10 years later…

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I can’t believe it either.  It’s been 10 years since my first ambitious post.

And off to a crazy start, I tackled installing NetWare 3.12, Running Xenix under emulation, and getting Mach 3.0+Lites running, among others in the first month.

As far as posts go, some months are obviously better than others, and so much has happened in the last 10 years, I’ve moved cities, states, countries and continents.  I’ve been though breakups, marriages, children, deaths, losing jobs, losing money, starting companies, renting houses, buying a house… It’s been incredible.

Looking back, in some places, I wish I’d written more, as this blog has been really technical which isn’t so bad, but even then it’s exceptionally terse.  Lots of stuff doesn’t format correctly, and the one thing I don’t like at all is that it doesn’t render on older browers.  But I have so much going on during the day, I don’t have time to write a CMS.  I had tried a few people to spec out something to read the wordpress DB, and generate pages + gopher pages, but they always go running for the hills.

I hope to keep on trying to modernize Darwin 0.3 .  I know that the world at large really doesn’t care, and I have a feeling that Rhapsody DR2 has some fundamental flaws that really prevent it from being anything useful, although it can’t be re-sold so it’s dead anyways.

So where will I be in 10 more years? I really don’t know.  I know one project I’ve been constantly putting off will have to come to light sooner or later, but I do want to move to virtuallyfun.com .  I know my blog is hard to find, it’s a custom name, on a really really long DNS zone.  10 years ago, I was hosted on wordpress, back at blogspot.com, but after their nearly 2 week outage, I moved out onto my own machine.  I’d almost move back to someone managed, as I have so much other stuff going on, running a site isn’t worth my time, but I haven’t had time. When I do make the move though, most people won’t notice I plan to do a 302 + a refresh to bounce to the new domain, and all being well it’ll preserve the same schema so other than a shorter domain in the titlebar most people won’t notice.  Right now it’s doing it, but backwards.  But rest assured, I’m still keeping superglobalmegacorp.com ..

I hope to at least keep this thing up, keep it slightly interesting.    Over the last year, the #1 page is Darwin 0.1 + Rhapsody DR 2 booted!  I honestly didn’t think that would be anywhere near as popular as it is, but even after OSNews locked the topic, I still get over 100 hits a day.  The #2 spot is Dunc’s Algomusic MkIIIb, after being linked to from [Vinesauce] Vinny – Text to MIDI.  Which just goes to show, I really can never tell what is going to be popular..

Laters!

42 thoughts on “10 years later…”

  1. come to think of it, when i have some spare time, the first url i type is this site. i came across your blog while scouring the net for old 4.3BSD stuff around 2010. since then i have my own mad scientist lab with all the goodies i’m interested in, from a fully up-to-date sgi octane2 to a power5 running aix. on my main server i have openindiana zones with qemu and simh for all sorts of virtualisation fun..

    the only thing miss is that old xenix box you used to hand free shell accounts out on.. i know you had to leave it behind, but still.. it would be so great to have some retro meeting place for everyone here, complete with unix mail, talkd, maybe a bbs..

    anyway, you were awesome back then and you are still awesome now. it’s been a hell of a ride, and i’m looking forward to another 10 years – at least. hope everything goes well for you, in cyberspace as well as irl.

  3. Congratulations and Happy birthday !
    It’s always a pleasure to read your blog !

    Greetings from Montmédy in France

    And sorry for my English 🙁

  5. Good stuff! I’ve learned a lot about Qemu and​ retro NetWare not to mention running some of your stuff on real Cisco hardware. I must have been following for 9 of the last 10, keep it rolling!

    • Looking back, I’ve always found it fascinating to run these ‘heavy weight’ NOS’s in virtualization, to not only keep them around, but show just how powerful newer machines are, and of course to see just how demanding ‘modern’ software really is.

  8. Congratulations! I don’t think I’ve ever commented on any post but your blog is one of the ones I check more often. Awesome stuff 🙂 🙂

    • thanks, and don’t worry, I think something like less than 1% of people ‘engage’ by writing a comment.. but thanks for being part of the 1%!

  10. Congratulations Jason and thanks for sharing all of this virtualization knowledge.
    I’m a long time reader who enjoyed all your BSD’s posts, and just been waiting if you could show some love to Irix with Gxemul.

    thanks.

    • Thanks! I haven’t seen any activity on gxemul in a while, although on the current Darwin thing, I did see some Mach stuff that can run on an older version of it’s MIPS support… Although I didn’t think anything could run IRIX though.

  11. Thanks for the inspiration! in particular the Venix competition a while back. Got me started on a real history refresh, involving a 286 Compaq with a complete reconfigurable Venix system with driver sources, Fortran and a bunch of ported bsd stuff. Keep it up.

      • No project pages as of yet. Will let you know – thanks for the offer. Possibly the only way to find out if there are others keeping Venix stuff in their closet out there. Venix 2.1 is doing amazingly well on ancient hardware.

        • I can’t possibly image using a 286 in 2017, but in 1992 it would have been awesome to have such a capable setup! Or at least for me I didn’t get a 32bit machine until later.

  12. Fantastic site, thanks for all your posts. I bump into this site when search for virtualization of windows 95/hyperv ect.
    I found here a one stop resource about OS stuff we used to forget that is so useful and a great explanation on each topic. Keep us posted with more articles.

    We do appreciate your hard work here.

  14. Congrats for your works. Very fascinating and enthusiastic site.
    It gives me the willing and energy to work on my own project.
    Keep on doing.
    Greetings from the place between Paris and Disneyland Paris 🙂

    • Thanks! 10 years is a long time, that is for sure, and no matter what, it’ll add up!

      I’ve been to Paris quite a few times, and out to Marseilles, but taking Eurostar, you don’t get to see that much. One of these days I should see what ever became of ERE informatique, and the programmers Didier Bouchon / Philippe Ulrich

      • Philippe Ulrich came at my former job for a meeting. Unfortunately I knew he was here only when he was left 🙁
        I would have wanted to talk so much with him, specially about Captain Blood and his ERE period…

        • Oh wow, moments away from being able to meet one of the greats! Such a shame.

          Last I heard they were working on some Internet buzz 1997 VR type thing. I imagine it’s all long since imploded. I never could find Big Bug Bang… ever play it?

    • I keep forgetting about vines. I have a disk image somewhere I had contributed, although I recall having no success..

      I also want to build a netinfo network. I’ve actually never done it before.

  17. Re: gopher:
    I’d been considering doing a small Gopher server for my old machines here. I wanted to build something where you could plug in your own “providers” into it (ie you code however you want to process a selector)

    It’s still a work in progress, but here’s a couple of screenshots of it consuming the WordPress REST API:
    http://i.imgur.com/EOhmY3M.png
    http://i.imgur.com/Td3Elv3.png

    Hoping to finish it and release it this weekend.

    • whoa! that looks awesome!!!

      How would one feed it? mysql access, or does it just rip the pages itself?

      Either way, I’d be delighted to run it on my gopher!

      • Its just consuming the WordPress API (https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/). So you just point it to that and it does the rest. I was originally going to use the RSS feeds, but this ended up being a fair bit more flexible.
        It does some basic html parsing to try and format things as much as possible (this probably needs the most work as there’s a lot of room to improve that). There’s a proxy for images to convert them to gif on the fly. I’m considering building a http proxy in too.

        It’s currently a .NET app, but should run under mono as is. However I do want to make sure it runs under dot net core (https://www.microsoft.com/net/download/linux).
        I’ll put it up on GitHub by the weekend.

        • This is so awesome! I have a Windows machine or 12 so it doesn’t matter.. NFS will get me what I need so I’ll be fine.

          You’ll have to get this to the overbite and other gopher people to bring the protocol back.. as always, content is King, and by proxy “haha” you’ll have made it a great platform again!

  19. With havin so much content do youu ever run into any issues of plagorism or copyright violation? My website hass a
    lot of exclusive content I’ve either written myself orr outsourced
    but it looks like a lot of it is popping iit up all over the web without my permission.
    Do you knkw any solutions tto help reduce content from being ripped off?
    I’d genuinely appreciate it.

    • Although you are spam, I’ll reply anyways.

      Yes my content is stolen all the time. I didn’t do good enough of a job to protect it, so there is that. On the otherhand I have the originals…

      I’ve retained lawyers before, and yes it’s 10-15k USD to start something, usually finishing around 100-500k to finish. YES I’ve done this before.

      No it really wasn’t worth it, turns out the worm had no blood to squeeze.

      So occasionally I make nonsensical posts, and get people banned/censored for making fun of their autocratic dictators/and/or untouchable classes.

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