12‽ I'd swear the Slackware I downloaded was closer to 30+. On dialup. Via a VAX. Using FTP to go from internet to the VAX box, then Kermit from the VAX to the DOS PC using Procomm Plus. Write it all, start the install sequence, find out that the 18th disk was bad. Reboot. Rinse. Repeat.

X disks were X11. There were also the A,B, C etc disks.

Then there was the Coherent install, with massive manual on ultra thin paper with the shell on the front.

UnRaid does a variant of this; license is tied to the serial of the USB drive. It barely writes to the drive, so wear isn't meant to be much of an issue.

Tangential to this was the existence of California Software Product's "Baby/36" software. My father was a 36/400 programmer and sysadmin, and in his spare time used Baby/36 to write software for local businesses. I have vague memories of parallel port dongles being involved back then too. Don't think he mandated their use, was more a "framework" requirement.

For me, in Ireland, tacking "-ai" on the end of Google searches disables the hallucination engine. For now at least.

I poked this - the 96 installer from Archive didn't play nice with wine. However, dosbox plus win3.11 and some ingmount commands worked just fine. So yes, you could export to plain text or similar.

Someone's first impressions on the new version from Commodore International.

On the note of Jupyter notebooks and version control - there was a talk at this year's Pycon Ireland about using a built in cleaner for notebooks when committing the JSON (discard the cell results), and then dropping the whole lot into a CI system utilising remote execution (and Bazel or similar) to run and cache the outputs. Was a talk from CodeThink. No video up yet though. Scenario was reproducible notebooks for processing data from a system under test.

> On the note of Jupyter notebooks and version control - there was a talk at this year's Pycon Ireland about using a built in cleaner for notebooks when committing the JSON (discard the cell results)

Yup, I use a long "jq" command [0] as a Git clean filter for my Jupyter notebooks, and it works really well. I use a similar program [1] for Mathematica notebooks, and it also works really well.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/74104693

[1]: https://github.com/JP-Ellis/mathematica-notebook-filter

Tangentially related would be Adrian Newey's memoir "How to build a car"; he talks about both F1 and Indy cars he worked on. ISBN 9780008196806

> How many times a day / week / month do you launch your browser from scratch ?

Every morning / day across multiple machines. I don't leave them sleeping or hibernated.

Don't think I'd notice a slightly faster browser start; a 50% faster start would be nice though.

scoot, you may find the current mini-series by the podcast Unexplainable to be interesting. It's on sound, and one episode is about tinnitus and research into it.

https://www.vox.com/podcasts/467048/unexplainable-hearing-au...

Thanks!