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We used to have proper screensavers.
It’s worth mentioning that someone made a video game about your consciousness getting downloaded to this screen saver environment among other 90s screensavers.
The Internet is not some big truck that you can dump stuff on… It’s… It’s a series of tubes!
Back in the dialup days when WWW meant World Wide Wait
Computers were always pining for the tubes
Mine occupied itself exploring mazes of its own construction.
holy memories unlocked batman
Fellow vintage computer enthusiast or he stepped away for quite a long time. Either way, a nice throwback.
Or they work in a lab or industrial setting. Lots of computers running machines that nobody will touch because the machine is worth more than their salary. Not just XP, even at my most recent university job I was still seeing 2000, 98SE, and in one case MacOS 9. All of these I have seen are air-gapped though… for the most part.
We have a bunch of this shit still around for instruments. Every year we tell them to budget for replacement. Every year someone comes screaming that their 2000 or XP box isn’t booting. Sorry, hardware failure… And we don’t keep anything around that can support it anymore. If it was that important to production you should have replaced it a long time ago.
I would like to add some context.
I used to work in a factory; we had two machines that were designed in the 80’s. Both had the “upgrade” package purchased some time back; they were running the latest WinXP (home) on embedded computers.
The company went out of business sometime in the early 00’s; the replacement from a competitor was $7M USD (but only in the states) ~$15M NZ to ship and install.
So for ~$30M we could replace perfectly working equipment with something that did the same job…because of an old computer. We would have achieved no extra production, or better quality. So the decision was, every year, keep it going as is.
It sometimes is not as simple as “you should have upgraded already”.
The contingency plan I helped implement was to virtualise the application in a VM on the main server; run the comms to the embedded system using a serial to ethernet converter. I tested it a lot and found that it worked very well…never put it into production as it was “backup only” but it was better than hoping it wouldn’t fail. The embedded systems themselves were relatively simple with replacement components that were not too difficult to get hold of.
Mine was hacking
Visually it looks like it’s navigating a maze but 90s films taught me that when it finds the skull in the center of the maze it’s successfully hacked the government
Every so often it would use the Utah Teapot for one of the piping joints. At work we used to sit and wait to try and see it.
That article is super interesting. Thanks for linking it.
I remember as a kid I would sit and watch that pipes screensaver too! I never saw the teapot though, and so I was a bit disappointed and confused when I saw your comment. Turns out I wasn’t inattentive! The teapot only showed up in versions prior to windows xp apparently, and I am of the age that xp was one of the first OSes I used.
I currently have it installed. I hope it still does that.
Never knew there was lore about this screensaver lol
A new Mario level?
it’s designing the factory that uses humans as batteries
SCP-015
Holy shit. Must be an AI virus.
