#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #DEC #VAX #VAXstation #OpenVMS #VMS_Mosaic

Catch of the Day: A Dinosaur on the Web – OpenVMS on a VAXstation! 🦖

Hey Retro Fans!

When we think of retro computing, most of us picture a beige tower PC, a C64, or an Amiga. But yesterday, our bouncer welcomed a true heavyweight from the depths of professional IT history:

VMS_Mosaic 4.0 on OpenVMS V7.3 (VAXstation 4000-VLC)!

Let that user agent sink in for a moment. DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) was once a giant of the computer industry. Their VAX architecture and the accompanying OpenVMS operating system are absolute legends, famous for a level of stability that modern systems can often only dream of.

The VAXstation 4000-VLC ("Very Low Cost") hit the market in the very early 90s—a compact UNIX/VMS machine for professional use. The fact that someone in 2026 fires up this machine, launches the graphical Motif interface, and browses FrogFind using the native VMS_Mosaic browser is absolutely mind-blowing. It proves once again: With the right bridge (and FrogFind!), no architecture is too old for the internet.

A reverent toast to indestructible DEC hardware!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

Checked in on the Forkiverse

/public/local == "Live Feed"

for the first time in a very, very long time

Months, probably

Clinging to 1,036 Active Viewers according to their own stats and according to mastodon.fediverse.observer

Still virtually no #Hashtag usage

Still no apparent participation with the outer #Mastodon / #Fediverse at large

Running on Mastodon v4.5.9 despite all the "forky" nonsense

It's a "fork" of nothing

ho hum...

Here: https://theforkiverse.com/public/local

#Forkiverse #HardFork #SearchEngine

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #PowerPC #PowerFox #MacosX #Macos #apple

Catch of the Day: PowerFox on PowerPC – The community never gives up! 🦊⚡

Hey Retro Fans!

Many believe that old architecture eventually just becomes useless for the modern web. But our bouncer fished a browser out of the FrogFind pond today that proves the exact opposite:

PowerFox 128.0 on Mac OS X (PowerPC)!

For those who might not know: PowerFox (similar to TenFourFox or InterWebPPC) is a passionate community project. It's based on modern Mozilla engines but is painstakingly ported, tweaked, and compiled to run on old PowerPC processors (like the G4 or G5). Seeing a version number like "128.0" on a PowerPC is almost paradoxical—it's an attempt to squeeze current web standards onto hardware that Apple buried almost 20 years ago.

The fact that someone takes the time to boot up a G4 Mac, compile (or install) PowerFox, and use it to browse FrogFind is a wonderful sign of how dedicated the retro Mac community is.

Long live the PowerPC!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#Business #Guidelines
Google AI search optimization for your website · What Google recommends for AI search visibility https://ilo.im/16cyt5

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#Google #SearchEngine #AI #SEO #Visibility #Content #Website #Development #WebDev #Frontend

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #sgi #sgiindy #indy #irix #netscape #navigator

Catch of the Day: A visit from the SGI graphics forge! 🦖

Hey Retro Fans!

While many of us still had gray towers sitting under our desks in the late 90s, the world of high-end graphics looked completely different. And today, we had a visitor straight from that world:

Netscape Navigator 4.75C-SGI on an SGI IRIX system!

This is absolutely mind-blowing! SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) built workstations that were as expensive as sports cars and as powerful as mainframes. Whether it was "Jurassic Park," "Terminator 2," or the architecture of the Nintendo 64—all of it was developed on SGI machines running the IRIX operating system.

The fact that today, in 2026, someone fires up their SGI Indy, Indigo, or perhaps even a massive Octane workstation, launches the Netscape 4.75C customized exclusively for IRIX, and browses the web on FrogFind simply goes to show: True hardware legends never die.

A reverent greeting to the lucky owner of this UNIX dream machine!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

Omnisearch - A lightweight metasearch engine written in C

https://git.bwaaa.monster/omnisearch/about/

#HackerNews #Tech #SearchEngine

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #omniweb #nextstep #next #nextcube

Catch of the Day: Greetings from the Forefather of the Web! 🧊

Hey Retro Fans!
Hold on to your hats because last night we had a visit from absolute IT royalty on our server. Our bouncer logged this magical combination:

OmniWeb 3.1rc1 on a NeXTSTEP system!

Let that sink in for a moment. NeXTSTEP is the operating system Steve Jobs developed after he (temporarily) left Apple. And even more importantly: It was exactly such a NeXT system (the famous NeXTcube) on which Tim Berners-Lee programmed the very first web server and the first web browser in the world at CERN in 1990!

The fact that someone today is using NeXTSTEP and the legendary OmniWeb browser (which was developed exclusively for this platform in 1995) to find their way onto the modern internet via FrogFind is a goosebump moment for any tech historian. This isn't just retro—this is time travel to the architectural roots of Mac OS X and the World Wide Web itself.

A reverent toast to that magnificent black box cube!
Your FrogFind Team 🐸

Just discovered for myself (even though apparently it is 5 years old) another rare bird - an independent search engine running its own webcrawler & index (most alternatives like DuckDuckGo & Startpage just use Bing or Google's) - and this one is foss, & returned some nicely relevant answers in my quick tests.
https://marginalia-search.com/

Nice to have another option! (along with Mojeek)