DdCno1

The Wayback Machine in particular is one of the greatest treasures of the Internet. An absolutely invaluable tool and so far entirely irreplaceable.

It's already on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/hobbes-os2-archive_202401

Opera was useful to me at three very specific points in time for very specific reasons:

When I built my first PC out of old scrap parts in the early 2000s, the only halfway modern browser that was still compatible with Windows 95 and a 486 CPU was Opera. Not the latest version, but new enough to be usable. This version, which came with a permanent toolbar urging users to purchase a full license, already had tabs.

I did not have broadband Internet until 2006. Even 56k modems didn't work with the awful telephone line we had - I had to make do with 48k. The proxy service with compression Opera came with was the only way to browse then current websites without waiting for half an hour for a page to load.

When I bought my first touchscreen phone in early 2009, the LG KP500, a Java-based phone with only 2G and no WiFi that pretended it was a smartphone, Opera Mini was the only browser that was usable, again thanks to its proxy service.

Outside of these niche use cases, I never saw a reason to use Opera instead of Firefox. While it was an important innovator in the beginning, for me personally at least, it has always been nothing but an "emergency" browser and ever since it was bought out by a Chinese firm and switched over to Chromium, there was no reason left to use it other than brand attachment.

This transparency does come with the side effect of shattering the hope that moderators in the lemmyverse are any better than those on any other part of the Internet though. It's the same little lords ruling over their little fiefdoms.

Israel has been using a similar system since at least 2022:

https://petapixel.com/2022/06/29/the-xaver-1000-sees-through-walls-and-is-made-for-the-israeli-army/

It's pretty likely that they have shared this system with their closest allies, similar to how the Trophy missile defense system found its way onto German and American tanks.

By the way, those throwable cameras mentioned at the end of the article have been available to the IDF since 2005.

They aren't refueling during the 1990 pit stop though.

You can still buy new MS-DOS computers, for use with legacy equipment and software, like industrial machinery. The most powerful CPU this company is offering is a Pentium D from 2006:

https://nixsys.com/legacy-computers/ms-dos-computers

For an extra $95, they'll pre-install MS-DOS 6.22 for you, but it will of course only use 64 MB of the 1 GB RAM the machine comes with. That's a luxurious amount already. I've never used more than 48 MB with MS DOS and it was already more than plenty.

Motherboards for the LGA 775 socket were among the last to support ISA cards, which are why companies buy these new legacy computers in the first place. There's machinery out there worth millions and running entire factories, complex scientific instruments or medical equipment that requires interfacing with ISA cards. I've seen this myself and fixed a few of these systems. It's fun to take a machine off the factory floor that has been quietly doing its job for many decades. You wouldn't believe how much of the world is running on truly ancient hardware.

While it would be theoretically possible to e.g. create a new hardware interface and compatible software, this would not only be prohibitively expensive on its own, but require costly and lengthy certification on top, which just isn't feasible most of the time. That's where PCs like these come in. They may seem outrageously expensive given the ancient hardware they consist of, but compared to the equipment they'll be used with, they might as well be free - and on top of that, they come with a warranty, support hotline, etc. - unlike cobbling something together from old parts found on ebay.

I could swear I have seen it on some other device as well, many years later, but I don't remember what it was.

Slightly off-topic, but the only time I've ever used Windows 3.1 (beyond the odd virtualization experiment every once in a while) was on a laptop with a passive-matrix monochrome LCD, so seeing this OS in color always feels a bit wrong to me.

I think it was a Compaq LTE Lite, likely an early model. It was a relative's device (he's working in the insurance industry) and I was only toying around with it in the late '90s, when it was already obsolete.

Researching this laptop, I found a hilarious contemporary ad that is very full of itself and pulls no punches against the competitors:

https://youtu.be/b57-a9nm9hM

These were very expensive, like all laptops at the time, so it's no surprise it's shown being used by executives. I'm impressed by how many now common features it already had. I think they aren't showing the cheapest variant with the passive-matrix display in this video, which looked very dim and unpleasant.

A floppy disk is 3.3mm in height, so without taking into account that a large stack would be rather compressed further down, the theoretical height of this stack would be about 300 meters, which is right in between the roof and the tip of the antenna of the Chrysler Building in NYC.

I know you're joking, but the opposite is likely the future of game graphics: First a conventional render, perhaps even with path-tracing (although that might not be necessary), then AI on top:

https://youtu.be/3rYosbwXm1w