Hardlimit Museum

[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.

[vreyes1981]

Good afternoon. I have noticed that in the "library" section, both in the "files" and "magazines" sections, the links are broken. Is this due to the migration to the new server?

Thank you very much.

[cobito]

Good @vreyes1981

It's because of the migration to version 3 of the museum. The library will be out of service until it migrates to the new version, hopefully before Christmas when, in addition, the Micromanía discs you sent me will be available.

[vreyes1981]

Vale @cobito, no pasa nada, creí que había pasado como la última, que te hackearon la página.

¡Muchas gracias!

[cobito]

We are recovering old spaces: The magazine library is back online (NOTE: Publications and issues are still being added; it is an automated process that will be completed in a few days).

With the magazine library, we started making functional and visual changes:

• The loading of magazine pages has been improved to the point that they are practically instantaneous.
• Thanks to the loading speed, it has been possible to create a new simple, fast, and much more practical magazine viewer than the previous one:
  · Now the entire magazine is displayed on a single page, avoiding the need to turn pages.
  · Pages are displayed in pairs at full width of the browser window.
  · It is still possible to zoom in to full screen.
• A new format has also been applied in the presentation of magazine lists, years, and issues with wider tables with screens starting at 1080p in mind and mobile devices.

At the moment, the new file browser where the CD-ROMs will go is being projected. I have a sketch although I still have to make several decisions before starting it. I want to try to make this the definitive one.

On another note, a new universal header has been launched, which changes buttons for tabs and includes the turn menu. That is, the tabs will be the same for all pages but the bottom menu will change depending on the needs of each space. At the moment, this new header is only in the museum but will spread to all pages over time.

[vreyes1981]

Olé!! little by little, si señor.

And I like the new design, with the magazine covers really big. What a blast of nostalgia.

[cobito]

The first feature of the year arrives and it's for the museum. We're launching a new disc browser that has become the germ for the future file browser that will be an extension of this. The new front-end has been used, so the views are optimized for both large screens and mobile devices. As it is thought, it should be possible to navigate in a comfortable and intuitive way all kinds of media: in addition to magazine discs, also operating systems, drivers, demos, compilers, etc. The content will be arriving. The entire table structure is already created and in the next iteration, the concept will be put into operation with a couple of discs or three. Due to space limitations, for the moment only the PCManía CDROMs are available. I will look for temporary solutions. I have a 2TB disc around that I might be able to use as a temporary medium. For its part, the disc card (medio.php) of which you have an example here, shows the cover along with information about the medium. The information that is shown (if available) is as follows:

• Name of the publication.
• Size of the medium.
• Format of the medium.
• System with which it was originally created.
• Volume
• Editorial
• Entity that prepared the data
• Program that was originally used for creation
• MD5 sum
• SHA-256 sum

Download links are also shown for the file (.iso,.zip) or files (.cue/.bin) of the medium that you want to download and the downloads are enabled, in principle, without limits. What comes next will depend mainly on the storage space that I manage to rescue from discs that I have stored around.

[_Neptunno_]

@cobito I love the hard work you're putting into the Museum and the new interface for the disk browser. As a professional in the digital preservation sector, I can only take my hat off to you.

Let me tell you something, because you'll like it: my company is dedicated precisely to digital preservation on a global scale. We work with clients ranging from the National Library of Spain (BNE) to international ones like Harvard University, the Holocaust Museum in the US, or HILA (Stanford University), among many other top museums and universities, setting up systems that cost hundreds of thousands of euros. And I'll tell you something: seeing what you're achieving with limited resources has an impressive value; the structure with the MD5, SHA-256 sums and the metadata cataloging is at a level of rigor that many institutions would envy.

That's why I'm so excited about it. From my humble opinion (keep in mind that I'm just a technician, but after so many projects, and especially the one at the BNE where I saw how millions of pages were published thanks in part to my work over the years for people to access them from home), your work seems to me professional and necessary. I know how difficult it is to digitize and give visibility to these archives, and yours is something to take your hat off to.

It's vital to give visibility and access to this content before it's lost forever. In fact, if you want, I'll talk to my company so that you can negotiate with them for a safebox and we'll take the Museum to the big leagues jajaja

Seriously, you're doing great work and the community will always be grateful. As soon as I get my hands on the 486 or the Pentium 166 I have around here, I'm sure I'll be using this material to the fullest!

Hugs!!