Ok let me answer that about sdf.org. I joined as a member last year. What I am saying below is what I learned along the way. It is a nonprofit organization in Seattle that started decades ago promoting Unix for the masses. I joined out of a curiosity and my interests in anything classical computing just like this newsgroup. However, I still don’t know who runs it or who responds to my questions over there. You get a basic Unix (bsd) shell account that lets you chat with various other users within a chat application and a bulletin board. There are a bunch of services that you can upgrade to and are cheap (the site has a link to them). For each you send a donation to sdf PayPal account and they get activated. I don’t know who activates them but it does get done quickly. Services vary and include access to hosted MySQL/Postgresql, a vps instance, a Mastodon account, etc. Nothing that one cannot do though self hosting or through commercial means. But with sdf, they kept it very basic, nonprofit, educational, and oldschool. They are not trying to sell you something and making profit. At least that is how I see it. Even though I may not need sdf services, I managed to meet a community of common enthusiasts in retro computing on its platform, including its volunteers’ running radio station (aNonRadio), its Mastodon instance, and its old-school terminal-mode chats. I would imagine any classiccmp reader would relate to sdf and vice versa. Don’t know if this helps or just leads to more curiosity questions about sdf
Regards, Tarek Hoteit > On Feb 11, 2023, at 1:18 AM, Christian Corti via cctalk > <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Fri, 10 Feb 2023, Mark Huffstutter wrote: >> Well, I don't know what to tell you. I am looking at the sdf.org page right >> now, and >> When I click on the welcome tab at the top of the page I see the same >> message I did >> When I posted the first email. Maybe it's a local problem. > > Ok, the site seems to be up again. I got network timeouts yesterday. > But instead of constantly telling me to look myself, a member here could just > have written a couple of words to answer my question... Noone wants to > explain anything anymore, everyone is just pointing the world to google and > the internet. > > Christian
