This appears to be Douglas Adams’ nicely messy office and his cable spaghetti’d computer setup – complete with what appears to be a fantastic stack of external SCSI drives. Taken from this clip of October 1996’s ‘Break The Science Barrier with Richard Dawkins‘, this footage was likely filmed in the summer of that year.
A somewhat oddly rendered Feb 2024 google.com in Netscape 4 on Red Hat Linux 5.2. I suppose we’re lucky a 26 old browser can access google at all..!
Introduction
One of my longer-running goals for Period Sites in Period Browsers was to include a good number of non-Windows hosted web browsers and the first stage in that is the creation of a functioning instance of the operating system hosted within an easily managed virtual machine. Unfortunately, whenever I’ve tried to install premillennial versions of linux within QEMU, I have categorically failed.
And, given the lack of guides on the internet, I’m not the only one.
In this guide we’re going to install and configure a working (albeit non-perfect) version of 1998’s Red Hat Linux 5.2. By the end of this guide we will produce a Red Hat Linux 5.2 install with a working network connection and functioning XWindows/Desktop environment.
Grail 0.6 running on the release to manufacturing version of Windows 98. Grail 0.6 is interesting as it’s a cross platform browser written by Guido van Rossum in Python and uses the Tcl/Tk windowing toolkit for display. Was Windows 98 the ideal platform for Grail? Probably not, but it did run and it did pretty well with pre-millennial web pages…
Alt: And it doesn’t pop up a box every time asking you to use your real name. In fact, there’s no way to set your name at all. You just have to keep reminding people who you are.
…though I suppose these days the final caption should probably be switched to ‘But at least it’s not fucking Reddit…’