| Timestamp | Sender | Message |
| 2025-01-24 20:57 | Sole | And then I picked up some PostgreSQL and Python. |
| 2025-01-24 20:57 | Sole | Learning Linux and playing here helped me learn a *lot* about hardware/software. |
| 2025-01-24 20:56 | Sole | Oof. I assume you were slightly conflicted about that. |
| 2025-01-24 20:55 | Rairila | I worked for a medical software company that sold a solution that only ran on SCO unix - smack during the time SCO was suing linux |
| 2025-01-24 20:55 | Sole | But not enough to matter. |
| 2025-01-24 20:55 | Sole | tbh, I always found Slackware to be *slightly* more responsive. |
| 2025-01-24 20:55 | Rairila | gentoo was intersting. learned a lot. took a lot of time. eventually I got tired of waiting and making my computer generate BTUs |
| 2025-01-24 20:55 | Sole | Arch is probably a better balance. |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Sole | Just seemed like too much work for too little payoff. |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Sole | Of all distros, I never really used Gentoo. |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Rairila | I remember that heh |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Sole | (backed by Microsoft) |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Rairila | ain't nobody got time for that |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Sole | For those that don't know, Caldera ended up being very fond of lawyers. |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Rairila | I was a gentoo fanboi for a long time |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Sole | I used CorelLinux for a little bit too. |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Emperor | we're the same! |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Emperor | I once partitioned ubuntu on a windows machine |
| 2025-01-24 20:53 | Rairila | I think it was slackware |
| 2025-01-24 20:53 | Rairila | nice. my 1st linux install was from like 30 floppies burned from a alt.binary usenet group |
| 2025-01-24 20:53 | Sole | And my older brother had a set of Slackware install disks too |
| 2025-01-24 20:53 | Sole | Heh. We had Caldera on 3.5" disks a little after that. |
| 2025-01-24 20:52 | Rairila | there was a guy from the mud that told me about linux. I was like what? you mean.. it's not msdos? it's not windows? |
| 2025-01-24 20:52 | Ryoki | I remember KoalaKnight being one of the first people I interacted with here. |
| 2025-01-24 20:52 | Sole | And then got Gnolen to play at school in the new year. |
| 2025-01-24 20:51 | Sole | Gorion and I were super bored at my place, and found here. |
| 2025-01-24 20:51 | Sole | I started on here on Dec. 31, 1999. |
| 2025-01-24 20:51 | Rairila | haha yah |
| 2025-01-24 20:51 | Sole | Except for the people who had to be near you |
| 2025-01-24 20:50 | Sole | Nice :) |
| 2025-01-24 20:50 | Rairila | some nights we'd stay up all night and just go to class in the same clothes we had the prev day. |
| 2025-01-24 20:50 | Rairila | we used to mud from the solaris server at uni. we'd head to the comp lab after class and remote into the school solaris student server. someone (our friend from uni IT) compiled tintin for sparc and we'd copy it to our home dirs. |
| 2025-01-24 20:49 | Sole | Optimization is not a good use of time, generally. |
| 2025-01-24 20:49 | Sole | Now, you just throw more hardware at it. |
| 2025-01-24 20:49 | Sole | *nod* Most of the old games had lots of hacks to get everything out of the hardware. |
| 2025-01-24 20:48 | Ryoki | I remember kids sneaking starcraft on some of the computers. I definitely did a little bit of mudding. it was probably here, but that was so long ago. definitely predates my oldest altlist character by a good 3-5 years. |
| 2025-01-24 20:48 | Rairila | well, I guess it's not that simple. looks like a few folks touched it. anyways. it's a cool piece of code fora game. |
| 2025-01-24 20:47 | Rairila | oh wikipedia says Greg Walsh made it |
| 2025-01-24 20:47 | Sole | Me, Gorion, Gnolen and a couple of others would head to the computer lab at school and play Warcraft 2 on the LAN there on the weekends. |
| 2025-01-24 20:46 | Ryoki | I played a little quake, but was more of an original counterstrike kid. |
| 2025-01-24 20:46 | Sole | I remember lurking on IRC, and calling friends to say when to dial in for games of Quake etc. |
| 2025-01-24 20:46 | Ryoki | well, and IDKFA and IDSPISPOPD |
| 2025-01-24 20:45 | Ryoki | all I know is IDDQD |
| 2025-01-24 20:44 | Rairila | well. it was known to some folks. not me until the quake source was released and then everyone was like 'what the heck is this?!' |
| 2025-01-24 20:44 | Rairila | that's the guess, but nothing conclusive. the trick was known since the 80s. |
| 2025-01-24 20:43 | Sole | Carmack. |
| 2025-01-24 20:43 | Sole | Cormack or Carmack. I never remember |
| 2025-01-24 20:43 | Sole | Was that one of the John Cormack hacks? |
| 2025-01-24 20:42 | Rairila | my fav trivia from that time period is 0x5F3759DF - from the game Quake. it's a numer used as a shortcut for a fast inverse square root. it's a brilliant piece of compsci black magic that made the game playable. it has a wikipedia page. |
| 2025-01-24 20:41 | Sliiick | some of us learned less than others :( |
| 2025-01-24 20:40 | Sole | Most of the people here grew up in thae sweet spot of technology/computers... We had to learn a lot, and learned as it happened too. |
| 2025-01-24 20:40 | Rairila | yeah. not only do I know how to make it work - I know why it works. |
| 2025-01-24 20:39 | Sole | You had to learn more details about the inner workings, and even then, it still wasn't "that deep" |
| 2025-01-24 20:39 | Solipsis | i wish i could find some more uses for mine, i end up using it as an IT tool via fake keyboard the most |
| 2025-01-24 20:39 | Dumbledore | i can also play doom on my snes |
| 2025-01-24 20:39 | Sole | There's something to be said for learning computers on those old machines. |
| 2025-01-24 20:38 | Rairila | you can play doom on a flipper zero |
| 2025-01-24 20:38 | Dumbledore | i boot it up and play doom or wolfenstien every now and then |
| 2025-01-24 20:38 | Rairila | winsock.dll ftw |
| 2025-01-24 20:37 | Rairila | nice. that's a classic. |
| 2025-01-24 20:37 | Dumbledore | i still have my old 385 with windows 3.1 lol |
| 2025-01-24 20:37 | Dumbledore | i'll just move to columbia and grow my own :p |
| 2025-01-24 20:37 | Rairila | I had a student place a paper on the monitor and click a mouse randomly - and they were confused why the paper did not scan into the computer. this was MSDOS + Windows 3.11 days. Like sir, this is not the 21st century. |
| 2025-01-24 20:35 | Solipsis | magnets, how do they work |
| 2025-01-24 20:34 | Alrin | wow |
| 2025-01-24 20:34 | Rairila | ah memories. that time I was a student worker in the print lab, and had to tell another student that the reason their semester work was ruined was b/c they had hung their disk to their fridge with a magnet as a reminder not to forget it |
| 2025-01-24 20:31 | Rairila | I befriended the neckbeard admin and he gave me a whopping 10 megs of user space. |
| 2025-01-24 20:30 | Rairila | hah. I had an openvms account when I started uni |
| 2025-01-24 20:30 | Solipsis | (if you know where that is calculated i'm all ears, still hunting through source code) |
| 2025-01-24 20:30 | Sole | Like one that ran on OpenVMS or whatever back in the day. |
| 2025-01-24 20:30 | Solipsis | it's not the main focus of my investigation just noticed i wasn't getting the info when looking at system processing time |
| 2025-01-24 20:30 | Sole | And why it would make sense for an interactive terminal application over telnet. |
| 2025-01-24 20:30 | Rairila | *guess you could |
| 2025-01-24 20:30 | Rairila | I couldd you could time "how long from when I send a command, do I get the telnet ga sequence? calc that time, and that's the mud lag |
| 2025-01-24 20:29 | Solipsis | if only when hitting enter then that makes sense for it trying to use that to determine latency |
| 2025-01-24 20:29 | Rairila | yeah. for telnetga - I gotta hit enter |
| 2025-01-24 20:28 | Zaffer | Char.Vitals shows up every time you would otherwise get a prompt. |
| 2025-01-24 20:28 | Zaffer | You get that regardless of telnetga config. |
| 2025-01-24 20:28 | Zaffer | *nod* |
| 2025-01-24 20:28 | Rairila | Chars.Vitals being from GMCP |
| 2025-01-24 20:27 | Zaffer | http://flaprider.dyndns.org/~hair/tf/topics/prompt_protocol.html |
| 2025-01-24 20:27 | Rairila | so it doesn't seem much different than the Chars.Vitals |
| 2025-01-24 20:27 | Zaffer | Oh, it helps to get the prompt data *nod* |
| 2025-01-24 20:27 | Rairila | when I hit enter, I get a GA event, which contains my stats data, and a string represetntation of it. |
| 2025-01-24 20:26 | Solipsis | it seems to be how mudlet tracks network latency by default, not sure what the mechanics in there are |
| 2025-01-24 20:26 | Zaffer | But strictly speaking, -/+ telnetga doesn't really matter much to most clients these days, right? |
| 2025-01-24 20:25 | Rairila | so the telnet ga data looks like other data you get from gmcp. in tintin, I just created an {IAC GA} event and captured it. |
| 2025-01-24 20:25 | Solipsis | i am mostly trying to do some profiling on some stuff i wrote that definitely is slow so wanted all the info i could get |
| 2025-01-24 20:24 | Zaffer | I tried to write a Python client for a terminal application at work. It ended up being way more work than I was willing to put in. |
| 2025-01-24 20:23 | Mare | run @2e fol mare |
| 2025-01-24 20:23 | Zaffer | Ah, the go-ahead stuff. Really meant for more of a terminal application type thing. |
| 2025-01-24 20:23 | Dumbledore | telnet is the best! |
| 2025-01-24 20:22 | Mare | real players still mud on telnet |
| 2025-01-24 20:22 | Rhane | <- tried to write a mud once, has 12 several-year-old tabs on the telnet protocol somewhere in my browser windows |
| 2025-01-24 20:22 | Sumone | it is magic |
| 2025-01-24 20:21 | Ryoki | boggle |
| 2025-01-24 20:21 | Rairila | heh.. samesies |
| 2025-01-24 20:21 | Zaffer | *ponder* Now I have to google what a telnet GA sequence is |
| 2025-01-24 20:20 | Solipsis | oh interesting, thx |
| 2025-01-24 20:20 | Rhane | config +telnetga perhaps? |