In Search of Lost Time

Screenshot from about 1999, as there's a headline about Clinton's impeachment. It's Netscape Communicator, running on Windoes 98, open to the Altavista search engine.

AltaVista!

For several years, AltaVista was my go-to search engine. Yahoo! feels like the first I used, and I generally used Webcrawler, but for important and difficult searches, there was nothing better than AltaVista.

I was resistant to Google for a long time.


A screenshot of Windows 95, showing the My Briefcase folder.

I have absosmurfly no idea what the Windows 95 My Briefcase folder was for. I can tell you this — I never used it. It’s like the 3D Objects folder on my Windows 10 system at Diamond; as many times as Office tried to save something there (and it did!), I had absolutely no need for it, didn’t want it, wished I could get rid of it.

The screenshot above shows the direction, “This folder contains files you want to work on at a different computer,” so maybe it was some sort of syncing folder?

Projecting my mind backwards through the decades, I feel like I would want to use it like the new Projects folder in Linux. I went ahead and set it up in Linux Mint, and the subfolders it it as actually symlinks to folders elsewhere (Documents, Pictures), so that what I’m working on right now can be found in a curated, top-level location.

Probably not how My Briefcase worked.


An aerial photo of the White House, showing a ginormous, multicolored, bouncy castle situared where the illegally demolished East Wing stood as late as last year.

Donald Trump is a chud, and his cognitive collapse due to worsening dementia is increasingly difficult to ignore — he had a third physical in 13 months yesterday at Walter Reed — but if he brought in a bouncy castle onto the White House grounds instead of a ballroom and fuhrer-bunker and made it open and free to the public, that would be pretty awesome. It might even raise his standing in my eyes by, I dunno, a point or two.


Screenshot of an ad on Facebook, showing a LEGO-esque astronomical observatory on a monntaintop

A LEGO-esque astronomical observatory on a mountaintop.

Facebook, you know me well!

Again, something that would be cool to have, but also something that 1) I can’t afford at the moment (maybe when I find a new job?) and 2) I don’t have any room for.

Still, it looks fantastic and it makes my heart yearn.

Published by Allyn Gibson

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over fifteen years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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