What happened to Digital Equipment Corporation?

What happened to Digital Equipment Corporation?

Digital Equipment Corporation was perhaps the second most important computer company in history, behind IBM. Its minicomputers challenged IBM, and, indeed, Unix first ran on a DEC PDP-7. DEC’s Alpha CPU was one of the few chips to make Intel nervous for its x86 line. It created the first really good Internet search engine. In a just and perfect world, DEC would still be dominating. Instead, it faded away in the 1990s. What happened to Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC?

There’s a short answer and a long answer.

Read more

What happened to Altavista

What happened to Altavista

For as long as I can remember, my home page has been about:blank. But for a good chunk of the 1990s, I would have done well to set it to altavista.digital.com. Here’s what happened to Altavista.

Most people remember Altavista as the thing people used before Google, if they remember it at all. But I remember it as the first great search engine, because I’ve done my best to forget what search was like before Altavista came along. So I was a little sad to see Yahoo shut down what was left of the first great search engine in the summer of 2013. Read more

If you have a web site, don’t forget Google webmaster tools

I’ve been messing with Google’s webmaster tools.  I definitely wish I’d looked at them a lot sooner. You sign up, prove you own the web site (I inserted a meta tag), and then they start putting together everything they know about your site. It takes a while for all of the data to trickle in at first, or at least it’s taking a while for me, since I’m pushing 2,000 pages. But I think it’s invaluable for all but the very smallest, simplest site. Read more

Bias is good?

Blekko could be an idea whose time has come. It’s a search engine with bias.

The idea is, you punch in what you’re looking for, and include a slash term to bias the search in a particular direction. That could help filter out spam sites–sites that are loaded with keywords and a few links but no real content, for instance.

But I imagine some significant percentage of its users will use it to try to find content they already agree with. Read more

Just the bang, and the clatter, as the server hits the wall

Looks like we’ve hit the wall. Some times during the day, this P-120 just isn’t keeping up well, and last night when I experimented with setting up forums, the speed was acceptable locally but really sluggish outside where latency is much higher. So it’s looking like I’ll have to move the system to a faster machine.
I dropped the number of days’ worth of posts on the front page to three days, instead of seven, to help a little. That’ll cut the amount of data sent when the homepage hits by 50 percent, but I see that as a temporary fix. Earlier in the day I added the site’s URL to the Google and AltaVista search engines, which means more traffic, particularly as more content moves in. So the situation won’t get any better over time.

I’ve got some options, and I’ll have more options when my new Duron-750 arrives because it’ll displace another system.

Impressions of Netscape 6

I’ll be back in a bit. With preliminary impressions of Netscape 6. My notes on it are at work, but I’ll give you the overall. I’m thinking C+. It worked OK for me and it was fast. There were things about it that annoyed me though. I very badly want to use a non-Microsoft product, because I detest Microsoft, but IE has a couple of features that save me a lot of keystrokes and I have to think of that.

Assuming it manages to install, chances are there’ll be things about it you like. The things that bother me most are features that Netscape used to have but now don’t. But for basic browsing it’s much better than its predecessors.

I’ll get the rest of the details up here within a few hours.

My notes on Netscape 6. This is pretty rough, but I don’t have time to pretty it up.

Speed: Good. Very comparable to IE in most regards and sometimes faster, though still not as fast when rendering nested tables. On a P2/350 it’s hard to tell a difference. Program loads very slowly however (20+ seconds on that P2/350).

Stability: So-so if you can manage to get it installed. Installation problems galore; seemed stable under NT4 once I got it running. Under heavy use it didn’t crash on me once. However, numerous attempts to get Java plug-in working failed. I never did get it to install on a Mac G3 running OS 8.6.

Features: Stop animations feature is gone and sorely missed. Makes me mouse more than IE does. IE-like backspace is there; ctrl-enter is not and autocomplete is Netscape 4-like rather than IE like, forcing more keystrokes. I wish they’d focus more on usability, speed and stability and less on eye candy. Text enlargement doesn’t trigger window scrollbar or margin resizing when needed, so if you enlarge the text, you’ll lose the edge of the screen.

The ctrl-l-accessible Open Location box doesn’t use any autocomplete at all.

What’s Related moves from the navigation bar to the sidebar, where it’s tempting to turn off to save screen space.

Built-in search tool turns the sidebar back on if you turned it off. Annoying–don’t throw out your bookmarks to Google and Altavista yet.

No longer any fast, easy way to toggle images on/off

No longer forces you to install everything under the sun, which is very nice. Good to be able to get just a browser if you want.

Memory usage: disappointing. Used anywhere from 18-28 megs during initial testing. It’d be so nice to nuke the #$%& eye candy and get that memory usage down.

The verdict: I’m pretty happy with how the Gecko rendering engine turned out. But as soon as K-Meleon comes of age, chances are I’ll switch to that because it’s so much leaner and meaner. (Mozilla’s plagued by the same eye candy garbage, and until we all have 2-GHz processors and a gig of RAM and 15K RPM hard drives on our desktops, I’m mostly interested in having something that works fast. That means giving up some inessential whiz-bang stuff.)

And if you missed it… I posted an update late yesterday. It was too important to wait until this morning.

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From: “bill cavanaugh” <billcav@nospam.yahoo.com>
I just followed the Daynotes link to your site. I couldn’t help but notice:

“Farquhar’s Law. I should have some t-shirts made with this on it. Repeat after me. Cable connections are the last thing most people check. Make them the first thing you check.”

This has been one of (actually, I think the first) Pournelle’s Laws for a couple of decades.

Bill

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Aw man, I thought I stole that fair and square from PC/Computing way back when it was still a magazine kind of worth reading.

Well, hopefully there’s some other stuff on the site useful to you that isn’t stolen from someone who stole it from Jerry Pournelle.

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From: “Curtis Horn” <curtishorn@nospam.home.com>
Subject: Fwd: FIC VA-503+ and K6-III+

I read what Peter said, and you are right, I got the K6-III because my other option is a k6-2, and we all know that on chip cache is better than on board, even at 100Mhz.  And it wasn’t that much more expensive than getting a k6-2.

I haven’t had the chance to upgrade the bios, but I did find it.  The other issue is that the bios chip is soldered on so I have to do it right and back up the old bios.  I’ll have some time this weekend, when I’m going to put the hard drive in.

This may sound weird but ever since I got a job that has me work on computer sometimes I feel less enthusiastic about doing it at home.  Right now I have 3 computers that I have to put NT Images on, and one has to have a second network card (for a bnc connector).  Thanks allot for the help.

Curtis

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By all means take all proper precautions. It’s always a shame to ruin a motherboard because of something as simple as a BIOS upgrade. (I’ve got a dead Abit IT5H under my desk. Great board. I have no idea what I did that killed it, and that’s a shame because I could drop a Cyrix MII in it along with all the 72-pin SIMMs I could scrounge up and a 7200 rpm hard drive and it’d still be a fantastic workaday machine.)

What you say about not wanting to work on PCs after you get home actually makes a lot of sense. I resemble that remark! My main station’s Antec 300W power supply blew over the summer. The PC sat there in pieces for a couple of months because I just didn’t feel like working on it after doing that kind of stuff all day at work. I finally got around to swapping in another power supply a couple of weeks ago. I messed up my Linux firewall around the same time that power supply blew. I didn’t get around to fixing it until this weekend. Writing is relaxing to me because I don’t do it all day. Back when I was paying for college by selling my soul working as a salesman in a consumer electronics store, I found working on PCs relaxing.

I’m glad I could help.