The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

    20140508-Delphi-2007--Project-Options--Cannot-Edit-Application-Title-HelpFile-Icon-Theming20140430-Fiddler-Filter-Actions-Button-Run-Filterset-now20140424-VMware-Fusion-6.0.3.-no-reclaimable
    More Photos

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,862 other subscribers

Archive for the ‘History’ Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

ASCII Art Archive, my own ASCII signature, plus many FIGlet and TOIlet ASCII font art links

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/11

Earlier this year I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] ASCII Art Archive

This brought back instant memories about ASCII art, so in the future expect af few unfinished blog-posts that were in my “if I ever get to it archive” about it.

Let me start with my very limited ASCII art I used in late 1980s and early 1990s newsgroup and LISTSERV mailing list signature I reconstructed from a comp.virus post¹ having some very old contact data²:

    o  _   _  _   _   _            voice: +31-2522-20908 (18:00-24:00 UTC)
   /  (_' |  (_) (_' | |           snail: P.S.O.
__/                                       attn. Jeroen W. Pluimers
                                          P.O. Box 266
jeroenp@rulfc1.LeidenUniv.nl              2170 AG Sassenheim
jeroen_pluimers@f521.n281.z2.fidonet.org  The Netherlands

Shortly after that, my main source of income moved from the command-line to GUI based tools, so I temporarily kind of lost interest in command-line tools and customs. In that period FIGlet (see below) got created, which I totally missed (though I vaguely remember the 1.0 version being named newban).

The link at the start of this blog post not only pointed me to FIGlet, but also has a lot of examples (like some [Wayback/Archive] ASCII Art Logos – asciiart.eu) of which many by ASCII artist Joan Stark, and also links to JavaScript based tools:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Encoding, Fun, History, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Retrocomputing, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

WinWorld: Microsoft Office 95

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/29

Just in case I ever need it for historic reasons:

[Wayback/Archive] WinWorld: Microsoft Office 95

Because back in the days various Office products had localised VBA (at least German and French products had; I’m not sure about other languages)

Via:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Development, History, LifeHacker, Office, Office 95, Office Automation, Office Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 95 | Leave a Comment »

Algorism and algorithm are named after Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, founder of algebra (via @annefleurdd)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/14

I was in my 50s when I learned that both algorism and algorithm are named after the 9th-century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi who founded algebra.

Related:

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in Algorithms, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, History, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

30+ years of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines from 1985 (and earlier Lisa / Apple II equivalents)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/25

I hope someone has also archived all these in the Internet Archive as this is a great collection of historic material: [WaybackSave/Archive] GitHub – gingerbeardman/apple-human-interface-guidelines: Apple Human Interface Guidelines, et al.

If you have more of them: add them via a pull-request.

Related: [Wayback/Archive] Making It Macintosh: The Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines Companion : Apple : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

A client that went belly up in the early 1990s had all these and similar books. In retrospect, I though have found a way to obtain them but back then I didn’t value the uniqueness of them enough and didn’t have the storage space for it (I lived in a 30m² apartment).

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in //e, 68k, Apple, Apple Lisa, Classic Macintosh, Development, Hardware, History, Mac, NeXT, Power User, Software Development, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »

Reminder to self: find back if non-archived early GMAIL (alias for GOLD MAIL on VAX/VMS) can be found back

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/08

Blog posts I should check:

In the meantime:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in History, Power User, Retrocomputing | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

“Everybody should have an obsession with Lisp-like language at least once in their life” @KevlinHenney

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/27

The tweet [WaybackSave/Archive] Jakub Kočí on X: “”Everybody should have an obsession with Lisp-like language at least once in their life” @KevlinHenney I’m glad that I had one with Clojure.” mentioned a great talk:

[Wayback/Archive] The Past, Present & Future of Programming Languages • Kevlin Henney • GOTO 2024 – YouTube

The quote brought instant memories to my early computing days that I had almost forgotten: the muMATH (the muMATH-80 version on Apple II) computer algebra system which was based on muLISP (the German muLISP page has more detailed information), a LISP dialect.

In retrospect, I was way too young to really grasp LISP which was way harder than just using the muMATH wrapper. But it was also my first encounter to reasoning systems, or what we now collectively would call AI systems as back in the 70s there was a strong LISP connection to artificial intelligence . Do not confuse muMath with MuMath-Code however, that is a different LLM beast: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – youweihao-tal/MuMath-Code

So hopefully I will have a chance to revisit LISP with a LISP-like language one day, maybe even using the discontinued muMATH-83 on MS-DOS (also named “Microsoft LISP“), maybe even the (also discontinued) Derive 6.1 for Windows which is also based on muLISP, or even Clojure itself.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, History, LISP, LLM, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Fix a “Automatic Repair couldn’t repair your PC” on an UEFI system: when Windows cannot be located

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/22

I got the below error when booting a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro, a machine not just supporting supporting UEFI but preferring it, on which I had copied a backed-up disk image, then moved the hidden Recovery partition to the end of the physical disk (to make room to extend either the OS or DATA partitions).

Fixing it lead me to a trip that was on the boundary of software archaeology, so this blog post has a truckload of archived links to information that is still relevant, but for which the original links have long vanished due to link rot or (often worse) part of the historic information got lost because of migration to new tooling forgot to cover important additions (especially in comments).

One thing that I had to unlearn was MBR disk basics, for instance the fact that on GPT disks a partition can be active (they can only be on MBR disks, but despite UEFI supporting both MBT and GPT, GPT disks are way more common and required). The same holds for partitions having a boot flag: that too only applies to MBR disks. For the same reason, bootrec is only useful for MBR disks. More details towards the end of this blog post. CSM (Compatibility Support Module) booting is the UEFI way to simulate BIOS boot for operating systems that do no support UEFI.

Back to the error at hand:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, History, link rot, Power User, Software Archeology, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows XP, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Eind 2024 was er een exclusieve tour in de Gerbrandytoren: het hoogste gebouw van Nederland – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/18

Indrukwekkende video van “Zendmast Lopik” (staat in IJsselstein en heet officieel Gerbrandytoren):

[Wayback/Archive] EXCLUSIVE TOUR GERBRANDYTOWER | TALLEST STRUCTURE NETHERLANDS – YouTube

Achtergrondinformatie: Gerbrandytoren – Wikipedia

--jeroen

Posted in History, SocialMedia, YouTube | Leave a Comment »

10 years ago, Toru Iwatani showed his original drafts for Pac-Man : gaming

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/12

I missed this back then, so here is a reminder: [Wayback/Archive] Toru Iwatani shows his original drafts for Pac-Man : gaming

Of course these had a big red stamp on them marking them classified. The detailed game experience and sprite transformations in just a few pages really shows how great Toru Iwatani was.

Images were posted first on [Wayback/Archive] Toru Iwatani shows his original drafts for Pac-Man – Imgur:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in History, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »

Tom Waes tussen twee vuren in Noord-Ierland

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/26

If anyone knows how to watch this outside Belgium, please let me know: [Wayback/Archive] Tom Waes tussen twee vuren in Noord-Ierland.

I was there a few years before and a few months after this got broadcasted and I am curious to the footage: how does it compare (or differe) with my own experience and why.

For now, it looks like you cannot view it outside Belgium without confirming you are a Belgian citizen: [Wayback/Archive] Reizen Waes – 5 (4) Noord-Ierland | VRT MAX

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Awareness, History | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »