Re: good gopher article by Cory Doctorow
On Mon, Feb 24 2020, Paul Lindner wrote:
> Yes, screen scraping was a thing. I have some old expect scripts to
> download the weather, and way, way before
> there were headless browsers we had a scripted tn3270 emulator that let us
> grab screens in a programmatic way.
Oh boy. This brings back memories, and not the pleasant kind. I had to
do IBM screenscraping with that exact tool twice in my career. The most
recent being the really embarrassing year of 2005, when I was converting
a company off an AS/400 to something that understood ASCII...
> Cool to hear about your experiments with physical terminals and LoRa. I'm
> a supporter of Diaster Radio <https://disaster.radio/>
> which uses LoRa radios and Arduino boards to create a mesh network. Check
> it out.
Oooo very cool. Darn you, I can see where my free time is going in the
near future. I love radio stuff (I'm a licensed ham) and a
solar-powered LoRa mesh.... oh yeah.
> The closest I came to old school terminals is Cool Retro Term
> <https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term>
I tried CRT myself but couldn't get it to run very stably. Perhaps
that's due to xmonad but in any case I decided to go out and purchase
some phosphors...
> I recompiled elm and took some screenshots for my wife's memorial site
> <https://www.julieslife.com/more/email>
> using old mbox files. Elm influenced the curses client as you can
> clearly see.
I'm very sorry for your loss. What a great way to preserve memories of
a special person. I enjoyed reading about her life, and especially the
dog rescues.
If you would like me to take photos of any of that text on a serial
terminal, I am more than happy to do so. I don't know what you would
have used back then, but I have a green Wyse WY-55, green and amber DEC
vt420, white and amber DEC vt510, and amber IBM 3151 available.
Although my first emails were sent across CompuServe and are completely
lost to the mists of time, and my first "native" email client was Pine,
I also used Elm for quite some time, and in fact maintained the elm-me+
fork for Debian for a few years. elm and tin were my go-tos for a
number of years, with my mail and news coming in via long-distance UUCP
to my digital wasteland in rural Kansas for a couple years until we got
local PPP.
What a small world.
John
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