Re: DEC Emulation Website
> On Oct 20, 2017, at 6:00 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > >> >> Believe it or not, I am planning to update the pages in the near >> future, who knows, I might even modernize them a little. When I >> started them, one of the design goals was that they be readable with >> Lynx. I’m not sure how important that is anymore. :-) > > I have browsed it just few moments ago with lynx, emacs-w3 and my new > textual favourite, elinks (it multitabs!! and shows tables!! and I could > play with configuration a lot, so on 256-colors-enabled term it looks > a bit nicer to my eyes). In all them, and in some old graphical one, > the site looks decently. My chief complaint is that it suffers from a readability problem. Part of that is for the “updates” sections at the start of each page. Let’s be serious, the pages haven’t been actively updated for years, so that’s no longer really valid. There is new info out there, and a lot of links I’m sure are dead. Though what’s really changed is my attitude towards emulation. This might sound odd, but when I wrote the pages, I wasn’t that much in favor of emulation, and was more inclined to run on the real hardware. It’s a heck of a lot more practical to leave SIMH running on a VM, than it is to have a real VAX or PDP-11 running 24x7. Then again the main source of inspiration for the pages was the PDP-10, and I’ve never viewed running one of those at home as practical. :-) Mind you, while I have a couple emulated VAXen running, I also have a real VAX, and a rather nice Alpha running 24x7. Zane
Re: DEC Emulation Website
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 07:39:01PM -0700, Zane Healy wrote: [...] > My chief complaint is that it suffers from a readability problem. > Part of that is for the “updates” sections at the start of each > page. Let’s be serious, the pages haven’t been actively updated for > years, so that’s no longer really valid. There is new info out > there, and a lot of links I’m sure are dead. It seems that your site could get some updating, indeed. Some links are dead and some point to your old website, or something. And I think it could be better to have one central "what's new" section. Other than this, I can use it very comfortably in elinks - including left and right clicking the links. > Though what’s really changed is my attitude towards emulation. This > might sound odd, but when I wrote the pages, I wasn’t that much in > favor of emulation, and was more inclined to run on the real > hardware. In other words, you would like to put some more stuff to your website. I have had a look, and I think that perhaps you should try to select some more recent tool, or tools to do this new job. Unless you would like to keep using the previous tool, but wikipedia says it is discontinued. Once you have a tool, the rest is just some time and maybe perseverance. Out of the top of my head, before I drop: - Emacs + org-mode - myself, I would have looked at that first, mostly because I have already invested some time into learning Elisp, Emacs, and am able to use org in some basic way, so it could be perhaps just learning a bit on top of it - but if you do not know Emacs, this would be a very uphill project. It might require writing a snippet of Elisp or two. Some people have created nice pages with org-mode: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-web.html like this: http://srandby.org/ - variation of above - more code snippets to help yourself, in some yet another language I have never made a website in this way, so I have zero practical knowledge about process. I suspect it is very easy as long as one follows some path described in manual, and then gradually harder when it comes to bending org-mode to one's specific wishes. - adopt some wiki and remake your new site in its image - I am sure there must be something not so complicated, not depending on stuff I myself consider untrusty (like PHP, which many people use happily, but I would rather not). Advantage: you could probably get going in a day or two, site should look ok in many different browsers and you do not have to start from designing website structure, just start putting content into pages and tag it. Anyway, I would stay away from more complicated solutions, whatever they are written in, unless I was ready to read the source code on as needed basis (I am ready with Elisp/Emacs, so this would I choose, or at least considered - I am not ready to learn PHP and keep it ready to use, so I do not choose Wordpress, even if it can be used by people with almost no tech knowledge, from what I have seen - and besides WP has a baggage of its own security problems, so using it seems to me a bit like plowing a minefield). > It’s a heck of a lot more practical to leave SIMH running > on a VM, than it is to have a real VAX or PDP-11 running 24x7. [...] > Mind you, while I have a couple emulated VAXen running, I also have > a real VAX, and a rather nice Alpha running 24x7. Yeah, emulation is even more practical for those of us, who have no place for too many things, not even smaller VAX :-). -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **
Re: DEC Emulation Website
On Sun, Oct 08, 2017 at 03:36:00PM -0700, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote: > While it’s still in need of a major update, the DEC Emulation > website now has a new home. It’s now on my server, and > realistically I should have moved it years ago. > > http://www.avanthar.com/healyzh/decemulation/decemu.html Cool, thank you. > Believe it or not, I am planning to update the pages in the near > future, who knows, I might even modernize them a little. When I > started them, one of the design goals was that they be readable with > Lynx. I’m not sure how important that is anymore. :-) I have browsed it just few moments ago with lynx, emacs-w3 and my new textual favourite, elinks (it multitabs!! and shows tables!! and I could play with configuration a lot, so on 256-colors-enabled term it looks a bit nicer to my eyes). In all them, and in some old graphical one, the site looks decently. As of "modernisation"... You know, just MHO and stuff but sometimes when I see modern pages it seems like their creators have had been abducted to some sect and brainwashed clean. I have 1600x1200 and I like to have some other window besides browser (say, an editor, like emacs). So I open such page, and the browser has about 3/5 of estate and I am not going fullscreen, no way. And there is huge menu on the left side, so I can choose. And there is some (expletive0) "top bar", all white and empty, or maybe with page title (I already have one (expletive0) title on a title bar of browser window), then there is (expletive0) bottom bar, all empty. And for a text, there is area left which is about five to ten (expletive0) lines high. There is no (expletive0) way to make those (expletive0) elements go the (subseq (expletive0) 0 4) away. The last resort is to turn styles off, which quite often gives me almost the view that I would like to have, plus (quite often) a parade of (expletive0) leftovers from the leftside menu, which after switch takes more than 90% of (expletive0) web page. I swear I do not make this up. The usable part of the modern webpage is on average the (expletive0) ten percent, as measured by scrollbar - and sometimes even less. The only reason I keep using very old Opera 1x.x is because it: A) does not multithread (so when I load heavily crapped page, it only (subseq (expletive0) 0 4)s with one core of my cpu max, rather then (expletive0) with me fulltime B) is able to show very decently a page with styles turned off; this also sometimes means lowering core usage by half (the usage which is there even when (expletive0) browser is expected to sit on its (expletive1) and do nothing). C) I turned a lot of CSS off by default, but I am not quite sure if this really works (software, trust, does not compute) - and I put fixed/monotype fonts wherever I can see them, because I love the idea that space is same width as "i" and "W". So all the job done to max my pleasure with downloadable fonts is lost, and (expletive0) good for me. I have tried switching to Firefox, but somehow having eighty tabs does not work very nicely there, for me at least. But I launch it when there is something that poor Op cannot render properly. Overally, I have few browsers opened as day goes by, one for Common Lisp docs, another for casual reading, one for sci articles heavy with equations and gfx (mostly up-to date rendering 'gine), few text browsers for interesting stuff, books or longer reads etc. I have recently started to experiment with Dillo - this is very nice piece of (expletive2), recommended to everybody even if it not always shows things, kind of like text browser with graphics (sometimes) and multitabs. Perhaps will also try "old new" Mosaic - the old one got lost during innumerable system upgrades. As I could have observed, plenty of people out there think that "modern" means "optimised for mobile", but what does it mean in practise? The text, i.e. useful part of the page might take 10 kilobytes (optimist, me, always), there might be even useful pictures on it, and then there goes a (expletive2)load of javascript. Megabyte is a, kind of, norm. So, this (expletive2) eats my download/upload quota, for which I pay (in theory, because I never was in such position). And then it starts running and eats from my battery, which can be loaded for peanuts, but who wants to recharge every few hours - this is supposed to give me mobility, but not to/from wallsocket. Which is how I came to brainwashing - the words being used are redefined. Optimised no longer means what it used to mean. Now it just means conformance to some group's standard. Optimised for pats in a back, just not from enduser (some endusers dream of packing boot deep into webdevel's (expletive1) and leaving it there, and the second boot would go to their halfbrained tasteless boss'es (expletive1), only deeper). For me, "optimised for mobile"
DEC Emulation Website
While it’s still in need of a major update, the DEC Emulation website now has a new home. It’s now on my server, and realistically I should have moved it years ago. http://www.avanthar.com/healyzh/decemulation/decemu.html Believe it or not, I am planning to update the pages in the near future, who knows, I might even modernize them a little. When I started them, one of the design goals was that they be readable with Lynx. I’m not sure how important that is anymore. :-) Zane
