tangentsoft website for PiDP-8

[HB Eggenstein]

Does anybody know why

https://tangentsoft.com/pidp8i/

is offline for quite some time now? Has this moved somewhere else or is it just gone?

THX

HB

[Warren Young]

On Tuesday, September 28, 2021 at 9:10:49 AM UTC-6 hbe....@gmail.com wrote:

Does anybody know why

Because I'm stoobit.

The better question is why no one flagged the problem until now. Apparently the project is "done" through lack of interest.

[Alexandre Keledjian]

Hello,

it seems that the redirection sucks:

https://tangentsoft.com/pidp8i/wiki?name=Home

[Warren Young]

On Tuesday, September 28, 2021 at 11:34:46 AM UTC-6 dervi...@gmail.com wrote:

Hello,

it seems that the redirection sucks:

https://tangentsoft.com/pidp8i/wiki?name=Home

Works for me.

[Alexandre Keledjian]

Yes this link,

but the redirection: https://tangentsoft.com/pidp8i/  ---> https://tangentsoft.com/pidp8i/wiki?name=Home

doesn't work at least for me...

[Jeff Jetton]

Working for me, FWIW. Using Safari on a Mac.

[Warren Young]

On Tuesday, September 28, 2021 at 12:17:31 PM UTC-6 jeff....@gmail.com wrote:

Working for me, FWIW. Using Safari on a Mac.

 Ditto, plus Firefox on Mac and Win10, Chrome on Mac, and Edge on Win10.

[HB Eggenstein]

Yup, works again,  before I got a " 502 Bad Gateway " server-side error message for the last few days.

HB

[William Cattey]

I've been working on other stuff lately, but I am LONG overdue with making poetnerd.com a replication site for tangentsoft.

Indeed, there are several PDP-8 projects I hope to pick back up as soon as life quiets down a bit.

-Bill

[Mike Katz]

I am having the same issue with 12bitsbest.com.

But soon.  I have my new PDP-8/E to get up and running first.

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[Bob Reynolds]

Between the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org) copies and the GitHub mirror, is there a need to replicate the site? 

Just wondering, not trying to discourage.

Bob

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pidp-8/1eff837b-45fd-8171-1220-a459e297a6ec%40gmail.com.

[Mike Katz]

I want my site to more be a site of reference where you can go to fine links to the information

Like the 4 or 5 different sites I needed to go to to fine all the maindecs I needed.

[William Cattey]

The idea is that, if Warren ever lost interest, we could keep the project fully operational and active by switching commitment from tangentsoft.com to poetnerd.com.

I've had experience trying to recover stuff from waybackmachine.com.  It's great if it recognizes the text file as a text file and preserves it, but for example, RALF sources with a .RA extension were simply ignored over time and so old versions of OS/8 Adventure from rickmurphy.net/advent/ were not available.  Luckily in the case of OS/8 Adventure, Rick Murphy took time out of his busy life and recovered various of the interesting milestones in the development of the package.

I've produced a demonstration of historical curation of PDP-8 software packages using Rick Murphy's ADVENT as an example: 

https://poetnerd.com/pdp8-alive/advent/

One of the projects I hope to work on is to put other packages into the same form.

Note that I chose fossil as the source code management system instead of git for two reasons:

1. The system preserves not only the software history, but also the Wiki docs, Issue resolution workflow items, and the discussion forums.  When google decided to abandon code.google.com, yes the packages that had active maintainers that chose to do the work and migrate them to github did preserve the code, and kept the projects going, but um.. the discussions about bugs, and the evolution in forums?  LOST.

2. The other useful services, Wiki, Discussion Forum, and Issue resolution are all part of a SINGLE fossil installation.  You don't have to decide which forum or wiki, or issue tracker to bolt on to your replica git collaboration space.  And to presume that github will be the one around forever seems naive in light of the previous experience with code.google.com..

Preservation is tricky. Curation is real work, and is definitely NOT a solved problem.

-Bill

[William Cattey]

I also lament the disappearance of pdp8.org after Aaron Nabil lost interest in keeping it alive.

We need a loosely coupled federation of sites to keep things alive, and active with a changing community of contributors.

[HB Eggenstein]

But is the forum at https://tangentsoft.com/pidp8i/forum still moderated? I'm pretty sure I posted to it a few days before the site went "kaputt" but it never appeared there, probably it's stuck in a moderation queue. The most recent message there is > 200 days old.

HB

[Warren Young]

On Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 4:19:04 AM UTC-6 hbe....@gmail.com wrote:

But is the forum at https://tangentsoft.com/pidp8i/forum still moderated?

Yes, and it's going to remain so. Spambots will not be getting the ability to post straight to the forum. Not only is cleaning that back out annoying, the forum creates durable Fossil artifacts just like making commits, ticket filings, wiki edits, etc, so it's purposefully difficult to strip them out everywhere in the distributed clone chain. The ideal is that only things meant to live forever make it into the hash tree. For a public forum that allows anyone to sign up and post, as the PiDP-8/i software development forum is, this means we need a moderator to act as a gatekeeper to keep obvious trash out. I got volunteered for the job by universal disinterest from the rest of the planet's PDP-8 hobbyists. :)

And yes, spam attempts have occurred. You just haven't seen it, being on the outside, because they've all been squished before they hit the durable hash tree.

 

probably it's stuck in a moderation queue

Yes, it was. I must have missed the notification email, and since I had no other reason to visit the forum, I also didn't see the message saying there are things awaiting my attention.

 

The most recent message there is > 200 days old.

 My own failings aside, that is part of the problem behind this whole thread. I'm a passive sort, by nature: unless something external to me happens to kick me into action, I'm unlikely to react and keep the development cycle working. Everything I've done for the PiDP-8/I software project follows that pattern: something happened, I handled it, and then moved on until something else happened. Now that those "somethings" aren't happening as often, I've been off reacting to other "somethings".

[HB Eggenstein]

Totally understood. And maybe the newly started discussion in that forum will bring some new life to it, it is about finding ways to use the PiDP-8I in fun ways similar to what PDP-8s did in many labs and factories back in those days: reading sensors and logging and analysing their data in real-time, switching machinery on and off, etc. .

Cheers

HB 

[Warren Young]

On Tuesday, September 28, 2021 at 7:08:12 PM UTC-6 B Rey wrote:

Between the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org) copies and the GitHub mirror, is there a need to replicate the site? 

The git mirror is inherently incomplete, and while the Wayback Machine could in principle mirror the public-facing content, it isn't going to get all of the underlying repository structure, even were its developers so rude as to redesign their spiders to defeat Fossil's anti-bot defenses.

Fortunately, everyone in this group should have at least one clone of the repository, creating a pretty good backup.

More projects should use Fossil.