| Timestamp | Sender | Message |
| 2025-01-24 21:09 | Rairila | I heard it was amazing capabiltiies around scientific and math notation |
| 2025-01-24 21:08 | Sole | We ended up with a report that looked like it belonged in a journal. |
| 2025-01-24 21:08 | Rairila | oh wow. that's hardcore, and you're not the 1st person I heard use LaTex for something like that. |
| 2025-01-24 21:08 | Sole | I told my entire group to just write the content in plaintext, and I would take care of the rest. |
| 2025-01-24 21:08 | Sole | I wrote my senior project paper in LaTeX |
| 2025-01-24 21:08 | Rairila | WYSISYG - not always the best. I think in the early days, I would spent WAY too much time finding the right font to use. |
| 2025-01-24 21:07 | Sole | Word is slowly getting better, but it's still such a pain to properly typeset anything in it. |
| 2025-01-24 21:06 | Sole | Because the forms they had to fill in were perfectly formatted in WordPerfect. |
| 2025-01-24 21:06 | Rairila | hah! I bet! I can completely understand that |
| 2025-01-24 21:06 | Sole | Lots of lawyers got very annoyed when they had to migrate to Word |
| 2025-01-24 21:06 | Sole | *nod nod* WordPerfect was miles better than Word. Especially w/ the show formatting. |
| 2025-01-24 21:05 | Sole | Too many people (management) just want a pretty interface, instead of an efficient workflow. |
| 2025-01-24 21:05 | Rairila | I mean.. wordperfect was pretty darn amazing - especially with that shortcut key overlay for the keyboard |
| 2025-01-24 21:05 | Sole | If the goal is data entry, then avoid the need to move hands from keyboard. |
| 2025-01-24 21:04 | Rairila | consistency is king as well. like I'm glad that ctrl-C/V is very similar to the mac's CMD-C/V |
| 2025-01-24 21:03 | Sole | I was just bitching about whomever at Microsoft that decided the default keyboard shortcut for a non-breaking hyphen should be ALT+SHIFT+- instead of the usual CTRL+SHIFT+- in Word. |
| 2025-01-24 21:03 | Rairila | yeah. I mean the new system was technically superior to the old one, but they failed to account for the most important thing: the folks using it. |
| 2025-01-24 21:02 | Sole | Keyboard shortcuts and responsive programs are unbeaten for efficiency. |
| 2025-01-24 21:01 | Rairila | nurses were like, I could enter a new patient in 30s on the old system: tab tab enter, enter, type tab, enter - but now I gotta move the mouse and type for 3 pages. |
| 2025-01-24 21:01 | Sole | *nod* I can see that happening. |
| 2025-01-24 21:01 | Rairila | in the end, they rewrote the whole thing for windows and went full GUI. This pissed off all the nursees and admin staff, b/c it was a "green screen" terminal that they used for 10-15 years and they memorized all the screens and tabs. |
| 2025-01-24 21:01 | Alrin | such efficiency and so much added value |
| 2025-01-24 20:59 | Rairila | haha yeah |
| 2025-01-24 20:59 | Sole | Which was the whole motto of SCO :) |
| 2025-01-24 20:59 | Rairila | my company was just a distributor, so the owner was kinda wary of using it.. as we also didn't wanna get sued by the software dev for bypassing their "security" check. - which was just a way to get more money from folks that wanted to run it on linux vs sco |
| 2025-01-24 20:58 | Rairila | yeah. the medical software dev created a linux version at one point, but they handicapped it so that you needed a special "client" to connect to it. so I reverse engineered the telnet protocol they used and figured out that the login sequence they used just added an extra char, so I wrote a program to just inject that for a normal telnet |
| 2025-01-24 20:58 | Sole | But... I made the right decision when going to university, and picked a degree that wasn't related to computers. I kept a hooby as a hobby :) |
| 2025-01-24 20:57 | Sole | At a certain point, I started reading books on software engineering in my spare time. |
| 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. |