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Comment by JdeBP | Hacker News Reader

The only rather sad part is around 2/3 of the way through, where the author had to use a pre-compiled binary from the Internet Archive, because the original WWW site had rotted away, and the source code did not assemble. This stuff tends to rot if the community does not do the preservation work.

That said, Sergey Bulba's WWW site is still around and the relevant stuff can be found today at https://ay.strangled.net/progr_e.htm . But the continued existences of things like this are not the sort of things to take for granted.

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Hi! This hit HN after I had gone to bed so only picking up on it now. Thanks for finding that link and letting me know, I've updated the article with a note and your link.

One of the uncomfortable realities I've encountered being involved in the retro scene is that so many of the resources are slowly disappearing, either because the original authors age out of the scene or loose interest (or sadly, many are approaching that age where natural causes are taking them from us), old companies are long since defunct and resources slowly disappear into a legal quagmire or no-one ever thought to archive them in the first place.

I'd never want to jump in and steal your thunder, Mark - but that's partly why I'm building Code Like It's 198x over at https://code198x.com, and the sibling projects that form the rest of the 198x family, including emulators, assemblers and other build tools.

Too many of these resources are gone already, or require particular combinations of old operating systems and libraries to run at all. And in many cases, blog posts, articles, even books, are becoming hard to find. I decided to try to collate as much information as possible in one place.

Caveat: I've used AI extensively to do the research and writing, but I've attempted to cite all material from primary sources and every code sample gets tested not just in my own tooling but in existing third-party tooling too (just in case I made a mistake).

What's your thoughts on making that all available as a bloody great self-hostable archive so everyone gets to have a copy, juuuuuust in case?

I'd be more than happy for EVERYONE to fork it, download it, whatever. It's all open-source on GitHub, as are the related projects.

Awesome.

The way the Internet should be.

I mean, I'd love it if the wider community got behind my effort and helped me improve it directly, but the important thing is that the material is out there.

Apart from being on a Microsoft service and requiring Microsoft accounts to interact with. At least cloning still works in one direction.

(Love the project, though.)

I was considering mirroring to GitLab, would that help? I'd be open to anything similar as long as it doesn't cause me a whole bunch of extra work :)

so good!!

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed!

> This stuff tends to rot if the community does not do the preservation work.

This is one of the areas where I'm actually pretty okay with getting LLMs to do the "junior dev" work. Here, take this, look up what that compiler error means, change the thing it's bitching about to be written the modern way please.

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