Sibling Reunion
Labor Day Weekend this year was a bit special. For the first time in a while, my sisters and I got together. Granted, we already saw each other this year for my mother's 80th birthday party, but this time, we got together just because.
Older sister Sandy actually drove from North Carolina with her husband for a bit of a road trip to see other members of their extended family, and one stop on their tour was our house. This allowed them to travel on their own time, but also to bring some hefty family heirlooms home with them. This, as you can imagine, was a huge relief for me to not have to ship my father's old sled!
Food and wine flowed aplenty There was no agenda, except for dividing up my dad's original collection of Shiny-Brite ornaments. A good time was had by all!!
Skeeter's IBM PCjr Lives!
It's true! The little almost-PC that "could" is alive and well again! As part of Skeeter's prep for the upcoming move, his attention turned to data cleanup and consolidation from old machines, including his original machine from 1984. Lo and behold, the damn thing still works.
One white-knuckle moment that transpired was before booting the PCjr up for the first time in probably a decade, was the discovery of a vintage 5.25" floppy disk still in the drive with the latch engaged. The disk was promptly removed, only to see some magnetic material removed from the disk, presumably stuck to the drive heads. Would the A: drive work? A DOS 2.1 disk was inserted, and presto... the machine booted up!
A survey of Skeeter's floppy library found most of the disks to be in working order, including his ROBOTECH video game he authored in BASIC back in 1986. Overcome with glee, he shared the above image to a PCjr user group on Facebook, only to generate requests for the source code. How cool is that??
Apparently there is a whole community out there who are retrofitting old PCjr's with modern hardware to add things such as extra memory, solid state disks, and network capabilities to their old machines. Users have been able to get their machines onto the net for use with IRC and BBS's. Could this be in Skeeter's future? Stay tuned as this story unfolds!
SkeeterNet Returns Soon
In a move that will surprise some and horrify others, Skeeter is slowly bringing back his old, pre-social media websites to the internet. No stranger to static web-pages, Skeeter has a sizeable collection of now-retired websites which will soon be returning to the world-wide-web.
The initiative will feature a return of the moniker, "SkeeterNet", an underrated and underutilized brand name that Skeeter will use to stitch together a unique retrospective on his past contributions to the small internet. As seen above, SkeeterNet will be reimagined in the spirit of the late 90's web which was dominated by Netscape Navigator. Rather than a search engine, SkeeterNet will resemble a vintage Netscape web portal, as a gateway to Skeeter's vintage works.
Surfers of the small internet can look forward to SkeeterNet making its return to the web in the coming weeks and months.
Skeeter's original Albegas website is now available on Neocities, with more soon to follow.
The Skeeter Times © Copyright 2024 David Bielski Jr.
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