There is just one webcam left in Manchester, England, courtesy of GMPTE London Road Manchester
webcam- looking South down the A6 with Piccadilly Railway Station to the left.
Texas Instruments TI99/4A
(1979-1983) A 1983 book on the Texas Instruments TI99/4A Home
Computer in both text and HTML formats by Stephen Shaw: Getting
Started with the TI99/4A. A report on a TI99/4A emulator for the
PC, PC99 Other
TI resources on this site, with links to a publicity photo of the
computer, some music in .MID format originally composed for a very
early TI module, and a memorial sample of the monthly columns of the
late Jim Peterson, a longtime supporter
of the TI99/4a computer. also a review of PC99 and some programs for
it.
LINUX Linux
content is on a separate Linux page!
Knoppix Linux is highly recommended to the Linux novice. No
installation required, no need to touch your hard disk unless you
want to.
.
Older Computers: Emulations of very early computers can
be FTP'd from Manchester
Computer Conservation Society, including the first stored
programmable computer, the SSEM, now rebuilt and working twice a week
in Manchester. Another early British computer, Colossus (predating
Eniac), was hard wired for one task- dealing with Enigma
messages- lovely description of how Enigma worked and was deciphered.
Creative Computing was one of the computing magazines I first read
and subscribed to. What a delight- at last glance 35 issues on the
web plus the three books "The Best Of...". Read computing
history in Creative
Computing.
Modern PC: Instead of using a supplied browser, which
may not have the features you want, probably has features you don't
want, and may have far more security holes than you need, look at an
alternative.
By far the easiest to obtain and use is Opera (if you have javascript off (sensible!) you may need to look for a manual download image towards page bottom - no alt text, tut tut). I find Opera to be the easiest
to install into almost any operating system. For Windows 95 or 98 use the classic installer option. Opera has Linux rpms you can use with anything (and they still support Windows 95!), but upstart Firefox has chosen not to properly support Linux, with no ready built rpms and adding Windows features....
For good old fashioned fast text web browsing in Linux, w3m is excellent.
Search for computer software vulnerabilities by vendor (including open source) from Security Focus
Want a free Windows programming language? Goto MSW
Logo - and program for anything from a Pentium with W95 to the
latest NT, ME or XP. The Windows
3.1 for a 286 version may still be available on this link. The Great
Logo Adventure(here as a 3.6 megabyte zipped download), supporting
MSW Logo.
There remain some excellent programs for DOS which cannot be run in Windows XP, or for a
smaller number, in Dosbox under Linux or Windows XP. To run in a native DOS
operating system you may need to get a copy of FreeDOS Odin or Balder, one
flavour
of which runs from a floppy with no hard disk install or partitioning.
Web
Archive allows you to see web pages as they were from 1996
onwards- if you have javascript the links on those pages will take
you to the closest (in date) archived page, and without javascript
the links will try to obtain the current page with the same name.
Site in heavy demand, expect delays or non availability. [site
unavailable fairly often, keep trying]
My favorite 32 bit media browser is the
free Irfanview, which runs in
95,98 and NT4. Huge list of supported formats of images, animations
and sounds; includes the special overview.pcd file format. Note- I
had problems using the associate option, and had to associate
file types by hand (whilst repairing the damage the associate option
did...). You don't need to associate anyway. Irfanview also has some
image editing options and scanner (Twain) input. It is quite small,
with plug ins in a separate zip file- you can delete any you don't
need after unzipping.
Although written for Windows, I was surprised to find many parts of Irfanview (up to version 3.95) work fine in Linux using
Wine (up to vn 0.9.24) - the Open box is slightly screwed but usable. There may obviously be problems with files that use external viewers which are
less receptive to Wine.
PC Support Links: New to the web? John
December has a very useful site which will tell you about the
Internet basics, how
to develop a web
site and a HTML guide
Mirrorservice.org is a UK based
ftp mirror site with files from many sites. This is the older more generous mirror service,
now offered by the University of Kent, plenty of goodies.
Interested in Computer
Science? Check the links on this large (100k+) Albany web page.
[FUN] Search
for Microsoft pages with Google (nb: this is an authentic result
page, but the question we asked was a trick. It looks nice though
doesn't it).
Check the links and syntax on your web
page and more at Addy and
Associates site. They require that you do not turn off referrer logging.
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this page! A high index number indicates a faster internet.
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