The youtube video linked has the toasters going north west to south east - they canonically travel from north east to south west. Did they flip the video to avoid a copyright claim?
Bill Stewart was by no means the author of after dark or the flying toasters[1] He did do the windows port of the screen saver engine and some modules, but that was years after they'd first shipped as part of the Mac version of After Dark.
I used to have a registered port (in the 3000s) - didn’t get a lot of spam, but once I got a very angry phone call (!!!) from someone that tracked me down because their firewall blocked an incoming request in that port. They did their own research and decided it was my fault.
Years ago I got a job through a recruiter, left company A for B. She called me after a few months and asked me for the Compsny A internal directory - which I declined to provide and she got kind of nasty about it. Maybe ten years later I was at company C and my manager mentioned hiring a recruiter - same person. I mentioned our previous interaction (not out of spite, just a naive narrative) and they stopped working with her immediately. My point being - your behavior has a long tail, so don’t be trying to take advantage.
One possible result of this that sounds dystopian cool - script kiddy kids < 16 spinning up mastodon server instances and creating their own very leaky insecure rolling social networks. Unless it suddenly becomes illegal to run a server without a license.
There was a rather silly 1976 thriller “Raise the Titanic!” predating it’s actual discovery by about 10 years. They made a movie from it too in 1980. Based on a premise that there was something valuable the government wanted on board)
I want to say it was at Sun in the mid 80s, most code lacked comments but there was one idiosyncratic data structure with field names having specific prefixes - with the comment “She’s Hungarian!” (Hungarian notation, presumably - and who was “she”?)
I’d been going since the mid 80s when it was “the foothill flea market” colloquially. I can’t say I’ve ever found any “wow, this is unique” things - honestly, most of the time it’s “neat” things that come home with me, get played with for a few years, and then I’ll buffer everything collected up and sell at the next flea market. In this way the hobby can be mostly self supporting - but it’s also very satisfying to return home with an empty station wagon.
It’s also a great way to reunite with coworkers from times past, although I have really a bad memory for faces.
Watching alt.religion.scientology in 1993 was very much like ogling a road accident. It was so weird how the adherents would attack the people that were leaking their church secrets - they literally had a playbook to follow - I guess there just modern public relations now.
This is the best. Offices with doors, as a semaphore for availability, and a close by common area for collaboration.
If collaboration occurs spontaneously and your door isn’t closed, it’s easy to join in. If it turns out that someone is essential, turn it into an actual design meeting.
The best teams I’ve worked on had this arrangement and developed their own cadence - morning walks for cofeee, water cooler tv show commonalities.
Having the refuge of a known private space made group participation easier - I would seek out and benefit from the social technical in person interactions, as opposed to an open office plan where I would start out with determination of defending my personal mental space at all costs.
I will often slap a dumb 3 line http server into my long running tools / applications for debugging - provide ReSTful channel to toggle debug flags. I “learned” html in the 90s and don’t use it otherwise, so <table> figures prominently in generating the structure of the page.
So many, many rants could come from this and my blood is boiling in fervent agreement. But two thoughts: as hard as it is to use the contrast-less, contextless obscure icons and "is it checked or toggled or active", try working with someone and having to explain "click that thing, I don't know what it is, no, the other one, to the left, arghghhg."
But really, maybe these aren't our interfaces anymore - the lack of scrollbars on macOS is because of the touch, pinch and swipe touch interfaces, and the people that are now very happily consuming content (and creating, although less so) without having to worry about that extra bit of information. But the rest of us suffer, and the "increase contrast" and "reduce motion" checkboxes don't do nearly enough to reconfigure the UI.
I never really appreciated the Mac modding community[1] (kaleidoscope?) and the powerful frameworks they had to build UIs, 90% of which I'd happily switch to today if I could.
There’s a character in “the truth” by Terry pratchett that ostensibly swears a lot in the book - “I don’t have any -ing friends”, etc. but it turns out he’s literally saying -ing (that being the joke). And I will never not think about if I encounter a .ing domain.
Another series along these lines I’ve been meaning to finish watching: “Moonbase 3”[1] from the bbc. James Burke (Connections, The Day the Universe Changed) was science advisor, although I don’t quite see how it helped overcome the inherent cheese.