LOG20032020:TLDP

 I'm wondering what people use these days as sources of information
on technology, computing.
One used to rely on sources as TLDL[1] for information on whatever
was needed to get your Linux, *BSD machines working properly with
whatever hardware was problematic.
 
 Hardware support improved, kind of. Ten years after "Optimus", only
now we see some effort towards an easy solution for dynamic GPU
switching. Bumblebee a hack, Primus an improvement, finally DRI PRIME
allows you to just bypass the built-in GPU, drain your battery life
but use the discrete GPU after modifying your .xinitrc or display
manager configuration with xrandr.
On the other side, AMD did disclose the documentation for their GPUs
and the FLOSS drivers are quite solid these days.

 Scanners are a disaster. Still. Binary blobs everywhere. It's so bad
that for a few moments i was searching if there was a way to bring
the old HP Scanjet IIcx back to life. The one with a ISA 16bit SCSI
card, since at least SANE[2] supports these (hats off to you SANE
developers, for your boundless enthusiasm and limitless patience).

 After a while i got frustrated with the modern day internet.
10 pages of garbage with 1 line of true minimalistic content, to get
basically nowhere. Man pages are more helpful, even when inexistent.

 How on Earth did it reach this stage?
Is this really the attention span of people these days?
Was the internet taken over by unscrupulous masses all in search of
easy money with click-bait?
It looks like half the internet is trackers, ads, data syphoning and
hoarding, scraping, and the other half click-bait.

Is gopher a solution? There's much more interesting content on gopher
than on the WWW, but still, the web seems fundamentally broken.

So in a bout of nostalgia i downloaded Mosaic's source code, compiled
it (you might need to patch some PNG code, patch attached), and
started searching the net for remains of early days web.
Not a lot can be found, but i added what i could find to a "hotlist"
(for a true early 90s experience, try it on Mosaic, and better yet,
under 5DWM[3][4] (IRIX Desktop clone) or CDE[5])

If you find anything interesting, pre-2000 still up and running in 
its more or less original form, feel free to add it.


20/03/2020


[1] http://www.tldp.org
[2] http://www.sane-project.org
[3] http://www.5dwm.org/maxxi/screenshots.html
[4] https://maxxdesktop.arcadedaydream.com/Indy-Releases/Installers/Install-Guide-1.1.0.html
[5] https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/