| What I've been doing recently, is exploring Anonymous FTP sites again. Backing the late 1990s, I was lucky to have (although I didn't appreciate it at the time) an unfettered always-on internet connection at work. I had to jump through some hoops to get it[1], but it was there, and unmonitored. I spent most of my free time, wandering around FTP sites seeing what was there. It was a magical doorway to so much random stuff; source code, images, text documents... Most of which has now been lost to time. I even managed to get a the source of Mosaic for VMS, and then compile it so I could use it on a VAXStation that was also in my office. Anyway... So I've been exploring anonymous FTP again... They are a shadow of their former selves I think. There's a few nice nuggets out there, but mostly it's just mirrors of Linux distros, and fragments of the old SIMTEL and Walnut Creek collections. What I did find out is that there are no Archie servers anymore. There's a few Web based FTP search engines, but that just not the same. So I'm toying with building one. --- [1] Crawl under the floor of my office, splice a CAT3 cable to another one, then configure SLIP on my Windows 3.1 PC using Trumpet Winsock. |