In this week’s newsletter
Nostalgic about technology? We are too! Also how to have fun with Windows 95, discuss Internet history, be mad about HP calculators, browse geeky old magazines, how to mod Australian boots, and computers can be personal — and sexy! Plus tips, tools, news and other stuff.
Enjoy this week’s issue of WServerNews and feel free to send us feedback on any of the topics we’ve covered — we love hearing from our readers 🙂
And Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!
Editor’s Corner
This is a short newsletter for end of year. Merry Christmas and Happy 2020!!!
Nostalgic about technology? We are too!
What’s your favorite tech nostalgia site? Since it’s almost Christmas we decided to have some fun and tell you some of ours. But tell us your own too by emailing us at [email protected] and we’ll mention it in one of our January newsletters in the new year.
Have fun with Windows 95
Ever want to go back to the days of your youth (or maybe even before you were born) and play around with Windows 95? You can do this right now by going to this page on the site PCjs Machines which has a Windows 95 demo you can actually explore and use!
https://www.pcjs.org/disks/pcx86/windows/win95/4.00.950/
The site has a whole library of virtual IBM PCs running different operating systems, applications and demos. Remember Lotus 1-2-3 for example? WordStar? Multiplan? Explore them right now by going here:
https://www.pcjs.org/disks/pcx86/
The site even has machine emulators for 8080- and 6502 systems you can play with:
What more could a geek want? 🙂
Talking about Internet history
Want to find out more about the history of the Internet? Want to ask the people who invented it? Some of them and many others can be found on the Internet History Mailing List:
http://www.postel.org/internet-history/index.html
Start by clicking the archive link in the second paragraph and you can browse list discussions by month and year dating all the way back to 2001 when those working on the Internet realized the lore of its beginnings might be lost if they didn’t start discussing it.
The Internet History List is hosted by the Postel Center, an organization that supports the Internet community through research and development projects, hosting visiting scholars and students in the spirit and in honor of the life-long accomplishments of Dr. Jonathan B. Postel, Internet pioneer. Never heard of Jon Postel before? Check this out:
http://www.postel.org/postel.html
Mad about HP calculators
Still my own favorite as far as sites about ancient (i.e. more than 2 or 3 decades ago) technologies is the Museum of HP Calculators:
There you can find the Main Exhibit Hall starting with the first HP calculator in 1968 going up to later models in the 80s of which I still own one and use fairly often:
Too bad I didn’t keep my first calculator, the HP-35. It would probably be worth a lot of money by now!
The Museum also hosts a discussion forum where you can ask questions and find answers about HP calculators, and about almost anything else that you’d like to ask former engineers (which is probably the main population of this discussion board) on some abstruse, technical subject:
https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/
The various forums on this message board are still quite active and are fun to browse when you’re bored with the latest new feature of Microsoft Azure (*yawn*)
There’s more for HP geeks
If you want to go deeper into Hewlett-Packard’s past you can check out the Hewlett Packard Archive:
Especially interesting for me since I have a background in Physics is the archive containing back issues of Measure magazine, which started in 1963 and continued until 2000. Measure magazine is a fascinating timeline of the history of Hewlett-Packard and the various products they developed. If you have an engineering bent of mind you should check it out here:
Just a byte, please!
And speaking of magazines, how many of us still remember Byte Magazine? The Internet Archive has rescanned back issues of this magazine which was highly influential among the computing community during the late 70s and throughout the 80s. Once again you can experience hours of fun — maybe even days of it once you get hooked — by browsing through the back issues of Byte found here:
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-rescans
and from Down Under…
…from Australia comes Paleotronic, a magazine of electronics, computing and videogame history. Check out the December issue which has a feature article about the Home Computer Christmas Wars of the late 70s:
https://paleotronic.com/2019/12/01/the-home-computer-christmas-wars/
Speaking of Australia though, not everything my dear Aussie friends make is perfect. For example, I recently bought a pair of these Blundstone boots:
Well, those tabs on the back and front you can use to pull the boots onto your feet, I think they look kinda dorky.
So I cut mine off:
I mean, who rolls up the cuffs of their jeans nowadays anyways? Not us geeks!
Which brings up a question I’ve always wondered about and maybe some of our Australian readers can answer:
How can you celebrate Christmas Down Under when December is the hottest time of the year?
Send your comments and criticisms to me at [email protected]
PS: Merry Christmas mate 😉
Computers can be personal — and sexy!
And finally we just can’t end this look into the nostalgia of the early personal computing revolution without pointing you to this sexy cover from a German computing magazine from back in the crazy 80s:
https://www.old-computers.com/fun/default.asp
We won’t comment any further since this is a G-rated newsletter 😉
Got more thoughts about anything in this newsletter?
Email us at [email protected]!
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Tip of the Week
>> Got any IT pro tips you’d like to share with other readers of our newsletter? Email us at [email protected]
Check for infection by a boot sector virus
From Fred Langa comes the following helpful tip for users of Windows PCs:
How do you detect if your computer has a boot sector virus? (Langa.com)
https://langa.com/index.php/2019/11/20/how-do-you-detect-if-your-computer-has-a-boot-sector-virus/
More information about Windows Defender Offline can be found on Microsoft’s website:
Run and review the results of a Windows Defender Offline scan (Microsoft Docs)
Admin Toolbox
>> Got any admin tools or software you’d like to recommend to our readers? Email us at [email protected]
From all of us at Veeam®, we wish you happy holidays. This holiday season, Veeam is giving away three incredible, FREE prizes. Win a Home Lab worth $15,000 Plus: $5,000 in AWS or Azure credits.
http://www.wservernews.com/go/kltoonfx/
Rush is a cross-platform command-line tool for executing jobs in parallel:
https://github.com/shenwei356/rush
Windows Firewall Notifier extends the default Windows embedded firewall by allowing to handle and notify about outgoing connections, offers real time connections monitoring, connections map, bandwidth usage monitoring and more:
https://github.com/wokhansoft/WFN
Ir-rescue is a Windows Batch script and a Unix Bash script to comprehensively collect host forensic data during incident response:
https://github.com/diogo-fernan/ir-rescue
Factoid – Alexa can spoil your Christmas
We’ll catch up on reader responses to our factoid questions early in the new year. In the meantime let’s move on to this week’s factoid:
Fact: Some things are better left unsaid in the presence of Alexa
Source: https://nypost.com/2019/11/30/alexa-ruins-christmas-by-blurting-out-girls-gift/
Question: Do any of our readers use an Amazon Echo or other so-called “intelligent personal assistant” in their home? What do you think of it?
Email your answer to [email protected]
Conference calendar
>> Got an IT conference or event happening that you’d like to promote in our newsletter? Email us at [email protected]
Microsoft Business Applications Summit
April 20-21, 2020 in Anaheim, California
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/BusinessApplicationsSummit
Microsoft Build
May 19-21, 2020 in Seattle, Washington
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/build
Microsoft Inspire
July 20-24, 2020 in Las Vegas, Nevada
https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/inspire
Podcast Corner
We’ll catch up on podcasts in the new year.
New on Techgenix.com
Collecting Office 365 mailboxes with external forwarding using PowerShell
Mailboxes in Office 365 configured to allow external forwarding is a security risk and compliance issue. Here’s how to find those mailboxes with PowerShell.
https://techgenix.com/office-365-mailboxes-external-forwarding/
Exchange Online mailboxes capabilities: Check them with PowerShell
Here’s a PowerShell script to ensure the capabilities assigned to Exchange Online mailboxes match with the number that admins have documented.
https://techgenix.com/xchange-online-mailboxes-capabilities/
Review: IT ecosystem monitoring solution NetCrunch 10.6
You need to monitor your IT infrastructure to avoid disasters. NetCrunch 10.6 is a monitoring solution for your entire IT ecosystem. Here’s our review.
https://techgenix.com/monitoring-solution-netcrunch-10-6/
Check Exchange Online storage mailbox policies with PowerShell
The PowerShell script provided in this article can be very handy when you need to evaluate Exchange Online storage mailbox policies in Office 365.
https://techgenix.com/exchange-online-storage-mailbox-policies/
Collecting deleted Office 365 users license status with PowerShell
You certainly don’t want deleted Office 365 users to still be under an Office 365 license. Here’s a PowerShell script to check deleted users’ status.
https://techgenix.com/collecting-deleted-office-365-users/
Fun videos from Flixxy
Santa Claus And Reindeer On The Road In Finland
The real Santa Claus from Lapland, Finland, and his reindeer are on the road again to distribute the Christmas gifts to the children all around the world:
https://www.flixxy.com/santa-claus-and-reindeer-on-the-road-in-finland.htm
Santa Cat
Well you can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a Santa cat, no time to talk!
https://www.flixxy.com/santa-cat.htm
Dogs and Cats – Santa’s Elves Making Toys
Cats and dogs dressed as Santa’s Elves build toys with a little help of their human friends:
https://www.flixxy.com/dogs-and-cats-are-santas-elves-making-toys.htm
Fred Astaire – ‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town’
From the ending of the film ‘Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town’ with the Fred Astaire mailman giving us words of wisdom, followed by the title song:
https://www.flixxy.com/fred-astaire-santa-claus-is-coming-to-town.htm
More articles of interest
Full virtualization vs. paravirtualization: What are the key differences?
Hyper-V and VMware are in a perpetual battle for supremacy in the virtualization market. Although the two hypervisors have similar features, capabilities are somewhat different. Explore those differences here.
NSX Intelligence evolves network security and load balancing
NSX Intelligence can bolster your zero-trust network security, provide microsegmentation analytics and balance loads in your network. Learn more about this new VMware product.
Infrastructure-as-code testing strategies to validate a deployment
IaC, when implemented correctly, can benefit enterprises’ CD pipelines. But, when IT teams fail to test the code before deployment, things can go awry. Learn several testing strategies here.
How to lock down rising Office 365 costs
Avoid springing a money leak in your Office 365 tenant by keeping closer tabs on several areas and following more frugal practices.
Send us your feedback!
Got feedback about anything in this issue of WServerNews? Email us at [email protected]