patrick.net

First computer to use was a Xerox 820-2 think it ran at 4khz, still have it with drives and printer and everything in original boxes. First computer I bought with my own money 386dx40.

Anyone remember the ESDI bus for the PC?

There are still a lot of old dos pc out there running dedicated machinery, always fun to watch younger IT guys that have to fix network issue or any sort of issue for that matter on them.

I think the only thing I miss from back in the day and its purely from nostalgia is the BBS systems from before the internet.

porkchopXpress says

Encryption only protects against physical theft of the media the data is stored on, unless you're doing file encryption with yet another password on it. I have OneDrive and just use the Personal Vault which ties into my computer's TPM for authentication.

Any sensitive data I unplug my internet. Turn off wifi and store it on an SD card in a safe. Delete anything on the computer. Plug everything back in. My wife doesn't even know I do this if you catch my drift. I wouldn't want my name out there, but anything on my computer I'd share with anyone, put it that way. The other stuff never has a chance to hit the internet and is in a safe.

Some stuff that might be sensitive I bury in folder after folder. I can't find it half the time. Don't label files with obvious titles that are easily searchable. Financial docs Apple easily allows you to passcode the folder AND file. Good luck getting into my stuff unless you have a gun to my head.

The problem with encryption is everyone uses encryption patterns that everyone else is using. If you get my drift.

If you take a file and randomly sift bits in that file, then store those shifts in a key file. Your average hacker would hit it with every encryption breaking software available to them, and never crack it. Roll your own algorythms and design your own encryption patterns, and don't blab about it. Make a process so hideously irregular, that the top IT Manager screams "That's not how you do it!"

Unique obfuscation is better than encryption. Encryption patterns are all known, all they have to is hack the key. They don't have to give the process a second thought.

Tenpoundbass says

The problem with encryption is everyone uses encryption patterns that everyone else is using. If you get my drift.

If you take a file and randomly sift bits in that file, then store those shifts in a key file. Your average hacker would hit it with every encryption breaking software available to them, and never crack it. Roll your own algorythms and design your own encryption patterns, and don't blab about it. Make a process so hideously irregular, that the top IT Manager screams "That's not how you do it!"

Unique obfuscation is better than encryption. Encryption patterns are all known, all they have to is hack the key. They don't have to give the process a second thought.

♞♞☾☭☹☸☂✿♆♗♞♖✸♞☹☮✸♬☸❉♙☢❉☭♕☯✸✪✸✈♠☢☠✿☹✸☮♖♕✪☯☮♠☮♖★☭❉✂☯☹✪✂❉☯❉★☢★♕♖✪♗☯♖☂☭☏♬♕♠☭✂✈♖♙☸✈☸☭✂☏♕♬❉❂♬☂☹✂☾☏♆♗♗☂☮✈✪☾★☭♗☹☢✪☯☭✪☯♖☯☏✈✪❉♗♆☯♕♙♬❉☏♗✈☢★♞♆♬★♗✈✿❉☾☮

That reminds me of a coexist bumper sticker that has been turned into a banner.

Don't save things on disks or thumb drives if they are important. They degrade too easily. Instead use an external hard drive(s) that you can store in your safe. That's the most lossless tech we have outside of writing with DNA or engraving crystals with lasers.

If you want to store small amounts of data, it should be printed out.

It's annoying there isn't a more permanent way of storing data. I've been waiting for crystal storage to show up, I know how to make a billion off from that, IF it ever is made.

1337irr says

♞♞☾☭☹☸☂✿♆♗♞♖✸♞☹☮✸♬☸❉♙☢❉☭♕☯✸✪✸✈♠☢☠✿☹✸☮♖♕✪☯☮♠☮♖★☭❉✂☯☹✪✂❉☯❉★☢★♕♖✪♗☯♖☂☭☏♬♕♠☭✂✈♖♙☸✈☸☭✂☏♕♬❉❂♬☂☹✂☾☏♆♗♗☂☮✈✪☾★☭♗☹☢✪☯☭✪☯♖☯☏✈✪❉♗♆☯♕♙♬❉☏♗✈☢★♞♆♬★♗✈✿❉☾☮

I've gone through a few substitution ciphers. This is nonsense most likely. IF each character is just a single character, there are 26 characters, no spaces, and substituting based on the frequency of the letters in typical text turns up nothing unless it's a random jumble of words.

If it's something like AES or DES encryption, it's unbreakable without the key although if it's Enigma, but there's 3 variants and the message is too short.

HeadSet says

Patrick says

My first was a Commodore 64.

My was the Commodore SX-64, a C64 in a case with a 5in color monitor. I still have it.

Fire up x86 from VICE:

https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/

If you want a blast from the past:

https://impossible-mission.krissz.hu/

Not certain if that's a re-write or if it's actually simulating a C64. It's the exact original game, I've even won it once. I think it's probably a simulator of the original code.

just_passing_through says

Don't save things on disks or thumb drives if they are important. They degrade too easily. Instead use an external hard drive(s) that you can store in your safe. That's the most lossless tech we have outside of writing with DNA or engraving crystals with lasers.

With advise like this I think it's always important to mention the value of redundancy. Simply encrypting the drive, then making several copies you spread around is actually better than a single copy in a safe.

Gateway 486. I was late to the game, and probably a bit younger than many of you.

NuttBoxer says

Gateway 486. I was late to the game, and probably a bit younger than many of you.

You missed out. The early machines really allowed you to entirely understand the entire machine. Now it's just a black box and libraries to most people.

Commodore 64 and then Amiga 500. I, too, still have these machines with hundreds of floppies each, though I will usually use an emulator just because it's so much more convenient.

Karloff says

Commodore 64 and then Amiga 500. I, too, still have these machines, though I will usually use an emulator just because it's so much more convenient.

What roms do you use for the the Amiga emulator? It took me a few years to find them.

Can't say I miss the Amiga once I got it fired up. It was a great machine for it's time, today it just feels primitive.

You might to try out Aros in a vm only. There is a new RiscOS out too if you want to.play with that. RiscOS is actually usable.

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

Karloff says

Commodore 64 and then Amiga 500. I, too, still have these machines with hundreds of floppies

I still have my Amiga 2000 with a Video Toaster. The Amiga 2000 had a hard drive and a 3.5 in floppy drive. Anybody remember that there were two types of 3.4in floppies. a "DD" with 720k and an "HD" with 1.2 meg?

richwicks says

What roms do you use for the the Amiga emulator? It took me a few years to find them.

Can't say I miss the Amiga once I got it fired up. It was a great machine for it's time, today it just feels primitive.

You might to try out Aros in a vm only. There is a new RiscOS out too if you want to.play with that. RiscOS is actually usable.

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

Do you mean the Kickstart ROMs? Or are you referring to the disk images that some people mistakenly refer to as ROMs? In my actual Amiga, I have the newer Kickstart 3.2 ROMs, but on the emulator I have all of them. Many games only work with the older 1.2/1.3 ROMs.

What most people use these days is a tool called WHDLoad. It's basically a wrapper that allows floppy games to run from hard drive. Crackers have removed the protection, fixed code that prevented the games from running on different hardware (CPU accelerators, newer model systems, more RAM, etc) and then written a WHDLoad "slave" to allow the program to run from hard drive on basically any Amiga. The games just come as archives compressed in the LhA format.

I tried AROS once quite a few years ago, but don't remember it very well. There's other offshoots like Amithlon but I never really got into that one as it has limited hardware support.

HeadSet says

Anybody remember that there were two types of 3.4in floppies. a "DD" with 720k and an "HD" with 1.2 meg?

The Amiga DD floppies could hold 880kB. They were able to store more data than the PC format because the Amiga didn't bother to write individual sectors, which necessitates the use of gaps between them in order to prevent the EMF caused by turning the write head on/off from destroying data bytes under the head. While the disk format did use 11 sectors per track, if you changed one sector, it would read in the entire track, change the sector in memory, then write the entire track back out.

Amiga later had an HD format that stored 1.76MB per disk. These were special drives that ran at 150RPM instead of 300RPM, so data transfer was slower than PC HD 3.5". If you had an aftermarket floppy controller, like a Catweasel, you could read/write these disks at full speed with a standard PC HD drive, as well as PC/Atari/Apple/etc disks, and even an "XTRA HD" format that held 2.38MB on an HD disk.

Karloff says

Do you mean the Kickstart ROMs? Or are you referring to the disk images that some people mistakenly refer to as ROMs?

Me engineer. I mean kickstart roms.

The reason people mistakenly refer to discs as 'roms' is because an optical disc is a read only memory, and that was the format for games in the mid to late 1990's. Floppies aren't roms though.

I really don't have much interest in the Amiga, although I recently fired a simulator up. I'm have all the kickstarts, EXCEPT for the the A2000. I found the right ones based off from the SHA256 sums, there's TONS of dumps but the "correct ones" are identified by FS-UAE based off from the SHA256 sum. I'm impressed that HeadSet has a 2000, that machine wasn't out long and didn't sell too well.

The frustration of using the Amiga came all flooding back when I booted up the simulator. I do NOT miss those days. It was a great cutting edge machine for it's time, but it's the stoneage of computing today. Using an IBM-PC of that era though is impossible.

Karloff says

I tried AROS once quite a few years ago, but don't remember it very well. There's other offshoots like Amithlon but I never really got into that one as it has limited hardware support.

I played around with AROS on a raspberry pi just to check it out. It's unusable. RiscOS is usable, but barely. RiscOS might actually become something worthwhile in the future, but you have to go through a little training to use it. The Acorn Archimedes was a real competitor to the Amiga and Mac lines back in the 1990's, again, far ahead of IBM PC (isn't it surprising that the x86 won?) and I'd put the OS on par with an Linux system of 1993.

If you want to try it, I recommend you do it in a virtual machine, not real hardware. You can do it on a pi if you have one.

It's a 3 button mouse system, and you have to do a little research to know how to use it. We're conditioned at this point, Linux and Windows work the same way, and Apple is just dumbed down Linux and Windows. The middle mouse button is used extensively in RiscOS and although it's used in Linux and Windows, it's more of an afterthought in those systems. There's a few Youtube videos on the system. Actually, as a GUI front end, it's superior to Linux of that time. It was on par with the latest Mac, Amiga, and Atari systems - Windows was crap back then, basically just 3.1.

The Acorn was the first ARM machine so compatibility is basically 100%, but in order to preserve clockcycles, they actually do simulation of earlier machines to get older programs to run right, even though they are simulating the architecture they are running on top of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sneYGad3j5I

I actually think we may be on a verge of a divergence in operating systems. Time will tell. Software development is converging in a way where libraries run across multiple platforms but what is presented to the user varies. Anybody can run Linux or Windows or Mac today, the learning curve has flattened quite a bit. It used to be quite a hurdle to learn to use Linux 30 years ago, today, it mimics Windows or Mac to the point that a general user can adapt to it almost immediately - or really it's Mac and Windows that mimics Linux although people aren't aware of this. I have a few neighbors that ask me to fix their "slow" machine, I just install Linux on the systems sit down for a few minutes with them, and get them setup. All they are doing is using a web browser anyhow. Windows corrupts the registry over time which slows down the machine, Linux doesn't do that kind of shit.

richwicks says

I'm have all the kickstarts, EXCEPT for the the A2000

The A2000 used the same ROM as the A500.

https://archive.org/download/Older_Computer_Environments_and_Operating_Systems/Amiga.zip/

I also have an Amiga 3000. That's a stylish looking system. It's also the first computer I ran Linux on back in the mid 90's. Kernel 0.9something if I recall.

richwicks says

I'm impressed that HeadSet has a 2000, that machine wasn't out long and didn't sell too well.

As I recall, the Amiga 2000 sold in very high numbers because of the Video Toaster. The Amiga 3000 was what did not sell well, because they designed the case specifically not to accept the Video Toaster card, as Amiga did not want to be a one trick pony. Bad idea as sales crashed. The 3000 was kick ass though, I remember one guy at a user's group who had an Amiga 3000 set up running Mac OS in one window, Windows 3.1 in another window, along with the AmigasOS.

Karloff says

I also have an Amiga 3000. That's a stylish looking system. It's also the first computer I ran Linux on back in the mid 90's. Kernel 0.9something if I recall.

You ran Linux on an A3000??????

You're more nerd than I am!

I ran Slackware 0.99 in 1993. It was 120 floppy disks. I collected a bunch of AOL floppies in college and over-wrote them, went to the graphics lab with a few friends, and we downloaded the entire system on a dozen computers and copied them to the floppies. It was AMAZING to have a Unix system running on an x86 that was almost as good as a Sun computer - much lower resolution of course, but I had the same OS at home as I did at work basically.

It took 3 days to get the system up and running. 3 of us were in front of computers figuring out how to get X11 to startup.

HeadSet says

As I recall, the Amiga 2000 sold in very high numbers because of the Video Toaster. The Amiga 3000 was what did not sell well, because they designed the case specifically not to accept the Video Toaster card, as Amiga did not want to be a one trick pony. Bad idea as sales crashed. The 3000 was kick ass though, I remember one guy at a user's group who had an Amiga 3000 set up running Mac OS in one window, Windows 3.1 in another window, along with the AmigasOS.

That's what is so infuriating about it all. It was WELL AHEAD of anything else of the time, yet it failed. I knew a few people that worked at Commodore and they blamed marketing and management. They were so furious they could barely discuss it, and I mean literally. They were so pissed off.

I really hate the x86 architecture and I've worked for AMD. It's just a terrible shit design. I'm actually trained as a VSLI chip designer, that's my actual matriculation from college, glad I didn't go into it though. ARM is a contender, but you can't get that as a desktop really, and I have hope with the RISC-V system, but that seems dead in the water. We're stuck with little endian forever it appears, I can see the point of view of both though now. Networking is big endian and everything else is little endian, makes network coding a pain in the ass but since we've all moved to little endian, you can basically just ignore it. I've not worked on a big endian system in 20 years now. I've been habituated to work with both systems, I have to drop the assumption I'm ever talking to a big endian system, they are so rare now. Even ARM has moved to little endian.

Blah blah blah, more technical bullshit and frustration that the public picked the worst system possible. There's no question in my mind that x86/Windows was the worst design, but it's prevalent. It's kind of infuriating to see the worst possible solution become the dominate one.

If anybody wants to try out Linux, I will help them. It's just a USB flash drive, the difficulty will be interrupting the boot screen to get it to boot. Let them try it out, and see. Alternatively, I can make a virtual machine copy. They won't see the use of it, initially. The great thing about a Linux machine is once you get it up running to your satisfaction, it stays that way, for years. It doesn't slow down or corrupt itself.

richwicks says

You ran Linux on an A3000??????

It didn't run well, that's for sure. Very slow. There wasn't really a "distro" to speak of either. Just a handful of archives for the various file systems, like etc.tar.gz, usr.tar.gz, the mkfs tool to format the file systems and, if I recall, an executable that ran under AmigaDOS to kick off the kernel. You created your partitions, used mkfs to format them, then untar the archives into their respective file systems, set the fstab, copy the booter in (maybe there was a boot-sector tool as well, my memory is foggy on that) and away you go.

Don't think I ever got X11 working. Not like it would have been usable on that system anyhow. The 16MHz 68030 processor struggled at the command line with that OS, and it was pretty much the minimum you could run it on due to requiring an MMU for it's memory management, which lesser Amigas lacked.

I think it was called Watchtower Linux.

My first x86 Linux was also Slackware. Ran OpenBSD for a number of years as well. Upgrades with that OS were a terrible hassle though.

Patrick says

Worth repeating:

And repeating again.