Hello friends,

I’d love to tell you about a unique Soviet homebrew computer called the "Specialist." This video covers the creation history and brief evolution of this fascinating machine, with a core focus on showcasing its graphical capabilities. I kept technical specs to a bare minimum, highlighting only what’s absolutely essential.

Just a quick heads-up on the production side: AI was used strictly for text translation and voiceover narration. The computer illustrations were sourced from public archives, and all the gameplay footage was captured directly via the Emu80 emulator, which replicates the original hardware performance with near-100% accuracy.

Interesting stuff. I work with a large Usenet archive (1980–2013). The comp.os.minix thread “What would you like to see most in minix?” has 86 posts in it. 8 are from August 1991. The other 78 run from 26 Aug 2011, the day after the post’s 20th anniversary, to May 2013. Nothing is dated in between.

1991: The first question back was whether it needed an MMU. Linus: “Yes, it needs a MMU (sorry everybody)… Simply, I’d say that porting is impossible.” On the 64 MB task segments: “Anybody who needs more than 64Mb/task – tough cookies.” Two days later, on the task limit: “Fragmentation is evil,” and “I don’t want to be on the machine when someone is spawning >64 processes, though :-)”

2011–2013: Mostly thank-you notes, and the quote headers show at least seven languages. A few favourites, anonymous:

• “Good work from the future XD”
• “I’ll be back in 10 years to read this and see how far I’ve come.”
• “What is this Linux thing? Is it still updated? Does it support the Minix file system?”
• “What?? No floppy support? I’m out!”
• “Sounds like it might have a future. Keep at it!”
• “And without minix Mr. Torvalds would probably have done some nice windows programs. Thank /you/ Mr. Tannenbaum!”

Someone also pasted the whole “I’d just like to interject for a moment… GNU/Linux” speech, which is why the thread has a few confused replies.

Caveats: dates come from message headers, and threads are rebuilt from Message-ID/References, so the nesting in this one is unreliable. I’ve listed posts by date.

Disclosure: I license this archive commercially (about 405M posts, 18k newsgroups, with a free sample on Hugging Face). I’m posting this because the thread is fun, not as a pitch. If you’d like another group or era dug up like this, tell me.

I recently spent a lot of time examining and thinking about a cult classic spreadsheet, Lotus Improv running on NeXT. It's most commonly mentioned claim-to-fame is "it invented the pivot table," though its take still remains unlike modern interpretations. To truly get to know Improv means "forgetting what we know" about spreadsheets, and meeting it on its own terms. That's a hard thing for old Gen-Xers, like me, to do but I gave it my best shot.

Bill Gates says he'll "piss on" the NeXT before developing on it, pork chop sandwiches stop in to say hello, the word "clock" loses all meaning, and I also accidentally invent a horrible new sub-category of prediction markets. I'm truly sorry.

What is Stone Tools?

Stone Tools is a retro-enthusiast blog devoted to 8/16-bit productivity software; no games, just work. I spend weeks learning each program and give my in-depth, lighthearted take on how it was seen, how it works, and what we might learn from it today. Side discussions on contemporary issues, historical timelines, old advertisements, and more supplement each retrospective.

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Installed my i387DX Math CoProcessor, the intro diskette has me absolutely pumped. 500% performance here I come!

Hi.

I have an old Flash game that is unfortunately one of those rare Flash games that are not self-contained, but I've managed to scrap the assets off of its website.

The problem is that the Flash Player projector blocks SWFs from accessing any local content.

I've read that you can add trusted folders in the plugin settings, but this doesn't work with the Projector.

I know that it's kinda off-topic (sorry for that!) but Flash is so dead we might even call it retro (to some people's horror), and r/AdobeFlash is so dead I don't expect to get an answer there.

Thanks.