Is it a sign of getting old if I don’t get half the idioms he is using?

Absolutely! I observe this behaviour on myself: I am nowadays even sometimes coding on my phone (though, the experience is still… “suboptimal”), but for everything else? Its mostly fine.

I don’t get it… Arch install is pretty straight forward?!?

Well, that was a sentence often heard at a former employer… we employees often followed up with “… yeah, but the family name is Corleone”

Nah, '95 was best. BBS systems were in their final bloom, Usenet was better than everything that came afterwards (OK, the fediverse maaaay be a good successor) and there were still the COOL systems (Atari, Commodore…) around even after their respective companies had abandoned them.

You also could make some decent money if you had some rudimentary coding skills… I financed my first motorcycle (for which I hadn’t a driving license, mind you) by writing a (QBASIC? Visual Basic? I don’t remember) software for managing car parts for some local used car dealers.

I would say “taking an RPG projectile to the chest” is surely traumatic and could lead to all sorts of crazyness…

Just to mention it:

gopher://sdf.org

There is no better place for plain and real content

They didn’t get most references in the 80s/90s either… this is the reason why nerds seemed weird…

I will never go to the US legally or otherwise… i am pretty content with sitting here in Europe and watch you guys tear each other apart

Nah, they would simply disappear you if you were a nuisance

For one, they are still sold new for a surprising low amount of money (e.g.: https://www.bueromarkt-ag.de/farbband_kmp_0633_0501_fuer_epson,vt-farbbaender_und_-rollen,vh-epson,vg-lq_500,p-06330501.html) but re-inking them using just rubber stamp ink is also a possibility.

The best investment of my life was buying an Epson LQ500 back in… I don’t know… '95 perhaps? All this years, and even after months or even years without use it will happily awake from its slumber to once again scream and punch dots on to its never ending but ancient supply of fanfold paper

The thing is: If you ask her out (in real life, not through some shitty app) and you are not super creepy or awkward about it you already have an advantage above 90% of the dudes who write weird messages to her… it’s the date when you find out more about her

Well regarding plan9port, it is really, really easy to acquire… just clone the Github repo (https://github.com/9fans/plan9port), run ./INSTALL and everything else sorts itself out ;-)

Either sexually assault or Sturm Abteilung… neither is good

Why ed? Well, it keeps my brain from rotting 😀 just half joking… i have noticed that whenever i use a somewhat more “user friendly” software my mind starts to wander off more easily and instead of being more focussed on the programming task i shortly after find myself doing… $THING instead of being productive. So, being the only jack-of-all-trades-computer-guy in a small-ish company i tend to chose the tools that work for me, even if they are a bit… anachronistic.

I think the best maintained version of Sam would be the one included in 9front (if you want some truely special experience) or if you want to stay (somewhat) in the realm of the sane you can use plan9port which also brings in many nice tools out of the Plan9 ecosystem.

Well, for me personally this would be EmuTOS

Honestly: Yeah, i was trolling (kind of), but:

I DO like to code via ED because the design and workflow of ED (or even better: Sam) makes folding unnecessary because you only put on the screen what is needed right at that moment. Want to see two functions 1000 lines apart? No problem, just print them right below each other on the screen.

ED IS THE STANDARD EDITOR

I was there, even a couple years before that… and in reality not so much has changed.

What we now call “The Internet” is what BTX (in germany) was back then: A commercialised platform controlled by corporations. Trolling, hate, ragebait… all nothing new, just look at archived posts from the Usenet!

The cool thing is that we now can rebuild something that is more akin to the BBS networks of yesteryear, something like the Fido-net, something that is entirely owned by the people using it.