July 2016

I first got to play with NCSA Mosaic on a Series 700 workstation running hp-ux back in 1993. A couple of years later, we were using mostly Netscape on Windows 95 , on a Pentium based HP Vectra PC.

And it was on these machines that I first got to go gaga over what Yahoo offered – an easier way to get to content I had previously used text-based usenet readers or a compuserve dial-up to access. Yahoo back then was an online directory that revealed wonders, a guide to what was new and cool on the web….. more than just a yellow pages for the internet.

Over the years, yahoo would swallow up a huge number of web properties, acquire lots of services, get deep into advertising, fail to buy Google, resist a buyout by Microsoft, and now end up in the sorry state of having most of it’s value to investors being in it’s stake in Alibaba.

One of the better pieces I’ve read lately about Yahoo fall from grace:
Techcrunch: Platform change, the Yahoo-slayer

My faithful i3 based minitower which has done double duty as a linux workstation and a file server for the home has finally given up it’s ghost.

It simply would not power on last night. No display at all, and after about 20 seconds, the fans ran up to full speed, making a frighteningly loud sound.

After removing all the plugs & components and the CMOS battery, leaving it overnight, and then putting just the minimum back in, I was greeted by 4 beeps everytime I plugged the power cable into the PC.

That settles it. Most likely cause is a bad power supply.

The good thing about using an old PC (10 years old by now) with very standard hardware, together with a very user friendly distribution (Mint Linux in my case) is that when the hardware fails, I can literally just move the hard disks to my replacement less old minitower (5 years old) which had been a test machine, and everything boots up working fine. Drive mounting, shares, lan connection – it all worked beautifully. All the drivers needed for the replacement PC were already in the Linux Mint installation.

So I am back online with my workstation/server again, and can take my time to troubleshoot and fix the old machine.

Standard hardware modules. Unexciting for the techie who needs to be at the leading edge, but quite frankly, there is nothing better for swap and play.