Videos The Alaska Server June 10, 2026 / June 18, 2026 by mark | Leave a Comment We recently pulled out this old 2U rackmount server. I set it up 10+ years ago as a personal file server, and recently realized the server wasn’t powering on. We determined the power supply had failed and then tried to figure out where this machine came from. With some help from our supporters, here’s what […] Read more » alaska dinastia mexmal tyan
Videos curl March 1, 2026 / March 1, 2026 by mark | Leave a Comment Most of us use curl daily without thinking about it. In our new video, we learn how Daniel Stenberg first got involved in programming and became the lead maintainer of curl. The story starts simpler than you might expect: an IRC bot built in the early 1990s to help manage some channels. That path led […] Read more » curl daniel stenberg
Videos 1995: The Year of the Virtual LAN November 27, 2025 / November 27, 2025 by mark | Leave a Comment VLANs VLANs are an everyday staple in networking today. We wanted to discover exactly how, and when, they came about. In everyday homelab/prosumer, small business and many enterprise networks, routers and switches use VLAN tags, which were defined by the 802.1Q standard. This feels like a concept that has been around forever, and I was […] Read more » 802.1q vlan
Videos Bonding 12x Modems October 4, 2025 / October 9, 2025 by mark | Leave a Comment Using modems has been close to the core of our focus in re-exploring 1990s tech since we started working on The Serial Port back in 2023. After we got our simulated dial-up ISP working, I had been thinking about doing a demo of combining multiple modems together. We knew multilink PPP was a thing – […] Read more »
Videos Internet Relay Chat August 29, 2025 / October 9, 2025 by ben | Leave a Comment We just dropped what might be our most personal video yet – a deep dive into the history of Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. And honestly? Making this one hit different. For those of you who weren’t around in the ’90s (or weren’t online yet), IRC might seem like ancient history. But here’s the thing: […] Read more »
Videos We rebuilt Impulse BBS in 2025.. using modern tools! June 23, 2025 / October 9, 2025 by ben | Leave a Comment A question no one has asked: could you take a 90s BBS and compile it from source using modern dev tools? We decided to find out using Impulse BBS, a platform that was huge in the underground scene back in the day. Why Impulse? Impulse was popular with scene BBSes—those invitation-only underground boards that were […] Read more »
Videos 512K Day May 23, 2025 / October 10, 2025 by ben | Leave a Comment On August 12, 2014, network operators started their morning with an unwelcome surprise. The Internet’s IPv4 routing table suddenly exploded past 528,000 routes, breaching a critical threshold that many Cisco 6500 switches were configured to handle. For 6500s running default configurations, this meant hitting a hard limit that had been lurking in TCAM memory for […] Read more »
Videos Inside the Bowling Alley Computer March 11, 2025 / October 10, 2025 by ben | Leave a Comment We just posted our latest video about one of the strangest finds we’ve come across: a complete bowling alley computer system running SCO OpenServer 5! The Find When Village Lanes in Durham, North Carolina closed its doors in 2023 after 61 years of operation, everything went up for auction. Most people were bidding on bowling […] Read more »
