[sgt]

This kind of article reminds me of about 20 or 15 years ago. Maybe at the early days of Wikipedia.

There was so much exploring to do, and sites weren't filled with AI slop either.

You'd easily go ... "Ah, lookie here, this is interesting.. Unix usage in East Germany".. after 4-5 hours you'd still be reading, maybe about Elektronika (PDP-11 compatible clonest in old Soviet), etc.

Fun times!

[netsharc]

The start of the story touches on even older days: they got a tape with some binary data, and couldn't just ask AI "What's this?", they had to hunt for answers in books, in their library!

And then the amount of focused work they needed, which they probably had because they weren't doomscrolling:

> Since we had no machine with a `C' complier, we chose the same method: translation by hand into another language. In a finite time (about 3 months), we had a `C' compiler which produced PDP/11 assembler.