB HD. There was something along the lines of 20-25 of them. Then lord help you if suddenly the system would panic because it was slightly out of spec of what OS2 wanted (usually halfway thru). Also if memory serves me I think you could tell the windows installer to make a set of disks from a CD. Then you got to feed the beast a bunch of floppies.
I legit considered not clicking on the link when I saw it on the frontpage, out of fear that I might actively contribute to burning someone's house down.
It does crash every couple of weeks due to bugs in either the packet driver, DESQview, the httpd or the fabric of time/space. I'll be testing other NICs to see if it behaves better.
I would have expected HN to take it down, though. So .. wow.
I'm all for more coverage and exposure - but I don't think that machine can handle a lot more.
Luckily I've got a 386 running OS/2 Warp Connect here that I can set up to serve an error page if the box goes down.. :D
In South Africa, apparently, a 3.5-inch floppy disc was called a "stiffy". That's a much more sensible word, right, and you're totally not smiling now?
The stats page says it's been up since Jan. 01 2023. Maybe it just does not respond to some clients when traffic is higher than it can handle. I could see if just fine right now.
Watched a 4k blu-ray last night. Let me know when streaming services are sending video with peaks of 100Mbps h.265 and audio with peaks of 4Mbps (and when I can get a home connection that can handle that). And when I can use streaming when utility power is unavailable and my telco DSL is too (they apparently don't have a battery at the remote terminal)
SD cards seem alive and well, although usually micro these days.
If you're including micro SD cards, there's literally one on my phone right now. And optical discs remain good for watching movies, although I agree they're on the decline everywhere else. The rest I haven't seen in forever.
I was not including SDXC or even SHDC cards, only SD. I am trying to find a maximum capacity SD card to use in a Palm T|X, either 1 or 2 GB. Back when SDHC first came out, I often ran into issues with 2 GB SDHC cards not working on older devices. I think being difficult to find is another criteria to qualify as obsolete.
The odd thing about high capacity SD cards in general is that they are generally used as fixed storage. I have a 256 GB card that I put into a 11" laptop when I bought it and I haven't seen it since. I haven't used a CF or SD card like a floppy since storage hit 4 GB.
I agree that I spoke too hastily about optical media. Even modern gaming consoles have optical drives.
The odd thing about high capacity SD cards in general is that they are generally used as fixed storage. I have a 256 GB card that I put into a 11" laptop when I bought it and I haven't seen it since. I haven't used a CF or SD card like a floppy since storage hit 4 GB.
If you were a still or video photographer, you would likely be using CF or SD cards like floppies every day still.
(Some of this has been changing with WiFi capable cameras and video cameras with USB-C ports for SSD's etc but SD cards are still very much A Thing for photographers)
If you refresh the stats page, you can see the TCP stats updating just fine but the ICMP does not.
Guessing ICMP is just getting filtered at some point.
There's a much larger than zero possibility something (network gear) North of this thing is black-holing ICMP echo and/or your ISP is dropping the responses.
The site's IP is announced by https://www.blix.com/. It's conceivable that an IBM 5170 is sitting on its side in a colo rack, with a transceiver bridging its Ethernet card directly to the ISP's network connection.
But it seems more likely traffic is being forwarded or even rewritten at Layer 4. I don't think running something like HAProxy in non-caching mode would invalidate the website's claims. Even an IP forwarding solution (eg a GRE tunnel) might have http://shouldiblockicmp.com/ issues.
The other counters on the page are updating after each refresh. I think only the ICMP counter is broken. The IP address points to a Norway provider. I do not think there is a CDN, elsewise the counters would be frozen.
