retroNET - Vintage Culture/Websites/Software

I want one so badly. I never see any for sale, not even in pieces.

Alternative Invidious Link

Here's a preview from the introduction of the article:

This ended up leading me down a series of wild rabbit holes where I found:

• Encrypted files which I was able to crack to discover their secrets
• A gift a dad in Thailand had made for his two and a half year old son, but didn’t want published online
• Somebody’s email password
• A secret biography of Chet Baker
• A file called worm.exe which held quite the surprise
• A host of extremely random images and files
• 56 previously unknown Winamp skins hidden inside other Winamp skins!

I love when the computer goes

*click*

mmmmmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

Alternative Youtube Link

A couple posts ago I asked if anyone knew of an archive of old tiled wallpapers. There really weren't any that were curated or easily accessible, so I started one. So far there are over 12k tiles!

Please enjoy.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15880015

Sealed Windows 2000 Advanced Server floppy disks

Not so much a post, but more of a request. Is there a proper archive somewhere of 90s tiled wallpapers for older distros? Think like, old CDE style stuff.

Another template on the theme of MS DOS

this template is special in that it does not have any graphics, it is made exclusively of text symbols

in the template there is a cursor specifically for viewing dark pages, and above the navigation bar there is a special thing to show which page you are on at a given time

no frameworks. simple clean code

HTML template made in the form of MS DOS programs

Great for an old school project

Alternative Invidious Link

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2435866

Anyone else love TTRPG history?

Everyone remembers the “cult of the home pages” in the 90s and early 00s, for about thirty years there was a fashion for them. later it all disappeared somewhere, the Internet shut down, people went to social networks, where the same memes and videos circulate in circles. there is nothing new. I did a little research and came to a specific conclusion: it has become too difficult for people to do this.

Thanks to old habits, and an understanding of how everything should really be - I used modern technologies so that backward compatibility would take place. so what do we have?

No database required!

You only need one file to work!

Works on PHP 8 without preinstalled frameworks

Just copy the files to the server (or hosting). No settings needed.

Perfect for a simple home page.

The hamster works very quickly.

The hamster code is simple and clear!

Open source and free!

Multi-template

Easy to adapt templates.

https://github.com/turboblack/HamsterCMS

but not only that! There are templates adapted and drawn by me in HTML 3.2 that are perfectly displayed both in DOS browsers and in modern ones. they are easy to edit, because if you simply write text in DOS in the admin panel, it will still look relative to the styles of the CMS itself, and everything on the site will look beautiful.

for those who want a version compatible with PHP 5.6-7.4 - go to the HamsterCMS website http://old.net.eu.org/

and if you don’t want to do this yourself, you can use hosting on HamsterCMS where everything is already configured - http://w10.host

hosting for those who love retro computers and want to administer their web page as under DOS, although it is possible from a phone and on modern browsers.

follow the updates, motivate the author with stars on Github, it inspires you to do more for you

Who would have thought that internet addiction would become the status quo.

Story time.

Back in the late 90s when Y! Chat was possibly at it's peak, there was a community of kids that were cracking old accounts. A few years prior Y! had started enforcing [a-zA-Z0-9_-] only account names. Young chat nerds were after these older accounts that had wild alt-chars in their names, in order to parade them around chat, as well as for bragging rights.

I certainly did not provide the scene a series of dict-based programs, that were specifically designed for this purpose.

At this point in time I was still stuck on 56k dial-up because DSL hadn't made it to my area yet. Though these programs were capable of sending rapid requests, my personal connection would only really allow me trickle through a dictionary.

During testing before release, to avoid tedium I would set the app to run before I went to bed. I had coded in the ability to select an MP3 file, that would play when a match was found, which I leveraged to wake myself up so I could inspect debug logs for any unexpected entries.

(I should take the moment to establish that I definitely only tested using accounts that belonged to myself.)

The MP3 that I chose to wake me up was the first track from the Hexen II OST, titled "Blackmarsh".

Every time I hear this track, I am filled with really deep nostalgia, associated with a period during my teenage years, when I got to be a mildly infamous internet cowboy.