Recently in nostalgia Category

Open browser, navigate to mainboard manufacturer's hompage, find correct BIOS image and corresponding flash utility, download it! discover that you can only update BIOS via floppy disk. (mild profanity here). find a floppy. checked. floppy drive, huh? we've 2008 man! ok, go find a floppy drive. what about a floppy disk cable? Its not working. its just not working. try to tweak some bios settings in order to get the floppy disk drive going. no good. try another floppy drive. no good. another floppy cable? argl. (some more mild profanity here)

ok, now how do we get a bootable DOS disk? no Windows around here anymore. try google. find www.bootdisk.com, download dr-dos bootdisk. discover that it is a Windows executable. (the profanity thing again) go back to bootdisk.com and search for non-exe image files. checked. write image to floppy. man that thing is slooow! ages later, strange noises appear to be coming from the floppy drive. aaah, bad blocks! try another floppy. bad blocks again. (the profanity thing gets out of hand) some four or five floppy disks later we have a bootdisk. Hmpf!

On we go. boot from floppy. at the dos prompt, run the flash tool. aaah! no keyboard. wtf? obviously a USB-keyboard isn't the way to go here. find PS/2 thingy and retry. did I tell that it takes ages to boot from a floppy. *sigh*. eventually update BIOS, remove floppy drive and swear to never ever touch a floppy disk again. two hours of lifetime lost to some 20 year old piece of technology called floppy disk.

Remember those point-n-click LucasArts adventure games? Yes?! Numerous hours of lost lifetime, and still you never finished 'em all, right? Well, fear no more .. here is your chance to speedrun some of those classics: Loom in 27 mins, Indiana Jones 3 - The Last Crusade in 27 mins, Zack McKracken in 34 mins and Maniac Mansion in 9 mins .. lean back and enjoy.

Unqualified code-monkey Garote posted to slashdot.org about his annotated version of Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line. His comments discuss UI design theory and fill in some of the gaps from the last five years. (And yes, he has been granted permission from Neal to do this.)

There's an interesting article on Advogato about the world of computing that kids today find themselves in compared to the world that kids in the 80's found themselves in. Learning to program in the 80's was simpler because the machines were more limited, and generally came with BASIC. Now we have Windows, which typically comes with no built-in programming language.