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1. Abandoned (doctormo@fosstodon.org)'s status on Sunday, 19-Feb-2023 08:23:03 JST Abandoned

   Hey linux user!

   You have been recruited by a mad south african billionaire who's invented a time travel machine. There's just enough fuel to send himself with a pocket full of diskettes to the early 1980s and he wants you to select the linux and foss packages which will be used to beat Microsoft and Apple. You must select software is a) runnable on the hardware of the time, b) plausibly of the era while c) better than anything then available.

   What do you choose?

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Sunday, 19-Feb-2023 08:26:06 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     @doctormo Wayland & SQLite comes to mind!

     Also it probably would be good to have an edge (on inclusivity) in the office-suite race, so would Harfbuzz & FreeType be good candidates? The graphical capabilities at the time were quite limited, but they could run well with a display-list rasterizer graphics chip!

     The tricky aspect is "how well could I pass off broad internationalization as being plausibly of that era?" Could I bring back the Unicode spec?

   • Abandoned (doctormo@fosstodon.org)'s status on Sunday, 19-Feb-2023 08:28:19 JST Abandoned

     in reply to

     • Adrian Cochrane

     @alcinnz

     An entire book of specifications retitled "things i stole from xerox park 1982” but just happens to have css4, emoji and svg packed inside it. haha

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Sunday, 19-Feb-2023 08:37:21 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     @doctormo Oooo! eSpeak!

     Would need some talented-linguist as a patsy to give all the credit to, but in terms of the code itself...

     Yeah, CSS4 *could* suit. But SVG would require powerful CPUs for the time, PostScript did & they're roughly equivalent.

     It is amusing that printers at the time had more powerful CPUs than the computer they were connected to...

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Feb-2023 06:04:20 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     @doctormo Other strong contenders: It would be more than worth taking back some modern codecs! Those could serve a real need back then with the internet speeds of the day!

     I'm specifically thinking FLAC & QOI.
     https://qoiformat.org

     I'd also consider videoformats, but I doubt any of those could run on even a supercomputer in the 1980s...