We had a similar issue back in 2004 or so. Downloading a browser (Mozilla) was a bout 40MB. Normally it took about 30 seconds to pull it down on our University Internet. Then one day we were setting up systems and every time we clicked the download button nothing seemed to happen.

Further inspection showed that it had many successful download in under 1 second each. Our IT network team got us linked up to Internet2. It was able to download so fast that the bottleneck was the IDE bus of about 40MB/s. The file was coming from Intel over I2 so we couldn’t even see it download before it was done.

I had a three year bender with OpenBSD back in 2001-2003 or so. I even started building my own kernels and doing a tiny bit of hacking on the code. There’s all kinds of interesting tools and systems out there if you start exploring.

It sounds like you want to bring Sorcerer Linux back.

The packages were kept in the Grimore and you cast spells to build, install, etc.

https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=sorcerer

It was a very early source-based distro.

Huge congrats to the team and my condolences on the loss.

FreeCAD is a huge part of my engineering toolkit and your work is greatly appreciated.

I expect that the 1.0 will be in the Debian repos by about 2026 and I’m looking forward to it. Stable distros be stable distros. :-p

I had a Pentium I 120 MHz Packard Hell machine. It came with Win95 OSR 1 and I loved that beast. I upgraded the disk (1.1 GB to 3.1GB!) and the RAM up to 40MB. The screen was a 13" fishbowl so I get a Sony Trinitron 15" screen eventually.

The combo modem/fax/sound ISA card wasn’t worth keeping, but I got a PCI Sound blaster as well as a 3Com 3c905 fast 10/100 Ethernet card. I had one of the best machines in the dorm for a while. Warcraft II played so very good.

The Linux support in RedHat 5.2, then through 6.2, and sometimes Mandrake, OpenBSD, and some other distros was great. As long as you set the IRQs in the bios right it worked like a dream.

I turned down a professorship position at a uni in part because they used windows for the whole curriculum. It would have driven me crazy having to use windows given how annoying it is for dev work. I put value on my sanity and it wasn’t worth the modest pay bump to be driven batty every day.

I likely get to teach an IoT class next term. It’s going to be so much fun with SBC systems running Linux and Arduino sensor systems! That’s worth a ton to me.

What a wonderful world that would be. Fingers crossed.

Your perspective might be why I enjoy microcontroller work. I love getting to know everything about the system, reading hardware documentation, and getting the low level parts to work in a highly deterministic way.

I use ATTiny85 cores when a ESP32 costs almost the same, but the 85 only has 256 bytes of SRAM and five I/O pins so I can track it all and ensure it will do exactly what I want.

The same meme with “wiring and lights” at the top. Then you descend to motors, transformers delta-y phases, RC and RL circuits, op amps, BJT circuits, reverse bias what?, differential equations, and eventually signals and systems.

The summary that I liked from the last post was “python is the second best language for everything”. There’s always something specialized and better for every given job. But, if you want one tool that’ll do a solid job everywhere, python is your go to.

We’re entering the ‘blockchain for every need’ stage. Expect massive money to flow into scams, poor ideas, and outright dangerous uses for a few years .

Before Blockchain we had ‘the web’ itself in the dot com era. Before that? I saw it in basic computing as a solution to everything.

I had a student came into office hours asking why their program got a bad grade. I looked and it didn’t actually do anything related to the assignment.

Upon further query, they objected saying that the CI pipeline built it just fine.

So …yeah… You can write a program that builds and runs, but doesn’t do the required tasks, which makes it wrong. This was not a concept they’d figured out yet.

As per all too often, the functional programming world invented them. Haskell (and its ilk) usually has all the future cool stuff already. Then python picks it up, then it moves over to C#/Java, then C++ says “mee too”!

Time is possibly one of the hardest things to handle properly for a coder. There’s plenty of hard problems (network loss, 3 phase commits, etc), but time stand out as really annoying.

Another one is colors. All it takes is one library to encode colors in a weird way and then mapping them between libraries is a mess.