oh yeah that, and compiling your kernel! Felt like opening an old spell book or something…

friend told me “ah you like hacking at DOS and stuffs, you may be interested in that, it’s called ‘linouqse’ i guess…” so i gave it a shot.

“Slackware”… it was something like kernel 1.3.12 or 1.3.13 i am not sure… it came on 6 or 7 floppy disks.

from the boot already it seemed like nothing i had seen before: all (!) hardware seemed to be methodically enumerated, a bunch of esoteric commands and processed started their bizarre dance before my very eyes. looked already like i was accessing so much more information about the insides of my -then beloved- machine than ever?! this flashes very fast though and is a bit frustrating… then a rudimentary install menu, in text mode, asking a lot of questions.

… trying all of this and failing many times, getting an old hard disk in a secondary bay to dedicate to the exercise… getting to it again and again (there was no Internet, where i was, then)… until finally, the thing boots up. a login prompt. i had remembered the password chosen upon install, that was it!

… a shell? i had never heard of Unix before, 100% of my previous practice before was with micro-computing, from 8bit to 16bit to DOS PC and its laughable Windows 3.1 ™…

… what am i gonna do with all this, now?!

[fiddling…]

[months passed]

… “xf86something”…? what? some more configuration? some more esoteric? Where does that lead me? wait.

… a graphical environment just popped out of my console?! with windows and shits??? this was there since the very beginning, like it was already there this whole time?!?!

🤯

Later on erring back on the side of Win3.1 because its “trumpet winsock” was the obvious, “easy” way to get connected to this new eldorado that opened up around (the year was 1995)… reading more about it on this new “online” helped me figure how to get back on that cool and hacky side, to finally (after months?) get the modem to connect, through PPP, to my ISP…

This is when I decided it would be cool, someday, to make this my primary OS, and that i’ll work towards this end from now on. at the same time i heard for the first time of “free(libre) software” and that thing resonated within me as something i didn’t know was possible: a way to organize society, based on virtuous principles of sharing knowledge and helping one’s neighbor, through the same playful excitement of hacking that had kept me on my toes since i was a child? where do I sign?!

3 years later i decided to never boot a Windows OS again, and here I am, ranting on lemmy like i am 275 years old…

Imagine a pile of floppy disks, with stuffs inscribed on it that you never heard of…

… will you insert one into your computer and reboot it?

Internet Libre o Barbarie!

“Allo, IT? Have you tried turning it off and on again?” ;)

yt-dlp -U ?

wait until you’ve tried with a PCEngine! ;)

+1.

Also it can be turned into a coolest spaceship, with its CDRom attachment, a very first in 1988!

Also the HuCard format for its games is unbeatable!

you are right. they are now accessible and unified accros platforms by retroarch.

That’s to me part of the delight in modern experience of classic games: to go through these games you never had a chance to complete before! mostly with a few features:

• save/load states (with accessible shortcuts on your controller) anywhere in the game, whether or not the original game had a way to save/load progress, and regardless on when/where the players were “allowed” to save. because we don’t have as much time as we had when we were 12yo…
• rewind. YES. in case you havent played a modern emulator through retroarch recently you may not even have thought it would be a thing! but it is… like in movies. you get killed in that super-hard shmup that implacably sends you back to the beginning of the level every time you die? ever found that a bit… unfair, maybe? well, just rewind, dodge that bullet and keep playing. you may not integrate this new learning as much as if you had to play it 100 times to learn it by heart and get there, but hell, again, the time thing. (also fast-forward comes handy for those JRPGs games, where you had to constantly grind with random encounters in order to level up… think “catchin’em’all” and not having all the time in the world…)
• arcade games frequently had unlimited “continue” (as long as you would shove money into them), while console adaptations we tried our teeth into at home -for the lucky few of us- had usually an arbitrarily set number of “continue”… (mostly -so i heard about the US at least, where there was a huge rental market for console games- to make sure kids won’t finish the game in less than a day or a week-end worth of a rental… and rather be challenge to rent the game again). with arcade emulators, you have all the virtual coins that you need…

Combining those together gives anyone the occasion to just experience any of these games, from start to finish, in a relatively short period of time. a 90s arcade brawler or shmup or such goes in one sitting of usually less than one hour… anyone is free to then decide to practice them hundreds of times until they decide to stop using these features one by one and/or use them as creative constraints along the way of their own training, etc…

In short: modern emulation gaming levels the playing field (pun very much intended) when it comes to making those games accessible to everyone, especially those nail-hard ones, by giving access to a wide diversity of ways to experience them! yay! \o/

welcome home! <3

don’t use it if you’re flying a plane, though!

Coming from someone at the helm of a new reactionary movement, that’s pretty tasty!

newsboat <3

to edit CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT all night long

something you cooked from the bottom of your heart, inspired by that person, improvising with seasonal ingredients, with a touch of crazy zestiness (lime, ginger, chili)? something that would taste delicious and show how inventive and thoughtful you are!

You’re right! I don’t know either.

The facts remain, though.

Bruce Schneier is also probably just a conspiracy theorist, when he writes in 2014:

“By the way, the Register noted that Whisper Systems (along with Tor and several other privacy projects) received $450,000 from Radio Free Asia – which is pretty much an official State Department / CIA propaganda organ, isn’t it? How exactly does this work as a coherent national security strategy, when State is funding ‘privacy’ while NSA is funding eavesdropping? https://www.opentechfund.org/sites/default/files/attachments/otf2013annualreportfinal.pdf”

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/11/whatsapp_is_now.html

oh and that linked annual report of the OTF, like the following ones, doesn’t seem to be online anymore… :))

what a joke

well before 2013 it wasnt “Signal” but some proprietary software. After 2016 it wasn’t anymore “the initial phase”

Funny how you don’t seem to be wanting to see 2013-2016, but it’s OK. facts speak for themselves :)

“Between 2013 and 2016, Open Whisper Systems received grants from the Shuttleworth Foundation,[49] the Knight Foundation,[50] and the Open Technology Fund.[51]”

“Marlinspike launched Open Whisper Systems’ website in January 2013.[2][1]”

(from the page you linked)

How is that not the OTF (100% funded by Radio Free Asia) since its inception? how is it not its initial conception phase?

US government: “Make us an app that people can use so we are the only ones accessing their meta-data.” Developer: makes Signal US Government: 👍