I finally did it and moved to a more appropriate "home realm" for a #FreeBSD enthusiast. Thanks @stefano for offering this!
Moving followers worked flawlessly, restoring all my settings was pretty quick, but of course all my old toots are left on https://techhub.social/@zirias 🙈
So I guess I'll introduce myself here by writing a little thread, adding a few of my works that someone might find interesting. But first a bit of "who am I":
I'm a "professional" software architect/developer (mostly #dotnet platform in the day job), FreeBSD hobby-admin and ports committer, #C64 fan (and occassionally coder and even musician), and apart from computers also interested in music (playing a few instruments myself), traveling, cooking, sometimes sports, sometimes politics ... but probably won't toot about any non-technical stuff (or, very very rarely).
Also quite recent: #dos2ansi. This is a very versatile converter for #MSDOS#ansiart (and other "text") files to a format using #Unicode and only standard #ANSI#SGR escape sequences, so, suitable for today's terminals like #xterm. It includes an ansiart viewer which is "just" a shellscript, leveraging dos2ansi, xterm, less and some nice original #IBM fonts to do its job. So, maybe something for the #retrocomputing fans.
#BASIC turns 60 today! Happy birthday from the PCjr. Sometimes, I wonder what path my life would have diverged into if I had never had access to a computer and a book on BASIC programming as a kid.
The image/source is originally from Icons & Images by Elmer Larsen from 1985. I typed it in and tweaked it with PC-BASIC, then transferred it to a working PCjr with a gotek floppy drive.
Growing up with MS-DOS, I knew its role in today's Windows' usage of \ to separate directories and / for command-line arguments (choices that sound quirk-y in an Unix-influenced world that uses / and -, respectively.)
I never understood why MSFT - a very Unix-aware shop, having released their XENIX a year before MS-DOS - went with such an odd choice, until I looked at the (recently open-sourced) MS-DOS source code.
The files include documentation for computer manufacturers (so they could write compatible BIOS code, customize distribution, etc.), and this piece on MS-DOS 2.0 (which introduced subdirectories) suggests that - as usual in those times - the party behind the odd decision was none other than IBM:
@ptribble and this inplies that #ibm is expecting to relief their cloud customers of an additional 64bn. why exactly was it that people still believe #cloud fairy tales about cutting cost?
Can anyone have any idea about what this #mysterious#IBM#hardware can be ? I can't remember precisely how I got it, I THINK it was from a dumpster or found in a pile of some "electronic garbage". I have absolutely NO IDEA what this can be , I have a SUSPECT but I could be totally wrong, I THINK they MAY be part of an IBM 5100 but I can't be sure, if anyone knows what they could be I'd be interested to know !
The Love for #C64 computers never ceases. #IBM quantum computing Code is running here, which experiment claims the C64 outperforms the IBM #qbit#Quantum computer
Do you like IDE drives? How about 8 of them? There's a bundle of 8 new old stock 30GB IBM IDE drives up for grabs. They're going for $29.77 currently, with just over 2 days to bid as of time of posting. I remember when drives were more than $1/MB - these would have blown my mind back then. Check it out and spin some rust if you're interested: https://www.shopgoodwill.com/Item/195936206#GoodWill#auction#retrocomputing#IBM
#TodayInHistory 1964 – #IBM announces the System/360. It was extremely successful, allowing customers to purchase a smaller system they could expand, if their needs grew, without reprogramming application software. It influenced computer design for years to come. Many consider it one of history's most successful computers.
「 System/360’s software was also ambitious. Variations of one operating system, OS/360, were supposed to run on all the models.
But OS/360 was hard to write -- especially the complex “multiprogramming” versions that ran several programs at once -- and it was late. Three special OSs had to be created for the smallest machines 」