As is tradition (well, I’ve decided that it’s my tradition), I’m doing #AdventOfCode on older hardware. I’m also a bit of a Windows 2000 fan, because … I don’t know why, weird irrational nostalgia, I guess. Either way, I’d like to do some Win2k thingie for AoC this year.

The minimum system requirements are a Pentium 133 and 32-64 MB of RAM. That’s pretty much exactly what I have. So, let’s try to install it.

The installation took well over an hour, but once it’s done, it’s actually quite usable. Here’s a video of the boot process (just takes about a minute) and a bit of web browsing:

https://movq.de/v/5dbc55dbaa/MVI_9356.MOV.mp4

It’s also the first time that I saw this screen (see below). Windows can’t power off the PC by itself, I have to push the button. I only knew similar screens from Win9x.

I don’t know yet which programming language I’ll use. Maybe Visual Basic? 🤪

#retrocomputing

Taking photos of these holographic CDs is ridiculously hard.

@movq Put them into a flat bed scanner and make multiple scans while rotating them.

At least with the scanner I used last time that kinda worked. Didn't look exceptionally pretty but ok-ish in the end.

@agowa338 Yeah, kind of, I can see where this is going. 🤔 If you’re really patient, I guess you could do this in small rotational increments. Could be cool.

How are you doing this, @dfx?

@movq @agowa338 I don't really deal with too many holographic discs. If I really need to, I try to take a static image in a flatbed scanner to get a good representation of it for my retro collection, but that's about it. Some discs are almost i possible to scan, though...