Tags: occ2026 , blog OCC 2026 Retrospective "Make something." That was the directive for this year's Old Computer Challenge and there were some really impressive interpretations. My entry was a lot simpler than many but that made it easy to stay motivated to finish. I learned about the OCC shortly before it began and it coincided perfectly with my own renewed interest in older computing hardware.…
Tags: occ2026 , blog This post is mirrored from the FrontPage website . DK Multimedia's Castle Explorer When I took the SATs the vocabulary section had a number of words familiar to me. Bailey. Barracks. Barbican. I think I learned most of those words via osmosis from playing video games. But I also might have learned them through infotainment software like DK Multimedia's Castle Explorer. Start a…
Tags: occ2026 , blog This post is mirrored from the FrontPage website . ProtoWeb Let's poke around ProtoWeb a bit today. I won't go over setup here - it's quite easy, just setting up your old web browser to use ProtoWeb's proxy: https://protoweb.org/get-started/ They also have their own fork of RetroZilla that runs on OSes as old as Windows 95 and as new as 11 so you can check it out even on a…
Tags: occ2026 , blog This post is mirrored from the FrontPage website . Packard Bell Navigator 3.9 Today I'll be taking a look at Packard Bell Navigator 3.9. This is another program I've never used before. Until recently I'd never even heard of it. It's like Microsoft Bob. However, the first version of Navigator was released in 1993 and Bob didn't make an appearance until 1995. As far as I can…
Tags: occ2026 , blog This post is mirrored from the FrontPage website . Bryce 3D I've never used a 3D modeling program in my life. I'm a programmer but frankly I don't know too much about computer graphics on the whole. I do remember hearing about Bryce. For me, the context was learning people used it to create some pretty wicked forum signatures. I have a vague memory of maybe downloading a trial…
Tags: occ2026 , blog This post is mirrored from the FrontPage website . (click images for full resolution) Encarta 2000 The Encarta 2000 home page. Some nice music even plays when it first opens. Encarta 2000 is a pretty magical program. If you wanted to read about how CDs work today, where would you go? Probably Wikipedia. Maybe a random Google result. Encyclopedia Britannica still maintains a…
Tags: occ2026 , blog This post is mirrored from the FrontPage website . (click the images for full resolution) Windows 2000 Desktop at boot The first thing I noticed about Windows 2000 is how good it still looks. Of course I'm biased in this regard having grown up with Windows 98 as my first operating system which looks quite similar by default. But I think it's true. There's something about it…
Tags: occ2026 , blog PC Setup For this year's Old Computer Challenge I'll be creating a website using FrontPage 2000 on PC running Windows 2000: Dell OptiPlex GX1, 256MB of RAM, 450MHz Pentium III CPU and a Voodoo 3 3000. After this post, the blog will be published there. Eventually I'll mirror the contents here. I'll be writing everything using FrontPage 2000. I learned about the challenge by…