Stephen's Computer Page

Secure Website: We do not ask for any personal information!!! Increasingly I cannot access websites that lock themselves away behind security cyphers that are only on this weeks latest browser - my ancient PC will never have them but otherwise works fine. And some websites hide behind Cloudflare which hates me and stops me seeing them. Other hide behind Captcha which I can never get past. The most secure website in the world is in a handwritten notebook in the drawer of a locked filing cabinet in an unlit basement with no stairs, a crocodile, and is in the middle of a desert. So much for the information age....

Texas Instruments TI99/4A (1979-1983)

Creative Computing was one of the computing magazines I first read and subscribed to. What a delight- at last glance 35 issues on the web plus the three books "The Best Of...". Read computing history in Index to Creative Computing and read articles on Archive.org CC which goes back to before 1979.

Want a free Windows programming language? Goto MSW Logo -(from archive.org) and program for anything from a Pentium with W95 to the latest NT, ME or XP.
The Logo for Windows 3.1 for a 286 version may still be available on this link.
The Great Logo Adventure(here as a 3.6 megabyte zipped download from archive.org), supporting MSW Logo.
MSW logo is dormant but was superceded by fms logo which runs under Windows.

I have discovered and now use sdlBasic which exists in a 2012 build for win32 and deb and in a 2007 build as an rpm. You can see some of my programs at Stephen's sdlBasic routines.
There remain some excellent programs for DOS which cannot be run in Windows XP, or for a smaller number, in Dosbox under Linux or Windows XP. To run in a native DOS operating system you may need to get a copy of FreeDOS or Balder, one flavour of which runs from a floppy with no hard disk install or partitioning.

Archive web pages- solution

My website has a lot of links to archived pages on web.archive.org.
Note- if you access a page on web.archive.org which has a link on it to a page on archive.org, that link will be "double referenced" to archive org, like this:
(http://web.archive.org/web/20230915125046/http://web.archive.org/web/20110524004938/http://raymondscott.com/WB.html)
and archive org will say- sorry, can't do that. It won't tell you what to do though. Just remove the first occurring reference to web.archive.org so that the above url becomes instead:
(http://web.archive.org/web/20110524004938/http://raymondscott.com/WB.html)
and the page is yours to view!

PC Support:
New to the web? Help with manually preparing your web page - which can be much more efficient than using any web tool,
can be found at w3schools.com Help with html, css, xml, and lots more. The site works well without inline frames and without javascript except the "try this" portion.

Help- my link/bookmark gives a 404 Not Found.

Getting a 404 (Not found) on a website you need to see? You could go to the webarchive front page which incredibly insists upon you using scripting enabled! -and type the url into their search box, or Copy and Paste this text in front of the original URL (eg not in front of example.com/404.html) to see the latest (if any) snapshot from the web archive: http://web.archive.org/web/2028/
If you have a 404 from https://example.com, just paste that text in front and go to:
https://web.archive.org/web/2028/https://example.com
Once upon a time you could use "latest" instead of a date but now you need at least a year- and if you post a future date it will give you the latest. If you get an archived 404, adust the year backwards until you get a good result.

Textualise

Local Proxy: Privoxy

I have a need to access websites using elliptic curve HTTPS on an old browser. For a time I had to use external proxies. I have now installed my own proxy locally- "Privoxy"- available for windows, linux and apple. This does not hide my IP address but otherwise is highly configurable- and transparently allows me to see websites using elliptic curve without having to buy new hardware! It is highly configurable and can block tracking tricks such as single pixel graphics etc, and forward requests from my browser to abc.com instead to xyz.com (there are legitimate uses for this). For websites that refuse to serve content at all if your browser is more than a week old, the browser ID can be changed.
It can block page headers, amend webpages so that S*** becomes oops, and a very simple (eg not reliable!) parental filter and more.

Historic Statistics for visitors to this website

Expand or collapse this section to see the content- access key to toggle is x, see your browsers help on how to use accesskeys.

Ancient statistics expand/collapse

General changes to browser settings mean the numbers for periods are not directly comparable but generally indicitive.
Quite a large drop in visitors.
Oct 2015-689 UV..:June 2016-647 UV ..:.March 2017-778 UV :..Feb 2018 496 U visitors.


.........3/11...11/11..7/12...11/13...11/14..10/15...6/16..3/17..2/18

Op system: 

MS.......84%....75%....67%.....58%.....49%....44%....44%....50%...42%

Apple....10%....14%....14%.....20%.....30%....27%....24%....30%...33%

Android.........................7%......9%....14%....13%....15%...20%

Linux.....6%.....8%....11%.....11%.....10%.....8%.....9%.....5%....5%

Are you writing software or websites restricted to Windows 10 and given up supporting anything less???? 45% of my visitors using Windows in Feb 2018 were using versions less than 10. Visitors using MS continue to decline as Apple moves slowly towards dominance.

Browsers- Note that these can be spoofed:Chrome...20%....16%....22%....24%......30%....38%....42%...50%....52% Safari... 8%....10%....12%....17%......24%....23%....21%...26%....26% Firefox..36%....30%....25%....22%......21%....15%....14%...13%.....8% IE+Edge..36%....38%....28%....16%......15%....13%....10%...10%....11% And.Webk.......................7%.......3%.....2%.....2%... 0%--- Opera.....0%.....4%.....5%.....7%.......5%.....2%.....3%....2%---

The most popular sections of the web site - page views out of a total of 785 (1247 in March 2017) were:
TI99/4a section 235 views (30% of total, down from 47% in 2014 and 36% in 2016), a section of the web site in sharp decline and no longer worth the immense time maintaining;
Poco a Poco 105 views (13%), 112 views in 2016.
Moomin 109 views (14%) - 89 views in 2016.
St Thomas Church 77 views (10%)

There was a significant decline across the board, possibly due to Google searches becoming increasingly irrelevant. Moomin views seem to be holding up and this continues to be the most popular single page.
I wish I knew why people were still searching on the Poco so long after its demolition.
The once principal TI-99/4A section is declining rapidly now, and I receive zero feedback - and the indications are that with dropping viewers I can now stop maintaining the section.
There will be no newer stats as I have no access to server logs and there is no free service left that works for me.

Go to Stephen's Index Page .
Site History: 1997-2010 at BT Internet. Service closed down with 7 years notice. Mirror at Connectfree 2001-2012 (when service closed). 2010-2023 at Zen Internet (web service closed with 6 weeks notice!). 2023- at whtech.com with mirror at shawweb.co.uk

COMPUTER REFERENCE LINKS