The name Orinoco makes me think of the 802.11b wireless LAN adapters of the same name. One of the few that worked in Linux.

I'm with you on this one. I think I still have that pcmcia card somewhere.

Really? It makes me think of the hunting of the snark, because my brain makes it's own style of random wikipedia link wandering.

Makes me think of Enya's Orinoco Flow...Sail Away, Sail Away, Sail Away!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTrk4X9ACtw

Fun fact, while Trower was the manager who got Windows moving, it was Gabe Newell who served as the lead developer of Windows versions 1, 2, and 3. Win95 was the first version he wasn’t really involved with. By that time, he was working on porting Doom to Windows.

Sorry, are we saying Valve Gabe Newell? That's blowing my mind from both timeline and area perspective.

Yup, where do you think he got the money to start Valve? :-)

Yep, I still do love this little factoid

It's a fact, though, not a factoid.

Huh, valid correction, thank you, never realised that those weren't synonyms

Half Life 3.11 confirmed.

Half Life for Workgroups

Half Life/386

Copilot Life

I think he must have sworn off any v3 after MS-DOSv3.

Clippy is the final boss

That's for Portal 3.

He notably worked at Microsoft before founding Valve.

I believe he’s confirmed that his time at Microsoft both gave him the money and the desire to make Valve and Steam.

The desire to switch to games was, reputedly, seeing Doom outsell Windows 3.x with none of the marketing budget (with Windows having huge one).

Then not getting enough support in trying to drum up better support for gaming at Microsoft, IIRC

Gabe and Carmack are probably above Amelio and below Jobs and Gates in impact on the world - but probably above them all in impact when measured on a “desired” axis - people sought out Doom in a way that even the iPhone wasn’t.

Yeah, I don't know why this never popped on my radar. I read Abrash books long ago, MS employees blog too, its history around the creation of UIs (xerox/apple and all that), the OS/2 era .. and I never saw his name (or maybe selective vision tricked me).

Very fun fact

I love this kind of lore. Thanks for enhancing

He's an awesome guy!

If you play any Valve games with commentary he prefaces them with an invitation to email him directly with comments or questions. He's said that he doesn't have time to answer every one but he tries to read them all.

For a multi-yacht owning, industry driving billionaire, he does seem pretty cool.

Well… it was still far more simple than anything today. Whether we are looking at Concurrent CP/M-86 or at Multitasking MS-DOS 4, these were far more simple than anything OS today. Once we add many users, you start looking at things like Xenix and other early Unices. Those too, we’re more simple than anything today.

Especially as, in Unix, you needed to add things by yourself, so it could be as simple or complex as you needed it to be

Thanks. I just went down a little rabbit hole into Dennis Gabor and then the book Cybernetics. Fun. :-)

Most use Linux now, and specifically RHEL. I did see some IBM z, but that was specifically for one old DB that handled oil pipeline stuff.

Well… UEFI is kind of modern DOS.

It certainly is not.

There are a lot of parallels: It has a janky set of buggy drivers. It has backslashes in paths. It has a shell that is "inspired" by COMMAND.COM. And it's basically a program loader where every program immediately replaces it and drives the hardware directly.

More like modern BIOS++ IMO

Except that UEFI supports loading PE executables which replace it and have direct access to hardware… so… not really BIOS-like. Some UEFI implementations provide BIOS compatibility, but that’s via an UEFI application whether provided by the implementer or via something like CSMWrap: https://github.com/CSMWrap/CSMWrap

Also, what is a natural food? Wheat, maize, oranges, bananas, broccoli... those are human made.

And there's plenty of unnatural, ultraprocessed food that's good for us.

Try telling the body builder he can't have a protein shake.

I get what you mean, but do remember that pretty much everything humans eat (fruits, vegetables, grains, meats) did not exist before humans cultivated them.

You do realize that would have once described GCC and Linux, right?

Of Linux, yes. Of GCC, no. From the very beginning there was multiple authors and the project was a mishmash of several other projects.

If you're using cloudflare tunnels, you don't even need to be on OVH. You could seriously host anywhere, like your own basement.

I have a basement, and a garage, and 2 sheds... I still dont wanna run servers at home. I use OVH, I just rent a server at their Hillsboro OR, US datacenter, just a few miles from my home, i know the twists and turns the fiber goes between there even.