Retrocomputing on Reclaim TV

Reclaim Hosting has been streaming every Friday at 10 AM for a while now. We use Reclaim TV as the channel, and Taylor Jadin and Pilot Irwin did a recent stream breaking down the details of that process. A stream about streams…

One of the fun Reclaim TV developments has been the retrocomputing episodes I’ve been part of over the last month or two. It started with Taylor and I doing a stream about Protoweb, a proxy web service that’s designed to let you browse the web of yesteryear. Taylor demonstrated this brilliantly in that episode using his MiSTer running Windows 95.

That stream inspired me to fill some empty Friday streaming slots with some of my trials and tribulations of re-visiting Windows 98. I have at least two machines running this operating system, and it’s been quite eye-opening just how difficult relatively simple elements of computing were twenty-five years ago. So, I followed-up the Protoweb stream with another about the “Pain and Pleasure of Retrocomputing with Windows 98.” This one dives into running virtual ISO images using Daemon Tools to create a virtual CD-ROM drive. This allows you access to an unlimited treasure trove of old programs and games via the Internet Archive, which harbors a vast collection of software from this era. I demoed games that you can easily run off ISO images from the archive, such as Moto Racer (1997) and NHL 97, two of my favorites back in the day.

And just last Friday I did yet another retro computing episode, this time focusing on getting a 3COM Etherlink PCI ethernet card installed in my Windows 98 desktop machine so that I could get online and access Protoweb. I was able to get the card installed ahead of time and talked through the process, but the real gold was using Protoweb to surf old websites archived on the Wayback Machine. I visited UCLA’s website from 1996, and it was truly amazing. The main page was a very 90s image map, that had a pizza pie-like effect highlighting all the different “slices” of the university.

UCLA’s website in 1996 was an image map

The Explore button in the top-right corner leads you to another image map of the campus, this time with everything from an Arcade to a Coffee House.

Image map of UCLA campus from 1996 “Explore” website add-on

The arcade leads you to a Shockwave game that actually loaded for me in the video, and I could play it cleanly on the stream, which was amazing!

The Arcade has an interactive Shockwave video game called Labryinth wherein you control the marble in a maze with the number lock arrow keys

After that I went to the Coffee House which had a wide open public chatroom—can you imagine?

The Coffee House on UCLA’s 1996 website had a public chat room

Anyway, I fell down a rabbit hole of the 90s web using Protoweb, and it was really fun, and that marks the third video in what might be considered a retrocomputing strain of Reclaim TV, and I have a feeling there will be more to come.

https://www.youtube.com/live/THO9LeAX-A0?si=BlZzw6CIr7jv_S4s