#eniac — Public Fediverse posts

#ENIAC’s Architects Wove Stories Through Computing
Grandchild of an inventor and a programmer reflects on their legacy

#NaomiMost weaves a great tale about her history and how her family intersects with early computing.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/eniac-80th-anniversary-weaving

🚨 Breaking news: a roboticist-turned-teacher recreates history by building a life-sized #Eniac, only to be bested by a 403 error—the true unsung hero of thwarting tech progress. 🔥 Apparently, replicating the first computer was easier than understanding web #errors. 🤖💥
https://spectrum.ieee.org/roboticist-turned-teacher-eniac-replica #robotics #education #technology #innovation #HackerNews #ngated

Roboticist-Turned-Teacher Built a Life-Size Replica of Eniac

https://spectrum.ieee.org/roboticist-turned-teacher-eniac-replica

#HackerNews #Robotics #Education #Eniac #Replica #Technology #Innovation #Teaching

Repórter Retro 124

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/04/29/reporter-retro-124/

#ReprterRetro #68000 #68020 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #Agfa #AmstradCpc #Apple1 #AtariSt #BareMetal #CalebeAdventure #Codeolences #DanielFalco #DNS #DockingStation #Emuladores #ENIAC #fMSX #GutBomb #IBM #IBMPCjr #Intel #Intel8085 #KonradZuse #LGP21 #MacSE30 #Macintosh #microsoft #MSXDev #NASDAQ #OldComputersSucked #PCXT #PowerBook #RaspberryPi #RetroCollective #RetroTechChris #SanderSouza #SBC #SunMicrosystems #Tan

Repórter Retro 124

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/04/29/reporter-retro-124/

#ReprterRetro #68000 #68020 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #Agfa #AmstradCpc #Apple1 #AtariSt #BareMetal #CalebeAdventure #Codeolences #DanielFalco #DNS #DockingStation #Emuladores #ENIAC #fMSX #GutBomb #IBM #IBMPCjr #Intel #Intel8085 #KonradZuse #LGP21 #MacSE30 #Macintosh #microsoft #MSXDev #NASDAQ #OldComputersSucked #PCXT #PowerBook #RaspberryPi #RetroCollective #RetroTechChris #SanderSouza #SBC #SunMicrosystems #Tan

Repórter Retro 124

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/04/29/reporter-retro-124/

#ReprterRetro #68000 #68020 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #Agfa #AmstradCpc #Apple1 #AtariSt #BareMetal #CalebeAdventure #Codeolences #DanielFalco #DNS #DockingStation #Emuladores #ENIAC #fMSX #GutBomb #IBM #IBMPCjr #Intel #Intel8085 #KonradZuse #LGP21 #MacSE30 #Macintosh #microsoft #MSXDev #NASDAQ #OldComputersSucked #PCXT #PowerBook #RaspberryPi #RetroCollective #RetroTechChris #SanderSouza #SBC #SunMicrosystems #Tan

Repórter Retro 124

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/04/29/reporter-retro-124/

#ReprterRetro #68000 #68020 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #Agfa #AmstradCpc #Apple1 #AtariSt #BareMetal #CalebeAdventure #Codeolences #DanielFalco #DNS #DockingStation #Emuladores #ENIAC #fMSX #GutBomb #IBM #IBMPCjr #Intel #Intel8085 #KonradZuse #LGP21 #MacSE30 #Macintosh #microsoft #MSXDev #NASDAQ #OldComputersSucked #PCXT #PowerBook #RaspberryPi #RetroCollective #RetroTechChris #SanderSouza #SBC #SunMicrosystems #Tan

Repórter Retro 124

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/04/29/reporter-retro-124/

#ReprterRetro #68000 #68020 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #Agfa #AmstradCpc #Apple1 #AtariSt #BareMetal #CalebeAdventure #Codeolences #DanielFalco #DNS #DockingStation #Emuladores #ENIAC #fMSX #GutBomb #IBM #IBMPCjr #Intel #Intel8085 #KonradZuse #LGP21 #MacSE30 #Macintosh #microsoft #MSXDev #NASDAQ #OldComputersSucked #PCXT #PowerBook #RaspberryPi #RetroCollective #RetroTechChris #SanderSouza #SBC #SunMicrosystems #Tan

#ENIAC, the first general-purpose digital computer, was created 80 years ago. The granddaughter of two of its creators remembers its history, tying together computing, weaving, weather, and storytelling. spectrum.ieee.org/eniac-80th-a...

I remember learning in school in the late 80s about the #ENIAC. I felt like it was from a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. This article from @ieeespectrum me realize it was about 40 years before I learned about it, and now 40 years have passed since then. So the #TRS80coco or #IBM XT sounds like similar ancient history to kids now.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/eniac-80-ieee-milestone

“The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information”*…

From yesterday’s post on the possible (and promising, but also potentially painful) future of computing to a pressing predicament we face today. The estimable Anil Dash on the threats to the open web…

You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee’s throat.

It’s not a pleasant image. Sir Tim is, rightly, revered as the genial father of the World Wide Web. But, all the signs are pointing to the fact that we might be in endgame for “open” as we’ve known it on the Internet over the last few decades.

The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.

Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.

Today, the good people who act as thoughtful stewards of the web infrastructure are still showing the same generosity of spirit that has created opportunity for billions of people and connected society in ways too vast to count while —not incidentally— also creating trillions of dollars of value and countless jobs around the world. But the increasingly-extremist tycoons of Big Tech have decided that that’s not good enough.

Now, the hectobillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what’s still open, and likely won’t rest until they’ve either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time.

Right now, too many of the players in the open ecosystem are still carrying on with business as usual, even though those tactics have been failing to stop big tech for years. I don’t say this lightly: it looks to me like 2026 is the year that decides whether the open web as we know it will survive at all, and we have to fight like the threat is existential. Because it is…

[Dash details the treats– largely, but not entirely driven by AI and its purveyors. He concludes…]

… The threat to the open web is far more profound than just some platforms that are under siege. The most egregious harm is the way that the generosity and grace of the people who keep the web open is being abused and exploited. Those people who maintain open source software? They’re hardly getting rich — that’s thankless, costly work, which they often choose instead of cashing in at some startup. Similarly, volunteering for Wikipedia is hardly profitable. Defining super-technical open standards takes time and patience, sometimes over a period of years, and there’s no fortune or fame in it.

Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go without winning awards or the other trappings of big media, just in order to maintain control and authority over their content, and because they think it’s the right way to connect with an audience. Publishers who’ve survived through year after year of attacks from tech platforms get rewarded by… getting to do it again the next year. Tim Berners-Lee is no billionaire, but none of those guys with the hundreds of billions of dollars would have all of their riches without him. And the thanks he gets from them is that they’re trying to kill the beautiful gift that he gave to the world, and replace it with a tedious, extortive slop mall.

So, we’re in endgame now. They see their chance to run the playbook again, and do to Wikipedians what Uber did to cab drivers, to get users addicted to closed apps like they are to social media, to force podcasters to chase an algorithm like kids on TikTok. If everyone across the open internet can gather together, and see that we’re all in one fight together, and push back with the same ferocity with which we’re being attacked, then we do have a shot at stopping them.

At one time, it was considered impossibly unlikely that anybody would ever create open technologies that would ever succeed in being useful for people, let alone that they would become a daily part of enabling billions of people to connect and communicate and make their lives better. So I don’t think it’s any more unlikely that the same communities can summon that kind of spirit again, and beat back the wealthiest people in the world, to ensure that the next generation gets to have these same amazing resources to rely on for decades to come.

Alright, if it’s not hopeless, what are the concrete things we can do? The first thing is to directly support organizations in the fight. Either those that are at risk, or those that are protecting those at risk. You can give directly to support the Internet Archive, or volunteer to help them out. Wikipedia welcomes your donation or your community participation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting for better policy and to defend your rights on virtually all of these issues, and could use your support or provides a list of ways to volunteer or take action. The Mozilla Foundation can also use your donations and is driving change. (And full disclosure — I’m involved in pretty much all of these organizations in some capacity, ranging from volunteer to advisor to board member.) That’s because I’m trying to make sure my deeds match my words! These are the people whom I’ve seen, with my own eyes, stay the hand of those who would hold the knife to the necks of the open web’s defenders. [Further full disclosure: so is your correpondent, and so have I.]

Beyond just what these organizations do, though, we can remember how much the open web matters. I know from my time on the board of Stack Overflow that we got to see the rise of an incredibly generous community built around sharing information openly, under open licenses. There are very few platforms in history that helped more people have more economic mobility than the number of people who got good-paying jobs as coders as a result of the information on that site. And then we got to see the toll that extractive LLMs had when they took advantage of that community without any consideration for the impact it would have when they trained models on the generosity of that site’s members without reciprocating in kind.

The good of the web only exists because of the openness of the web. They can’t just keep on taking and taking without expecting people to finally draw a line and saying “enough”. And interestingly, opportunities might exist where the tycoons least expect it. I saw Mike Masnick’s recent piece where he argued that one of the things that might enable a resurgence of the open web might be… AI. It would seem counterintuitive to anyone who’s read everything I’ve shared here to imagine that anything good could come of these same technologies that have caused so much harm.

But ultimately what matters is power. It is precisely because technologies like LLMs have powers that the authoritarians have rushed to try to take them over and wield them as effectively as they can. I don’t think that platforms owned and operated by those bad actors can be the tools that disrupt their agenda. I do think it might be possible that the creative communities that built the web in the first place could use their same innovative spirit to build what could be, for lack of a better term, called “good AI“. It’s going to take better policy, which may be impossible in the short term at the federal level in the U.S., but can certainly happen at more local levels and in the rest of the world. Though I’m skeptical about putting too much of the burden on individual users, we can certainly change culture and educate people so that more people feel empowered and motivated to choose alternatives to the big tech and big AI platforms that got us into this situation. And we can encourage harm reduction approaches for the people and institutions that are already locked into using these tools, because as we’ve seen, even small individual actions can get institutions to change course.

Ultimately I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time…

Unless we act, it’s “Endgame for the Open Web,” from @anildash.com. Eminently worth reading in full.

* Tim Berners-Lee… who should know.

###

As we protect what’s precious, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to a man whose work helped lay the foundation for both the promise and the peril unpacked in the article linked above above: J. Presper Eckert; he was born on this day in 1919. An electrical engineer, he co-designed (with John Mauchly) the first general purpose computer, the ENIAC (see here and here) for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. He and Mauchy went on to found the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, at which they designed and built the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC.

Repórter Retro 123

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/03/30/reporter-retro-123/

#ReprterRetro #1541 #68000 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #AlanTuring #altair #AMXProject #AppleII #Arcade #Asianometry #Atari8bits #AtariSt #bancos #BIOS #ChapletHalikan #CoCoTown #Commando #CommodoreHistory #DanielCampos #DavesGarage #DosBox #EduardoDias #ELKS #ENIAC #famicom #fliperama #FranKIMstein #FujiNet #GOTY #Holanda #hotbit #IBM #IbmPc #IDEBIOS #IETF #KIM1 #Laptop #LegendOfZelda #LGR #Luxocrates #Maddrugamers

Repórter Retro 123

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/03/30/reporter-retro-123/

#ReprterRetro #1541 #68000 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #AlanTuring #altair #AMXProject #AppleII #Arcade #Asianometry #Atari8bits #AtariSt #bancos #BIOS #ChapletHalikan #CoCoTown #Commando #CommodoreHistory #DanielCampos #DavesGarage #DosBox #EduardoDias #ELKS #ENIAC #famicom #fliperama #FranKIMstein #FujiNet #GOTY #Holanda #hotbit #IBM #IbmPc #IDEBIOS #IETF #KIM1 #Laptop #LegendOfZelda #LGR #Luxocrates #Maddrugamers

Repórter Retro 123

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/03/30/reporter-retro-123/

#ReprterRetro #1541 #68000 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #AlanTuring #altair #AMXProject #AppleII #Arcade #Asianometry #Atari8bits #AtariSt #bancos #BIOS #ChapletHalikan #CoCoTown #Commando #CommodoreHistory #DanielCampos #DavesGarage #DosBox #EduardoDias #ELKS #ENIAC #famicom #fliperama #FranKIMstein #FujiNet #GOTY #Holanda #hotbit #IBM #IbmPc #IDEBIOS #IETF #KIM1 #Laptop #LegendOfZelda #LGR #Luxocrates #Maddrugamers

Repórter Retro 123

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/03/30/reporter-retro-123/

#ReprterRetro #1541 #68000 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #AlanTuring #altair #AMXProject #AppleII #Arcade #Asianometry #Atari8bits #AtariSt #bancos #BIOS #ChapletHalikan #CoCoTown #Commando #CommodoreHistory #DanielCampos #DavesGarage #DosBox #EduardoDias #ELKS #ENIAC #famicom #fliperama #FranKIMstein #FujiNet #GOTY #Holanda #hotbit #IBM #IbmPc #IDEBIOS #IETF #KIM1 #Laptop #LegendOfZelda #LGR #Luxocrates #Maddrugamers

📰 ENIAC, the General-Purpose Digital Computer, Is 80 - IEEE Spectrum

｢ The computer contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes, which were cooled by 80 air blowers. More than 30 meters long, it filled a 9 m by 15 m room and weighed about 30 kilograms. It consumed as much electricity as a small town ｣

https://spectrum.ieee.org/eniac-80-ieee-milestone

#eniac #computinghistory #retrocomputing

🐢🎂 Oh, #Eniac, you ancient relic, still causing 403 #errors from beyond the grave. 🎉 Nothing says "Happy 80th!" like your inability to be accessed or remembered without a #server meltdown. 🔥🖥️
https://spectrum.ieee.org/eniac-80-ieee-milestone #80th #Birthday #TechHistory #DigitalRelics #HappyBirthday #HackerNews #ngated

Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80

https://spectrum.ieee.org/eniac-80-ieee-milestone

#HackerNews #Eniac #80th #Anniversary #Digital #Computing #History #Innovation #Technology

#WorldComputerDay:

80 Jahre #ENIAC

Vor 80 Jahren wurde ENIAC der Welt vorgestellt. Nicht der erste, aber der wichtigste Computer seiner Zeit.

Heute ist der #Weltcomputertag. Er wird alljährlich am 15. Februar zum Jahrestag der Vorstellung des "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer" (ENIAC) gefeiert und ist dieses Jahr ein ganz besonderes Ereignis. Denn ENIAC wurde vor 80 Jahren der US-amerikanischen Öffentlichkeit vorgestellt.

https://www.heise.de/news/World-Computer-Day-80-Jahre-ENIAC-11176983.html

Difficile stabilire quale sia stato il primo computer programmabile della storia. Ma è certo che l'#ENIAC venne installato 80 anni fa e non ci sarebbe stato senza queste 6 donne - different https://www.thedifferentgroup.com/2017/09/23/eniac/

@tecnologia

#WomeninSTEM #coding #ENIACGirls

“Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are”*…

As we head into the weekend, some food for thought…

A decade ago, the world was, at once, both the seed of today and a very different place: In what was considered one of the biggest political upsets in American political history (and the fifth and most recent presidential election in which the winning candidate lost the popular vote), Donald Trump was elected to his first term. The U.K. chose Brexit. The stock market finished strong, with the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq reaching new highs. (In the 10 years that have followed, the Dow has risen about 150%; the S&P 500, roughly 400%; and the NASDAQ has roughly sextupled.)

It was a big year for pop culture, marked by Beyoncé’s Lemonade, the massive Pokémon Go craze, and the rise of Netflix with Stranger Things, the Rio Olympics, and the loss of icons like David Bowie and Prince.

It was also a big year in tech: Russian hacking and disinfo (especially on Facebook) was a huge story– as was Apple’s elimination of the headphone jack in the iPhone 7. Theranos collapsed; and Wells fargo opened millions of accounts for customers without those customers’ permission (for which they were sunsequently fined $3 Billion). And Virtual Reality was everywhere (in the promises/offers from tech companies), but nowhere in the market. TikTok was launched in 2016, but hadn’t yet become the phenomenon (and avatar of algorithmly-driven feeds) that it has become. And in the course of 2016, artificial intelligence made the leap from “science fiction concept” to “almost meaningless buzzword” (though in fairness, 2016 was the year that Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo program triumphed against South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Sedol).

Back in 2016, the estimable Alan Jacobs was pondering the road ahead. In a piece for The New Atlantis, he coined and discussed a series of aphorisms relevant to the future as then he saw it. He begins…

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The apho-
rist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion
is a conviction that he is wiser or more intelligent than his readers.
– W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger, The Viking Book of Aphorisms

Author’s Note: I hope that the statement above is wrong, believing that certain adjustments can be made to the aphoristic procedure that will rescue the following collection from arrogance. The trick is to do this in a way that does not sacrifice
the provocative character that makes the aphorism, at its best, such a powerful form of utterance.

Here I employ two strategies to enable me to walk this tightrope. The first is to characterize the aphorisms as “theses for disputation,” à la Martin Luther — that is, I invite response, especially response in the form of disagreement or correction. The second is to create a kind of textual conversation, both on the page and beyond it, by adding commentary (often in the form of quotation) that elucidates each thesis, perhaps even increases its provocativeness, but never descends into coarsely explanatory pedantry…

[There follows a series of provocations and discussions that feel as relevant– and important– today as they were a decade ago. He concludes…]

… Precisely because of this mystery, we need to evaluate our technologies according to the criteria established by our need for “conviviality.”

I use the term with the particular meaning that Ivan Illich gives it in Tools for Conviviality [here]:

I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among per-
sons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this
in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands
made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I con-
sider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal inter-
dependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in
any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount
of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates
among society’s members.

In my judgment, nothing is more needful in our present technological moment than the rehabilitation and exploration of Illich’s notion of conviviality, and the use of it, first, to apprehend the tools we habitually employ and, second, to alter or replace them. For the point of any truly valuable critique of technology is not merely to understand our tools but to change them — and us…

Eminently worth reading in full, as its still all-too-relevant: “Attending to Technology- Theses for Disputation,” from @ayjay.bsky.social.

Pair with a provocative piece from another fan of Illich, L. M. Sacasas (@lmsacasas.bsky.social): “Surviving the Show: Illich And The Case For An Askesis of Perception.”

[Image above: source]

* Sherry Turkle

###

As we thnk about tech, we might recall that it was on this date in 1946 that an ancestor of today’s social networks, streaming services, and AIs, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), was first demonstrated in operation.  (It was announced to the public the following day.) The first general-purpose computer (Turing-complete, digital, and capable of being programmed and re-programmed to solve different problems), ENIAC was begun in 1943, as part of the U.S’s war effort (as a classified military project known as “Project PX“); it was conceived and designed by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, where it was built.  The finished machine, composed of 17,468 electronic vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints, weighed more than 27 tons and occupied a 30 x 50 foot room– in its time the largest single electronic apparatus in the world.  ENIAC’s basic clock speed was 100,000 cycles per second (or Hertz). Today’s home computers have clock speeds of 3,500,000,000 cycles per second or more.

source

Top fictional news headline of the day: #GNU #Emacs ported to #ENIAC #FreeSoftware #SoftwareFreedom

Marlyn Wescoff (standing) and Ruth Lichterman reprogram the ENIAC supercomputer, USA, 1946

https://piefed.social/c/historyphotos/p/1572013/marlyn-wescoff-standing-and-ruth-lichterman-reprogram-the-eniac-supercomputer-usa-1946

@maiwann Sur l'#ENIAC, je recommande fortement le livre « ENIAC in action » qui plonge das les détails https://www.bortzmeyer.org/eniac-in-action.html

@prijks I’m happy to see there are other posts under #eniac. 😄it is indeed wild that all this has transpired in such a short time. When I was in college, a very old professor had left-over resistors on his shelf from UIUC’s first computer (ILLIAC), which utterly blew away 18-year-old me.

@franckraisch

#ENIAC

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

https://www.geo.de/wissen/weltgeschichte/geschichte-75-jahre-eniac-der-erste-universalrechner-der-welt-war-streng-geheim-30378318.html

https://gruene.social/@angela_buettner/114155233448606262

https://ki-kurs.org/app/milestones/pioneer-women

The thought keeps occurring lately that my dad (who is still with us) is older than #ENIAC. All of this #nonsense within one human lifetime.

9 aprile 1919

Nasce Presper Eckert, famoso per il suo lavoro con John Mauchly sul progetto #ENIAC.

La costruzione dell'ENIAC iniziò nel giugno 1943. Eckert era l'ingegnere capo. A volte restava a dormire vicino alla macchina in costruzione, Una volta, per l scherzo, due tecnici sollevarono traportarono il lettino in cui dormiva in una stanza identica alla sua, ma al piano superiore; quando Eckert si svegliò, per qualche istante pensò che avessero rubato il calcolatore.

#retrocomputing

Modern Computing’s Roots or The Manchester Baby - In the heart of Manchester, UK, a groundbreaking event took place in 1948: the fir... - https://hackaday.com/2025/03/19/modern-computings-roots-or-the-manchester-baby/ #manchesterbaby #computerhacks #manchester #vonneumann #history #babbage #eniac

Modern Computing’s Roots or The Manchester Baby https://hackaday.com/2025/03/19/modern-computings-roots-or-the-manchester-baby/ #manchesterbaby #computerhacks #manchester #vonneumann #History #babbage #eniac

So What is a Supercomputer Anyway? https://hackaday.com/2025/03/19/so-what-is-a-supercomputer-anyway/ #parallelcomputing #computerhacks #supercomputer #Featured #History #illiac #eniac

So What is a Supercomputer Anyway? - Over the decades there have been many denominations coined to classify computer sy... - https://hackaday.com/2025/03/19/so-what-is-a-supercomputer-anyway/ #parallelcomputing #computerhacks #supercomputer #featured #history #illiac #eniac

You’re very welcome Ade!

Yes #Kate is rather indispensable to me (in the GUI, or via remote SSH sessions with X-Forwarding), as a fast and accessible advanced editor and with split window for a shell right there that synchronizes with the directories as I move between them if I wish.

Slackware ships with KDE and Xfce, but years ago stopped supporting Gnome out of the box. It was just too much work for such a small team (in many ways, one person), not to mention all of the extra space that would have exceeded what would be able to ship as a complete distro on a single CD/DVD.

There were, or rather, still are, a few external support efforts including gnome-slack, Dropline, and also a build at #Slackbuilds that can install all of gnome at once on a fresh install at least, and though I don’t follow them due to concerns over how practical keeping them updated might be (I typically run Slackware-current as a rolling distro that stays always current and bleeding edge).

I actually did really like, and prefer Gnome back when it was part of the distro.

Nowadays, There’s some other really solid, maintained desktops like #Mate and/or #Cinnamon, but again, I don’t follow them, yet they’re very popular. I tend to stick with and such between #KDE Plasma and #Xfce which both work extremely well for me.

But then again, like I mentioned before, there are a few Gnome based tools that i really enjoy enough to always install too, like Shutter (for screenies) and #Geany - and when I do it seems like I’m also installing half of #Gnome too, lolz…. The list of deps that are compiled are seemingly endless lol, so it’s one of those tasks I just get right out of the way as soon as I do a fresh install of Slackware-current.

After that, it’s easy to keep everything up to date for years to come as it just continues to roll right through the versions of Slackware releases, much the same as Debian Testing or even moreso, the way that #Arch Linux does.

I’ve been running Slackware Linux for about 30 years now, since 93 when I settled on it inn earnest after hopping around a bit from #Jolix (#386BSD) to #SLS, to my own spin of that, and then discovering the Slackware FTP archive. It is still, so refreshingly #UNIX in so many respects, including it’s BSD-esque #SysV style init scripts, and Pam support was finally added in just a few years back which made a huge difference in the rate of people ‘re-adopting’ it for enterprise server roles again.

I must admit that I did get off track for a bit there, but only for a short while, around the days of #Redhat 4 through 5.2, and certainly never want to revisit those days of “RPM Hell”, as it was affectionately known, due to a distro that really didn’t age well without really getting in under the hood with wrenches and screwdrivers and chewing gum lolz.

Because of Slackware’s commitment to retaining such a UNIX-like experience, it’s really second nature to feel right at home, with some minor accommodations for differences, with the four major #BSD flavors; namely, #NetBSD, #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD, and #Dragonfly_BSD.

Although for a longtime I encouraged beginners to use #Slackware as their second distro after getting their feet wet on say, #SuSE (which always will be affectionately known as, “The German fork of Slackware) or #Debian, I nowadays tend to usually recommend #Arch_Linux for that, after graduating from Debian or #Linux_Mint, like I did after enlightening my nephew and getting him to completely disavow any proprietary garbage that is the devil’s spawn out of Redmond, Washington (Microsoft, lolz).

I guess I did good too, because he’s now working on his Cisco certifications in addition to his full stack development development track at his college. When he was just a little tyke, I would show him pictures of things like the #ENIAC and #Colossus even the #System_360/370 families, and he wouldn’t even believe me when I explained that computers used to take up entire warehouses of space 😂

Okay… I’ve rambled on long enough I think. You have a fantastic day my friend!

#tallship #FOSS #Linux

⛵

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In memoria di Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson nel 1966via Wikimedia Commons

La puntata di oggi è dedicata a Katherine Johnson, matematica e informatica afroamericana che ci ha lasciate di recente. Oltre a lei, ricordiamo tutte le donne che hanno contribuito alla storia dell'informatica e che hanno dovuto lottare per vedere il proprio lavoro riconosciuto e ricordato.

https://hackordie.gattini.ninja/2020/02/in-memoria-di-katherine-johnson/
#puntata #eniac #katherinejohnson