Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

@maple Appropriately enough, this is one of the first pages in the WordStar manual I got with my Kaypro 4. I'd play this game.

Please insert the disk labeled

Windows XP Professional CD-ROM

into Drive A:

* Press ENTER when ready.

Imagine being so unscrupulous a marketeer that a complaint letter about you survives for nearly 4,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir

*groggily drags self zombie-like into work*
"Time to make the 'puters..."

@LilFluff It looks more likely to be inherited from things like IBM Fortran in the early '70s, as well as the wide variety of home/office computer standards of the '75-'85 period.

Until the PC, everything IBM used EBCDIC instead of ASCII for legacy reasons, & EBCDIC doesn't have fs/gs/rs/us characters; & until they made 16-bit computers, the other big players Commodore, Apple, Atari, & Tandy used incompatible enough ASCII-like encodings.

The printed comma was a LCD.

I just realized that Sauron made an Internet of Rings.

@maple If console mail and webmail suggestions are out, I recommend Sylpheed. It's light, simple, and old-school in UX terms, but modern in capabilities.

There's also a fork called Claws Mail, which offers the same things as well as a library of plug-ins for it.

Both *can* read HTML mail messages, but with very simple text-only rendering engines.

That sahara sand/minsk color combo looks pretty nice, tbh.

When will we have pills ready to turn me into a cute catgirl?

The third drive came in, & it has the same bad belt problem. My last hope for a local source was a belt from a bargain bin, but it's both too big (218 mm) & too thick.

I have 3 Matsushita EME-278TY floppy disk drives, & all 3 have stretched or broken belts. I've never even *seen* a belt-driven 3.5" drive before this month.

Would anyone happen to have 3 thin spindle belts about 214-216 mm in circumference, 1-2 mm wide, and less than 1 mm thick, you could part with?

@natalie@masto.ninja @troubleMoney Whether the parity is even or odd, it definitely has a hard requirement of one stop bit.

@troubleMoney The trouble is data reliability and the absence of speedy error correction mechanisms. You'd have to admit a 57.6 PB mass of data would not arrive at its destination with every 256 GB packet intact, let alone in the proper order. (Well, it would arrive there intact and in the proper order at the instant of arrival, but the buffer it's then immediately pressed into is not exactly compatible.)