[graypegg]

The last month or so, I've been watching a lot of clabretro's videos. If you find this sort of thing interesting (old enterprise software, and possibly the old servers/equipment that would run that software), you'll definitely like his channel! His retrorack is more from the early 2000s rather than the late 2000s, but there's probably still a good amount of cross over between what you're both doing.

https://www.youtube.com/@clabretro

[cube00]

I'm really pleased he's embraced long form videos showing the steps (and the failures) along the way, in the early videos you can hear he's apprehensive about if people would find it interesting in a world of short form content.

He also has really great editing where he'll sometimes show the success of a step first if it's a long journey to keep interest and then go back through the details so you can tell he's put care into the production.

I also enjoy his humourous Paul Thurrott-like jabs at himself and the problems he hits too, it feels like he has a nice humility about himself.

[EvanAnderson]

It kills me that it never occurred to me there would be a market for videos of re-living the work I did from 1997 on. I could have made a ton of 'content' about that.

[christophilus]

My videos would consist mostly of: “Chris is cursing msbuild again.” “Chris is losing a table tennis game to Mike again while he waits for the build to complete.” And so forth.

[mikestorrent]

Right? When I saw the list of Server 2008 things it's like... (a) please no I don't want to see that again and (b) you do know that Server 2025 is basically the same, right?

[durrendal]

That's actually the entire point of this specific endeavor. Windows server hasn't really changed that much, and professionally I deal with tons of small businesses remediating these sorts of legacy systems.

So in a sense I'm just setting the old systems up to have a better understanding when I engage to tear them down.

[wpm]

clabretro does it all on hardmode too. Picks the most obscure, esoteric shit to try and get working: IBM i was the most recent, but his AT&T Merlin Phone series was great. I feel like the Sun Ray stuff was the most likely to be you know, actually documented in a way meant for mere mortals to read, and still likely to be hosted somewhere accessible.

The IBM i stuff, my god, the acronyms, the terse and unhelpful menus and error messages, the insane lengths to get a simple goddamn serial console, it's no wonder IBM gets paid to handle it all for you.

[gerdesj]

I used to look after a System /36. It came with around 10 feet (thick) of manuals.

I kept a long plastic straw inside the case - the size of a chest freezer - to tickle one of the fans into life. If you forgot that step, the IPL (boot) would take around 45 mins and then about 20 minutes later ... thermal shutdown!

[clabretro]

more to come :)