babbling my thoughts and theories to nobody and everybody, or in other words, to anybody who might be interested in it :).?? Introduction I collected myself a vast amount of data and have issues with using them effectively. The lack of ability to find and use specific data that I collected when I need them is a problem that bothers me and where I am constantly working on improving. This problem of mine is of course a problem that pretty much every person has to varying extend, so there are of course numerous options and tools that were created by others already, trying to solve my exact issues. Considering the fact that virtually everybody has the same problem and that so many “solutions” and tools exist to solve your problem, it surprised me, that virtually of them that I check out failed to solve exactly those problems for ME. This bothered me a lot and got me thinking why this is the case. It didn’t make sense at first glance, but after giving it more and more thoughts, I started to realize why most tools that are out there fail to solve the problems for me.?? This is great, but does not help me with actually solving my problem. So I kept thinking about the problem itself, to learn that while the problem appears to be the same for everybody, generally speaking, it is actually not, if you start looking at things a bit more closely. Those differences can make[…]
Welcome to the fourth and last episode of my mini-series “Trip Back on Memory Lane“. This episode is about the French demo collection CD-ROM series “ACE” and also a bit about the demoscene and what demos are in general. Backup Link to Video on Vimeo.com Download this video in AVI format from Mediafire.com Part 4 – ACE Demo Collection CD-ROMs The ACE demo collection CD-ROMs are certainly not the only CD-ROMs with productions of the demoscene that were released over the years, but I will argue that this series covers more of the whole scene than any other release before and after it. There were occasionally good releases from the demoparties like Assembly, Mekka & Symposium and X, but those were not consistent and only covered one particular party. Note: You can find links at the end of this post where you can download the complete ACE CD-ROMs collection, as well as the complete content of many other demoscene related CD-ROM releases, such as the ones that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. The ACE collection covers the most important productions released by the scene between 1990 and March 1997. The collection has four volumes and spans 6 CD-ROMs altogether. ACE 1, which was released in 1994 covers the early beginnings of the PC demoscene, up-to September 1994. The same French demosceners would continue to release another ACE collection every year for the next 3 years. ACE 2 covers all productions between September 1994 and June 1995, ACE 3 (2[…]
Welcome to part 3 of my mini-series “Trip Back on Memory Lane“. This segment will talk about the 32bit operating system OS2 Warp by IBM, but also about the history of my bulleting board system “Closed Society”. ?? Backup Link to Video on Vimeo.com Download Video in AVI format at Mediafire.com Note: Correction to one of the statements that I made in the video. It was a Pentium 100MHz and not a 486/100 where I ran the BBS with OS/2 on. Sorry for that. Part 3 – IBM OS/3 Warp 32Bit Operating System After I had my BBS running on individual PC’s that were connected with each other and a “file server” via Novel Lite and then Lantastic for a long while, I got around buying a single “power PC” (=new) that was capable to run all nodes of the BBS all by itself.?? But let me take you a bit further back in time to when I first got started with my BBS that eventually lead me to the use of OS2 as the operating system of choice to run my multi-node bulletin board system.?? A Brief “Technical” History of my BBS I had not much money when I started my BBS. I was co-sysop at some other boards and also played around with local installations of Bulletin Board Software. I did not want to start a 1 node BBS (I had a U.S. Robotics 14.4 HST Courier with an “after market upgrade” to a full Dual Standard), which[…]
Welcome to part 2 of my mini-series “Trip Back on Memory Lane“. This part is about the famous bulletin board?? software called “PCBoard” by Clark Development Company, Inc. Backup Link to Video on Vimeo Download this video in AVI format from Mediafire.com Part 2 – PCBoard Bulletin Board System by Clark Development I am a former Sysop of the BBS called “Closed Society” in Berlin, Germany. You can learn more about my BBS in great details (including a video of a captured login session) at my regular web site here. I had a pirate board running, but I ran it on licensed software, including licenses for the BBS software PCBoard and the OS were it ran on (IBM OS/2 Warp). The cops where surprised about that when I got busted, but more to that at the page about my BBS. I recently recovered the original installation/setup discs of PCBoard and decided to make them available publicly. It’s not like a clean warez/crack installation, because there are also some update steps required to get the version of the BBS to V15.22, capable to run on a 32bit OS like OS/2 or Win32 and to increase the number of node licenses from 3 to either 5 or 10. Here are my notes as well as some comments to how this affected my own BBS etc. Floppy Discs 1-3 PCBoard V15.2/2 & V15.2 Setup Disks 1 – 3?? = PCBoard Professional Bulletin Board Software V15.2/2 Install Disks (3x HD 1.44 MB). Serial Number:[…]
Okay, Here is the first detailed segment of my mini-series “Trip Back on Memory Lane“.?? I thought that I would post that part later, but I was not able to post the intro post or any other post two days ago and yesterday as I intended to, because my AC broke last Sunday and temperature rose in my place to 90 and then 100+ degrees Fahrenheit, which forced me to shut down all my computer equipment, because of overheating. The AC was just fixed a bit over one hour ago and temperatures are slowly going down to normal :). So here we go now and start with the first segment, which is about the famous PC sound card Gravis Ultrasound (GUS). ?? Backup Link to Video on Vimeo.com Download this video in AVI format from Mediafire.com Part 1 – Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) Sound Card by Advanced Gravis In the year 1993 a small US company with the name “Gravis” introduced a sound card that was beating anything that was available at that time in the same price range. It was a sound card for consumers and amateurs with semi-professional needs. They called their sound card “Ultrasound” and people would soon call it simply “GUS”. The sound card was the first in it’s class to provide high quality surround sound and programmers on the PC loved the card even more for very different reasons. The GUS came with an on-board memory of 512KB, which could be extended to 1 MB. This[…]
Not logged in