DOS4Ever feels less like a website than somebody left the door to an electronics workshop open and labeled every bench.
Ronald Dekker explains the purpose plainly: he enjoys visiting other people’s electronic project sites, so he made one of his own. The pages show what he has built and double as documentation for himself.
That second purpose explains why the site is so useful.
The projects are not polished showcase photos with a shopping list underneath. They include circuit descriptions, software, design reasoning, measurements, historical notes, and enough detail that another electronics hobbyist can understand what happened.
Nixies, PICs, tubes, and old processors everywhere
The index sprawls across Nixie clocks, a talking alarm clock, Numitron and Dekatron projects, analog meter clocks, tube curve tracers, a tiny oscilloscope built around an eight-pin PIC, a one-chip Pong implementation, 8051-family hardware, and an SC/MP computer running NIBL Tiny BASIC.
There is also the µTracer series, a miniature vacuum-tube curve tracer that uses pulsed measurements and small high-voltage converters instead of the heavy power supplies associated with traditional test equipment.
Then the site wanders into electronics history.
Dekker documents obscure Philips tubes, early television research, the EF50 valve’s wartime history, postwar Dutch electronics hobby culture, restoration of old radios, and even experiments involving artificial ball lightning.
This is exactly the sort of technical personal site search engines are bad at summarizing because its value is cumulative. No single article explains DOS4Ever. The useful object is the pile: years of projects, failed assumptions, measurements, diagrams, historical digging, and software all cross-linked from one person’s index.
The homepage even tells visitors they may copy, distribute, or sell the project material as far as the author is concerned, while making the predictable warning that he is not responsible if anybody electrocutes themselves or otherwise creates a disaster.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes technical sites like this because the old web was full of specialists publishing the notebook, not just the finished object.
DOS4Ever is still a very good notebook.