I'm sick at home (again: two days in a row, although I worked from home yesterday; today I'm far to looped (get it?) to write code). I have some throat ailment that prevents me from speaking until I croak for a couple hours. Then I just have this raspy voice and annoying phlegm/cough problem associated with that tickle in the back of your throat which causes a non-productive cough. You know the one: that cough you get when you breathe in too much and some reflex gets triggered. That one. This morning I finally got a fever. I was wondering when I'd get sick all the way.

Anyway, I decided to medicate with Dayquil. About an hour after I did so, I realized that I was sitting in front of my PC staring at nothing who knows how long. I was in some weird trance-like state, and all I could think about was this game called Scorched Earth I used to play a lot on my 25 MHz 386SX. It's a simple shooting-across-the-hill game, were you have tiny guns and you take turns setting the barrel angle and powder charge. It has computer players and different weapons you can by and physics models and weather and such. My old roommate in Tucson once made hot toddies when we were both at home sick, and we played Scorch for about 18 hours straight. I think that was what reminded me of it.

I decided I really wanted to play again. Instead of go online and find a copy (duh), I went hunting through my 10-year-old collection of about 500 floppies for it. I finally found it after about 100 tries. Sadly, floppies aren't the most robust storage medium; I couldn't copy all the files I needed off the disk. Oddly enough my interest in playing Scorch waned right about that time, and I started digging through more floppies in sort of unspecified treasure hunt. I suppose if you're not looking for anything in particular, you're bound to find something.

I came across a couple disks (that I could actually read; I'd estimate about 1/2 of the ones I tried were defective in some way) that had old web stuff. One had the very first web site I ever made, circa summer 1994. Another had Tucson BBS info. One had various winsock utilities (Windows 3.1 didn't have a TCP/IP stack, and you had to install one to get on the Net). Another had a copy of the first graphical web browser I ever used: Mosiac Netscape 0.9 beta. Let me tell ya, when you're coming off using Lynx on a dial-up through a SLIP account from the university library, seeing online pictures and marked-up text was quite the spectacle. No more saving geological images off gopher, no sir. You get your pics right there. I wish I had saved the browser cache. I'd love to see if those sites are still up and what they looked like back then.

So I've been browsing around with Mosaic Netscape version 0.9 beta for a while now. I even took a screen grab of it. Most sites don't even render, and the directory buttons (the ones that go to certain hard-coded web sites when you clicked the button) don't go anywhere but 404-land. Pages with JavaScript show up with the code up at the top of the page; this version of Netscape didn't even know about HTML comments. I tried to post this entry with it, actually, until I remembered: Netscape didn't even do forms until version 2.0. I'm going to go see if I can find my old copy of Eudora 2.1.2.