Tag: opensource

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Ancient Web: The 1998 Linux Tea Party Put Silicon Valley Linux in One Room

In November 1998, Linux in Silicon Valley was still small enough that a gathering page could list people, employers, food, and the network setup without sounding absurd. Marc Merlin’s surviving page for the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group Linux Tea Party is a tiny snapshot of that moment.

Visit Marc Merlin’s Linux Tea Party page

The event took place on November 25, 1998. The page records attendees connected with names that now read like a compact history of commercial Linux: Red Hat, VA Research, Caldera, SGI, Linuxcare, and others. It also records the mundane infrastructure that made a late-1990s computer gathering a computer gathering: people brought machines, a 10BaseT network was arranged, and food and drinks were part of the plan.

That combination is what makes the page interesting. A corporate history can tell you which companies existed. A product timeline can tell you which distributions shipped. This page tells you that the people involved were in the same room, plugging hardware into Ethernet and eating together.

Old event pages are often better cultural evidence than polished retrospectives because nobody wrote them expecting historians to care. They were logistics. Names, affiliations, directions, equipment, and social details were included because attendees needed them. Decades later those details are precisely what make the page valuable.

The date matters too. In 1998, Linux had already developed a serious technical community, but it had not yet become invisible infrastructure under cloud services, phones, routers, televisions, and half the machinery people use without thinking about an operating system. The Tea Party catches Linux at the stage where participation still felt like joining a scene.

For Web archaeologists, the page is also a reminder to preserve event material. Conference schedules, user-group pages, release parties, mailing-list meetups, and photo indexes often look disposable once the event is over. They are not. They document who knew whom, which organizations overlapped, and what a technical community considered normal at a particular time.

The page survives without needing a documentary voice-over or retrospective redesign. It simply remains what it was: notes around a Linux gathering in 1998.

Read the Linux Tea Party page

Sometimes Internet history is not hidden in a manifesto. Sometimes it is sitting in an attendee list next to a note about Ethernet.

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Ancient Web: Windows Refund Day Tried to Return the OS Nobody Asked For

On February 15, 1999, people showed up at Microsoft offices trying to return Windows.

Visit the Windows Refund Day archive

The basic complaint was simple: many PC buyers wanted the hardware but not the operating system bundled with it. Microsoft’s license agreement said users could reject the agreement and seek a refund, while manufacturers routinely made the practical act of getting that refund difficult or impossible.

So open-source users turned the problem into an event.

Marc Merlin’s surviving Windows Refund Day page preserves the story from inside that moment. It describes February 15 as a worldwide day when users of Linux and other operating systems went to Microsoft offices to return licenses they said they had been forced to acquire with their computers.

The page still carries photos, contemporary explanation, and video material from television coverage.

The battle was partly about a sticker

The late-1990s PC market made operating-system bundling feel almost invisible.

Buy a mass-market machine and Windows was simply there. The price of the license disappeared into the price of the computer. For people installing Linux, BSD, or another operating system immediately, that meant paying for software they did not intend to use.

Refund Day tried to make the hidden transaction visible.

The organizers’ argument leaned heavily on the Windows End User License Agreement itself. If a buyer did not accept the license, the agreement appeared to contemplate returning the software. The problem was that the software was generally not a shrink-wrapped box sitting next to the machine. It was an OEM installation entangled with the hardware sale, manufacturer contracts, and a distribution system where nobody at the retail counter wanted to explain who owed whom twenty, fifty, or a hundred dollars.

The campaign therefore became both a consumer-rights protest and a snapshot of the Linux community at the end of the 1990s.

This was before Linux laptops were a normal product category, before major manufacturers routinely advertised machines without Windows, and before open-source software had become an ordinary part of corporate infrastructure.

The Refund Day page now reads like a small primary-source packet from that transition. It preserves the rhetoric, the frustration, the logistics, and the television-news footage instead of reducing the episode to one sentence in a history of Linux.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list turns up pages like this because the old Web often kept movements in the same place they organized them.

A protest flyer, a press archive, a photo album, and a manifesto could all be one directory on somebody’s server.

Read Marc Merlin’s Windows Refund Day page

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Ancient Web: Vedge.org Is a Personal Homepage With a Machine Shop Attached

Vedge.org opens with “Please excuse the mess,” which is exactly the correct greeting for a personal homepage containing a GUI toolkit, a machine shop, vacuum tubes, casting experiments, BSD, and a deep-fat fryer.

Visit Vedge.org

Julien Nadeau Carriere’s site connects several worlds that modern platforms would normally separate.

There is open-source software: Agar, Edacious, FabBSD, CAD tools, and build systems.

Then there are shop charts for lathe bits, thread depths, cutting fluids, milling cutters, sheet-metal gauges, wire resistance, and torque limits.

Then the gallery starts.

Software engineer meets machine shop

The shop section includes a vacuum-tube base press, hydraulic blanking press, sheet-metal work, ultra-high-vacuum equipment, a glassworking lathe, PCB fabrication, milling machines, aluminum and brass casting, resistance spot welding, a Tektronix curve tracer, vintage computers, and custom-built servers.

It is hard to imagine a better demonstration of why personal websites remain useful.

A platform profile wants to know what category you belong to.

Vedge.org does not care.

The same person can write software, run OpenBSD and FreeBSD systems, build electronics tooling, machine metal, cast brass, photograph the sky, document a BBC Micro, and keep reference tables for screw threads.

The site turns those interests into adjacent directories rather than separate identities.

Its open-source work has also escaped the homepage. Agar, for example, became a cross-platform GUI framework with its own project site. Vedge remains the personal hub where that software sits beside everything else the author actually does.

That context is valuable.

Technology history often gets rewritten as a sequence of projects and products. Personal pages preserve the workshop around the project: the tools, side interests, reference notes, and half-related experiments that explain how someone actually works.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes many sites where useful technical knowledge survives because somebody treated a homepage as external memory.

Vedge.org is practically a filesystem exposed to the public.

The mess is the feature.

Return to Vedge.org

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Ancient Web: TuxKart Is the Linux Racer That Became SuperTuxKart

The original TuxKart website is still online, and it looks exactly like the sort of page that could have convinced a Linux user in 2000 to compile a kart racer for no sensible reason.

Visit the original TuxKart site

Steve and Oliver Baker’s page introduces a game starring Tux, the Linux penguin, with six racetracks and the wonderfully modest assessment that it “plays pretty reasonably.”

That tiny project has a much longer shadow than the page suggests.

Before SuperTuxKart

The modern SuperTuxKart project’s own history traces the original TuxKart to April 2000. Steve Baker created the game for his son Oliver, who helped design tracks, and the project used PLIB, a graphics library Steve had also created.

Development eventually entered maintenance mode, with the final original TuxKart release arriving in March 2004.

Then things got messy in the traditional open-source way.

A Linux Game Tome “Game of the Month” effort tried to improve TuxKart in 2004. The later SuperTuxKart history describes that effort as going badly enough that the project became unstable and effectively died. A fork named SuperTuxKart emerged from the wreckage, was later revived, and ultimately became the actively developed cross-platform kart racer known today.

The descendant still carries fossils from the original.

The SuperTuxKart team points to ideas and track lineage that reach back to TuxKart, including Oliver’s Math Class, rescue behavior, penalty concepts, and the zipper speed boost.

That makes the old SourceForge page more than a download page for an obsolete game.

It is the visible root of a software family.

The page also preserves a specific era of Linux gaming when a developer could put up screenshots, thank Larry Ewing for Tux, link to source and downloads, admit to a couple of bugs, and call the project usable.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many surviving project pages whose importance only became obvious after later forks, communities, and software ecosystems grew from them.

TuxKart is one of those little ancestors still sitting on the web.

Return to the original TuxKart site

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Ancient Web: CloneKeen Kept Commander Keen Playable in Free Software

CloneKeen is what old PC game preservation looked like when a fan decided the cleanest answer was to rewrite the game engine and give away the source.

Visit CloneKeen

The project describes itself as a nearly complete clone of Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons. It is written in pure C, uses SDL, and was released as free software under the GPL.

The surviving site carries a 2003-2016 copyright line, which places it squarely in the era when SourceForge pages were one of the main public homes for hobbyist open-source projects.

Preservation by portability

CloneKeen did not stop at making the old gameplay run on a contemporary desktop.

The site lists support for GNU/Linux, BSD and other Unix-like systems, Windows XP-era Win32 machines, Mac OS X, Haiku, GP32X, Symbian phones, and even the Sega Dreamcast.

That list is almost more interesting than the game itself.

It captures a period when “portable” meant somebody had actually made the code compile on a ridiculous collection of machines.

The clone also added things the original did not have: two-player support, a built-in level editor, shared user maps, alternate game modes, and deliberately silly options such as a fully automatic raygun.

That is the nice thing about source-level preservation. Once the engine is understood well enough to recreate it, preservation can turn into experimentation.

The website itself is just as period-specific as the software. Small graphical navigation buttons lead to downloads, screenshots, installation instructions, modding information, and contact details. There is no launcher account, no cloud library, and no store client between the user and the source code.

You download it. You compile it. You mess with it.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes many SourceForge-era projects because they preserve more than executables. They preserve the point where old commercial software met the free-software culture that wanted to keep it running everywhere.

CloneKeen is a compact example of that transition.

A DOS platformer became C source, then wandered onto Unix boxes, handhelds, phones, and a Dreamcast.

Return to CloneKeen