Hardlimit Museum

[cobito]

In the coming days, the Hardlimit translation team will subtitle another episode of The Computer Chronicles.

The following titles are proposed:

1. Internet (1993)
2. Atari ST (1989)
3. The Megahercios Race (1989)
4. Virtual Reality (1992)
5. CD-ROMs (1988)
6. Amiga and Atari (1985)
7. Windows 3.0 (1990)
8. Windows 95 (1994)
9. Pentium Computers (1993)

You can vote by replying to this toot: https://social.hardlimit.com/web/@cobito/109325523271022485

[cobito]

The fifth generation of x86 processors was a big leap from the 486s. At a time when competitors like PowerPC and Alpha were starting to appear, Intel wasn't worried because they were confident that the Pentium's backward compatibility and the extensive software library would work against the new options. But with the Pentiums and their 3.1 million transistors, a new problem appeared: excess temperature. To solve it, manufacturers mounted a fan on top of a heatsink, something not seen to date in home computers. Upgrading to Pentium cost $2000 of the time, which didn't sound so bad when compared to the $4000 of a new PC. But this investment had to be justified, so performance comparisons between Pentium and 486 were the order of the day.

[jordiqui]

@cobito What times! And yes they cost a fortune, I don't think I could have bought a pc a few years later. Of course I didn't need it, but the thing with the fan has left me baffled, I didn't know that. Thanks, one more curious and interesting fact.

[defaultuser]

@jordiqui a cousin of mine had to get a pc to study, it had a turbo button on the front, and I'm not sure but it seems to me that it went from 33 to 66Mhz, or it was something in the range below 133Mhz for sure.

[cobito]

@defaultuser Then it was a 486. On the Pentiums you couldn't modify the speed even though the towers continued to sell them with the turbo button and the 7-segment display, I suppose for compatibility and the inertia of so many years with that functionality.

With the Pentium II and the introduction of the boxes and ATX power supplies, all of that disappeared definitively.

[ghazestor]

I say this in case, when I have time, I can give you an old CPU like a K7 or Pentium III.

[cobito]

What was the Internet like 30 years ago? There was excitement and enthusiasm, and above all, it was an innocent place. Very innocent.

There was also a vision for the future: a video conferencing system that can be considered an early version of what Skype is today and a video on demand system that looks a lot like Netflix.

Online communities were places where people from all over the world interacted with each other years before the first social network appeared. But there were also those who found very creative applications, such as producing a radio show that is then uploaded to the Internet. Long before the term was coined, these radio producers were already giving a precise definition of an idea that we now know as a podcast.

It was an unknown world to most. So how did you explain the most basic concepts? Cyberspace? Superhighways of information? Online communities? Analogies with the real world were essential.

In a field dominated by text interfaces, something completely revolutionary appears: a point-and-click hypertext graphical interface. Mosaic was what we now know as a web browser.

And all this, what impact does it have on society? Why all this fuss about the Internet? Is it really a paradigm shift in the way humans relate to each other?

Here I leave you a juicy piece of the history of the Internet with subtitles:

[defaultuser]

@cobito Huf in companies the internet was like there was something mystical hidden in a room, it was used by 3 or 2 people, and the rest didn't even know there was such a thing in the company .
Shortly after I had access to a Windows 3.1 but no internet, and apart from the fact that you had to install the cable, they took such care and fear of it that you couldn't see.
Back then it was like a new frontier for good and for bad.
With the first internet cafes you went to investigate the matter, and at home they stayed worried while others had been using napster in the background on the company pc of some family member for a while.

[cobito]

This time we have a video of an ecosystem that I didn't know about. It's about two machines based on Motorola's 68000 architecture with features that I thought only came to the home market in the mid-90s.

To be honest, I find it incredible that there were such sophisticated computers at popular prices in the mid-80s. And it's a bit depressing to me that two machines that were eating the options of Apple (much more expensive) and IBM/Microsoft (much more primitive) didn't catch on.

But it seems that the prediction they make in the video was correct and in the end, if you don't have the software, you have nothing.

About the video, if you want to watch it in full screen, click on the Hardlimit logo in the bottom right corner when it's playing.

[cobito]

The 386 was a commercial success even before the software that would squeeze all its potential appeared. Was it just hype or did it really represent a revolutionary change? Curiously, IBM was not the first to participate in the 32-bit generation of the PC that it had invented itself, but Compaq and Zenith took the lead. Faced with this delay, everyone was wondering what the blue giant was going to do and if, by adopting the 386 in its PCs, it would respect the industry standards.

[cobito]

In the 80s, professional users of IBM PCs were wary of using a graphical interface. Using a device called a "mouse" to work was not well seen.

With the arrival of Windows 3.0, that skepticism began to dissipate and the success of the third version of Microsoft's window manager would lay the foundations for creating Windows 95. It was an operating system focused on multimedia systems, which brought proprietary multitasking to the home PC and introduced an interface, of which, many paradigmatic elements are still preserved today.

The change was such that many wondered what would happen to their MS-DOS programs, since the previous versions of Windows did not go beyond resting on the old operating system.

Here I leave you the last subtitled chapter of the year:

[cobito]

The people from msdos.club have given us a magazine that they have scanned. It is PC floppy, aimed at the home PC user. I didn't know about it and the truth is that it is interesting, in the style of PC Manía. Only issue 57 is known to be from 1994 and from the cover it looks like it's from the summer.

You can check it out here.

[vreyes1981]

Good morning: I have registered to find out if you have any record of the page museo.hardlimit.com returning a 403 error, which makes it impossible to access it. I would also like to know what the procedure is for uploading material from the demo CDs that were given away in the magazines, especially Micromanía, since I have seen that you only have up to the one from 2001 and I have said material up to when they changed their editorial line.
Best regards.

[cobito]

@vreyes1981 Hello. The museum was disabled a few days ago due to a series of "attacks" that have been received from bad bots. They have been targeting all the pages and the other day it was the museum's turn.

It is already enabled again.

Regarding uploading the CDs, how many do you have? How much do they take up? There is no official way to upload material. I would enable a Nextcloud account (a kind of Dropbox) where you could upload the material to then catalog and publish it.

Thank you.

[vreyes1981]

Good evening, @cobito, and thank you for your quick response. Well, you see, I have all the CDs from Micromania from February 2000 until they changed their publishing house. Since you already have the 2000/2001 period uploaded, I can contribute from 2002 onwards. Many of them are already uploaded on archive.org and on AbandonSocios. The bad thing is that since I am on temporary assignment, I don't have all of them with me. If you want, I can upload to your server the ones I already have uploaded and saved in my private cloud. You tell me. Oh! And thank you very much for enabling the museum again. It's a good shot of nostalgia.
Best regards.

[cobito]

@vreyes1981 I'm glad you like the museum

I have sent you a private message.

[cobito]

After more than 3 years without news, today we bring an update to the v86 virtual machine. A lot of things have changed and the frontend had to be completely rewritten.

This new version is much faster and more stable than before, although there are still some issues to be resolved with the beta version of Windows 95.

Thanks to zstd compression, loading is now almost instantaneous and the sound has improved a lot. You can try it in the Windows 95 Emulations section.

Next stop: Windows 98 virtualized in your browser.

[cobito]

This time, the work has focused on improving the maintainability of the code. Until now, the museum's database used an RDBMS created by me based on CSV files. This was fine as a programming exercise, but doing anything was absurdly complex while with MariaDB it is ridiculously simple (it seems I had an insulting amount of free time to maintain something so infernal). Leaving aside the hyperbole, I have started to migrate everything to MariaDB (MySQL), which is considerably reducing the complexity of the code. With this "small" investment of time, I hope to be able to focus on more interesting things for the content and presentation.

You won't notice this change when it's finished, beyond the fact that the paths of the different sites are going to change (not to mention making a permanent redirect).

I had planned to put this new version into production for the software section this weekend, but more fun things have come up like assembling a cucumber. Let's see if I can do it next weekend.

Apart from this internal change (which will last for several weeks in parallel with things more visible to the public), the first virtualizations of Windows 98 have been added. In addition, the people at v86 have had the infinite kindness to prepare a patch that allows modifying the RTC date, which extends the possibilities to use beta versions with "time bombs". In any case, there are still a few things to solve with the beta versions of both Windows 95 and 98.

[cobito]

The software and hardware section has been migrated to MariaDB and put into production. The process has been faster than initially planned. With this, we jump to version 3 although the library is still missing.
For the library, there are big plans that will be executed when the second phase of hardware renovation is completed. So for now, the museum is slowing down.

Apart from the internal restructuring of the code and the database, it has also been decided to abandon the use of JS-DOS for emulation and everything will be centralized in v86. This is done because the people behind JS-DOS are starting to take a commercial approach to their project that forces, under certain circumstances, to use their cloud services, which look very good, but go against having a completely independent service from third parties, that requires little maintenance and works in all circumstances even if they decide to abandon their project. In addition, I have seen that v86 performs much better than JS-DOS, so the decision was clear. The only drawback is that doing certain things that were simple with JS-DOS, will have to be figured out with v86, but that's part of the fun. With this, there are now emulations (like those of Windows 3.x) that are not working, but they will be coming.

So, leaving the museum running at a slower pace (not stopped), I want to focus on starting to get the most out of the new machine that helps to power Hardlimit since this weekend.

[cobito]

All final executable versions in v86 of MS-DOS and a good number of Windows 95 betas and versions are now available.

In addition, thumbnails have been added to each version.