Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

The service manual also told me to remove screws hidden by the DVD drive, with detailed illustrations, but without telling me to remove the DVD drive first.

I got this manual directly from HP themselves, and now I'm doubting its accuracy.

The removal of really tiny screws should not involve the use of really hefty pliers. Who designs these things?

HP hid screws underneath two of the Little Rubber Feet, and their service manual tells me to pry them off.

I am repairing a computer, and the service manual instructs me to basically destroy its LRF-compliant desktop interface.

The AC in my server room seems to be working pretty well.

The early history of Windows file attributes, and why there is a gap between System and Directory: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180830-00/?p=99615

There's more CP/M legacy in Windows than you may realize.

LB: Rumor has it that, shortly after the worm Morris wrote unexpectedly raged across what was the Internet at the time as malware, not as the benevolent potentially bug-fixing worm he wanted, someone got root on Morris's system & changed his login name from rtm to rtfm.

Related: If you want to follow log files that are rotated, regularly or on reaching a certain size, use `tail -F` instead of `tail -f`. The difference is that -F tells `tail` to reopen the file if it's truncated or deleted/moved and recreated.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
#
tail -F \
/var/log/maillog \
/var/log/messages \
|
while read -r line
do printf \
"\033[38;5;%dm%s\033[0m\n" \
$(($RANDOM%214+17)) \
"$line"
done
#
# Follow log files, showing each
# line in a random color.
# Needs a 256-color terminal,
# works best on dark/black
# backgrounds.
#

But the weird thing is both original disks were fine in my 286's 1.2 MB drive the one time I put them in there, & by coincidence the one command I ran to exercise them both was diskcopy, giving me a full duplicate of both disks, & both copies work just fine in my XT.

It's a good thing neither IBM nor Microsoft put copy protection on their DOS boot/install disks.

It's hard to tell from the label. The icky label is the Startup (boot) disk, & the good label is the Operating disk. The mylar of the Operating disk is just as damaged. It does explain why it wouldn't boot in my XT.

You'd think that a boxed set of disks still in shrinkwrap would be best protected from damage. Nope. this is the underside of a DOS 3.3 boot disk that sat unused & protected in a tyvek sleeve, in a special pocket, in a 3-ring binder, in a box, under shrinkwrap for 31 years. Look at the mylar disc visible through the oval access hole.

The IBM DOS 3.3 User Guide has a yellow bird character in some of its illustrations.

"If you've ever wanted to see the Internet fold itself up into a burrito and consume itself hungrily over the course of four minutes, you've come to the right place." - NPR, introducing what's supposed to be a news article.

Frankly, that pretty well describes birdsite.