Sheesh, I've had twenex.org sitting in my bookmark toolbar for years - so many super-interesting systems to investigate, so little time....
crimsonRE
joined 1 year ago
I am also starting to dabble in the various aspects of the Fediverse, having an interesting time. "Neon Modem Overdrive"! Somewhere, William Gibson is smiling...
The memory in the two Voyager spacecraft - still in operation more than 45 years after launch, now more than 4 times farther from our Sun than Pluto's mean orbit - is core. Poke around in https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov
All the junk heaped onto the WWW table has made it bloated, requiring multiprocessing just to run it quickly enough for impatient humans. I still have a version or two of Phoenix (along w. versions of Netscape) on my SPARCstation 20...
2400 baud modem in an Altima 286 luggable (CGA LCD monochrome screen) in 1990. Hello CompuServe! And dialing into the Sun SPARCservers at work (oh yeah, remote working, 1993). Then used a USR 56k modem with a Sun SPARCstation 20 to connect to my ISP. The SS20 served as the firewall/router/DHCP server for my home LAN, which quickly grew to include NeXT, Sun and SGI workstations as companies cast them off to save money with the advent of the Intel/MS hegemony. That setup is still down in the computing cave, should the fiber-optic-cable-eating viruses grown in some corporate arcology ever be unleashed and we are back to copper POTS again...
gopher://codevoid.de is one of my favorites - he has written scrapers for CNN news, Hackernews and Slashdot. The inimitable Cameron Kaiser wrote browser extensions for gopher : see http://gopher.floodgap.com. And then visit his excellent burrow at gopher://gopher.floodgap.com site for plenty of information on gopher client software (including web browsers that also understand gopher protocol). He also has a section with news scrapers (VoA, Kaiser Health, etc) and the Groundhog section that pulls NWS weather forecasts and radar imagery... I have been happy to utilize all these sites for years - I used gopher back before http was at all widespread (I had to telnet into cern.ch to use their text WWW browser). Heck, I looked at gopher sites with Mosaic since it also parses the gopher protocol. And I love being able to burrow around using the clients running on my collection of old workstations (Sun, SGI, NeXT). Long live port 70...