A journey through busted tapes, the Internet Old Farts Club, and SPARCstations.
    • UndulyUnruly@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      7 months ago

      Love the Archie comeback, but fuck arstechnica and their fucked up site format. They literally call themselves the „Art of Technology“ and can’t even get their website properly formatted for mobile. Pathetic.

      • talEnglish
        5·
        7 months ago

        It works fine for me on Firefox on Android. How is it breaking for you?

        • UndulyUnruly@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          7 months ago

          iOS Safari. The scaling is utterly fucked up. The page displays just half the width on load right off the bat. As one pinches to zoom out to get the full width, the font scales so small, it’s unreadable without zooming back in to half width. The site is peppered with ads to boot to add insult to injury. I don’t even try to hang around, good riddance.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    16·
    7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    It’s amazing, and a little sad, to think that something created in 1989 that changed how people used and viewed the then-nascent Internet had nearly vanished by 2024.

    Nearly, that is, because the dogged researchers and enthusiasts at The Serial Port channel on YouTube have found what is likely the last existing copy of Archie.

    Archie, first crafted by Alan Emtage while a student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, allowed for the searching of various “anonymous” FTP servers around what was then a very small web of universities, researchers, and government and military nodes.

    While Archie would eventually be supplanted by Gopher, web portals, and search engines, it remains a useful way to index FTP sites and certainly should be preserved.

    I won’t give away the surprising source of their victory, but cheers (or na zdrowie) to the folks who keep old things running for everyone’s knowledge.

    Emtage, who would later help define the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) standard, gave his blessing to The Serial Port’s efforts to recapture and preserve the code of Archie’s server.

    The original article contains 307 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 43%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • stoly@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    I’ve been on unit Internet since before there was an Internet and I’ve never heard of this site!