Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

@maple 💝

@porsupah Replacing the RF modulator? Yeah, some folks refined the composite mod to be pretty reliable, and some are selling assembled drop-ins that can fit into the RF box. (I'd like to keep the RF if I can, so yep, troubleshooting that is next.)

@porsupah There's a UK auction site called SellMyRetro, and one of the sellers there makes and sells replacement keyboards. They're UK-specific, but the only thing Timex did different in the US version was some wording on top.

@porsupah Oh, it's definitely the keyboard ribbon in both cases. They all but completely disintegrated in both ribbons at both bends.

I should probably give the boards a thorough once-over all the same. The video quality from one-meter RF cables is worse than a low-power TV station over 100 miles away.

@kazu@yiff.life Very much part of the reason I've sworn off ever flying commercial again.

TMW you find a typo in a toot that got more boosts & faves than any tweet you ever made on birdsite.

@brook@octodon.social I pity the foo' who thinks he won't be punished in the name of the moon!

@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.