http://serentty.com

Serentty's Compunet

About Me

I, Serentty (real name withheld, but probably ridiculously easy to
find) am a linguistics student at York University in Toronto, and an
avid computer hobbyist. I collect the latest machines such as IBM
clones, Commodore 8-bitters, and dabble in networking.

About Serentty's Compunet

This page is being served from a 386SX at 25 MHz, running MS-DOS
6.22. This machine is from 1992, making it about as old as this new
information superhighway called the World Wide Web that I keep
hearing about. It currently has 4 MiB of RAM, and is connected
through a 38400 baud serial link. The HTML has all been written in
the MS-DOS editor (technically the FreeDOS one since it has some nice
features). This page will probably not be up 24/7 at first, since I
like using this machine for other things, but perhaps I will
eventually find some other way to host it using less power and making
less noise. VIC-20 maybe? Let me know if you would be okay with the
longer load times over 9600 baud.

CloudFlare!

I am not sure how everyone managed to do it, but you managed to
overload a state-of-the-art 386, leaving the site nearly entirely
unaccessible. Thankfully, there is a service called CloudFlare which
will cache requests. They probably have a lot of bandwidth--maybe even
a 115200 baud modem! They seem to be keeping up. The 386 is still
running and handling lots of requests.

This page is served using the brand-new UTF-8 encoding! Technically
it is only using the ASCII subset and is thus identical to ASCII at
the moment, and I will use HTML escapes for anything outside the
ASCII range. After all, UTF-8 is brand new and many browsers do not
support it yet. However, when the time comes, this page should be
future-proofed for the new, international and multilingual World Wide
Web! Look out for pages on here dealing with linguistics and ancient
languages in the future. Truly fitting for a website with a .COM
domain name--those are worth their weight in gold.

Projects

You can find my GitHub account here. I work on bringing support for
Rust-based development to the latest machines such as the Commodore
64 and 386 PCs. I have gotten Rust to compile for 386 DOS machines
before, but that stagnated after a while. Now that I have my 386
networked, I plan on getting protected mode through DPMI working,
since Rust and LLVM require at least a 386 anyway, and using a flat
memory model makes Rust's pointers and safety guarantees easier to
work with.

However, as a 386-class machine is expensive and out of reach for
many people, I am also excited to work with new technologies such as
LLVM-MOS to bring Rust to the Commodore 64 and VIC-20. A user called
MRK-ITS has already made a fork of the Rust compiler that targets
6502 processors and clones using LLVM-MOS, so I plan on working on
wrapper libraries and such that make acessing the VIC-II and SID easy
from Rust without having to poke around at hardware addresses
manually. The compiler will inline such functions and generate
assembly similar to what you would write by hand for these things in
many cases. We truly are living in a new age of structured
programming!

Accessing the World Wide Web

Many users of recent machines such as IBM clones, Tandy PCs,
Commodore 8-bitters, Amigas, and so on have reported issues accessing
the World Wide Web because of a technology called HTTPS which seems
not to have been updated to handle the latest browsers, such as
Netscape 3. To deal with this, there are many tools available that
will serve pages to you without HTTPS, such as Frogfind and The Old
Net.

Contact

You can reach me on GitHub (user: Serentty), or Discord (user:
Serentty#2181). Alternatively, mention @Serentty#2181 (the Discord
user) on #retrodreams on SlashNet IRC, and hopefully it will ping me.
No email address currently, since bots will mine it, but if this
website gets somewhere I might create one for feedback.

(c) SERENTTY ANNŌ DOMINĪ MMXXII