I've been out of the loop on pretty much everything lately, but while updating my More Links page I noticed that the great Hobbes archive at https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/ is shutting down this April.
OS/2 has been one of my great loves in software for quite a long time, and Hobbes never failed to amaze me with how extensive and still-updated it is. They offer a TAR of the entire thing you can download, and people are talking about taking it over, but still nothing can compare to an archive dating back to around 1990 that you could STILL add software to. Getting a port of ONScripter-EN added to Hobbes always was one of my goals that I never managed to achieve in time.
I clicked a few more links on my links page and noticed several totally gone now. The decline of all things good on the internet is stifling.
On Ars Technica's article about the shutdown, this comment was posted by "JnyJny":
> For some historical perspective, calvin.nmsu.edu and hobbes.nmsu.edu were originally a pair of NeXT machines hosted in the NMSU Small Systems Graduate Computer Lab in Jacobs Hall. The machines had 8Mb of memory, a small amount of storage and the 256Mb magneto-optical drives. The earliest they would have been available was likely spring of 1990 but probably that summer or fall. The NeXT machines were in counter-point to an early IBM POWER 320, some SPARC shoe boxes, and an IBM RT we referred to as "boatanchor". I worked in the Small Systems lab for most of my time at NMSU which started in the fall of 1998 1989 while studying computer science. I named them Calvin & Hobbes since they were a pair and I was a casual fan of the comic. Other names in the running were names of various igneous rock which were generally shouted down as being too hard to spell or remember. Sorry Dave.
> We noodled around a lot with those machines, mostly playing with Mathematica and Interface Builder. On Calvin we ran various MUDs that were sort of popular but in general caused a lot of drama. I wasn't much involved with the OS/2 Warp archive other than setting up anonymous FTP and keeping an eye on it to make sure it didn't consume too much storage. I goofed up permissions for the chroot jail once which resulted in a large amount of porn magically appearing on the machine. I had some explaining to do when that came to light. At some point we put some bigger hard drives in both of them, upgraded the main board and added more memory but to be honest I'm foggy on those details. I lost track of those machines when I left NMSU and suspect the hardware retiring in April isn't the hardware it started on. But it'd be nice to think those machines lived this long.
> January 29, 2024 at 11:41 pm
"_fluffy" replied:
> I ran the Hobbes archive for several years in the late 90s, as a student working for ICT (then called CANTO) when stewardship of Hobbes had been taken over by Dave Rocks.
> By that time it had been moved over to a repurposed/otherwise-decommissioned AIX server (an RS/6000, as I recall). I was the person behind completely reorganizing the file structure, which was controversial at the time, and I also redesigned the site and wrote the original search engine. As far as I can tell the code I wrote is no longer powering the site but the design is still pretty much the same as how I'd designed it (although with the HTML cleaned up somewhat and converted to CSS for layout).
> I think that the original NeXT that Hobbes ran on was in a pile in the hallway. I remember booting it up once and the monitor was very dim and the hardware just limped along. It felt sad.
> January 30, 2024 at 4:20 am