[jan-jaap]

The prime focus will be how it was to program on those machines, deep within the Microsoft ecosystem of the late nineties. What tools and technologies where available on them?

[...]

And shit I for some reason cannot compile, or get mad at in the process, or loose interest in, I will gladly defer to the technological marvel that is FX!32, or scrape it off some old MSDN or Resource Kit CDs. Like GNU Diff tools I use for the scs, or the NTP service. I'll happily share my findings in that regard, also.

All in all, I want to prove that even more than two decades after it's demise, one can still put those dream machines from the late nineties to good and productive use today. If nothing else, that is justification enough, on a forum like this, isn't it?

Ah, the Alphas ... fond memories. I used to run my firewall on an AXPpci33 for many many years, I think initially because it was my only system that could route the 100Mb/s campus network at full speed. Yeah I'm that old Of course it was still in use years later despite running Linux <version ancient> / Apache <old>. Was fun watching the message log, apache-cgi: I don't understand this URL <bunch of x86 opcodes>. I also had a Digital Personal Workstation 433. Everything went to a Nekochan member a couple years ago.

We still have MSDN archives at work from circa the Windows95 days until when they stopped shipping DVDs, if ever. I guess you have the infamous Windows 2000 AXP betas, they're in there somewhere. Of course I'm not really supposed to be in the office these days...

GIT is plain C code, isn't it? Surely that should be doable?

It's "calm" here because everyone's worried about COVID-19. I myself haven't had time to do any dev work or anything on my SGIs because there's been people casing my house every so often, so I've gotten very little sleep. Break-ins have skyrocketed in my area.

I can't speak for others, but the combination of a full time job (by VPN) and home-schooling two kids makes for long days. Plus, to go back to my office in the evening to mess with my SGIs after spending the whole day working there already? Meh.

Over here 'traditional' crime seems to be down. Hard to pickpocket the few remaining people on the streets from 1.5m distance, or burglar a house when everybody is at home. Of course we have online fraudsters selling non-existing masks etc.