Stephen's Computer Page

COMPUTER REFERENCE LINKS

Here is BBC Manchester England BBC Webcam. | GMPTE London Road Manchester webcam- looking South down the A6 with Piccadilly Railway Station to the left. The Manchester Evening News webcam formerly at www.manchesteronline.co.uk/webcams/ is no longer online.

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.

As a highly placed BBC rep has written in a magazine dedicated to a certain operating system and given OS statistics which are distinctly false, be aware that for the six months ended October 2007, of visitors to this web site, Linux users amount to the high side of 5 to 6 per cent, fairly consistent, whilst Mac OS users amount to about one percent less and are declining. Web site owners who insist on their visitors enabling javascript may wish to know that 86 per cent of my visitors have javascript disabled. The most popular screen resolution has been 1024x768 although there are still some visitors using 800x600. A fairly consistent 1.34% use the excellent Opera web browser. I still receive the odd visitor using Windows 3.1.

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, which is the easiest to install into almost any operating system. 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.
I have some links to streaming audio sites | Our 1998 PC specification

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, 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.

Latest vulnerabilities

Go to Stephen's Index Page

---- Validate this page!

The Internet Traffic Report monitors the flow of data around the world. It then displays a value between zero and 100. Higher values indicate faster and more reliable connections.

A high index number indicates a faster internet.

Note 1: AddFreeStats will try to set a cookie when this image is loaded. The cookie relates to "*.addfreestats.com/cgi-bin/*" only. The cookie can be safely refused without imparing your web enjoyment. At present I cannot locate a relevant privacy policy on their site.
Note 2: If you click this link to AddFreeStats you will need to have javascript enabled to use their website. Otherwise you will see a blank page! Again, their foolishness will not interfere with your enjoyment of THIS web site!

Access Key Details