The Lost Byte is a system that has evolved over 20 years. In its birth it was a prototype 8080 system that was breadboarded together. During its evolved to a Timex Sinclair, an Atari 800XL, to a black and white 8286 and a 33 Meg 486 Machine. The name "The Lost Byte" originated from The name of the BBS that I ran out of Brockton, Mass. The Lost Byte has never been a state of the art system, but has always been intended to be a practical home system that I can work and play with. The software and hardware listed below represent what I have found to work to do the job cheaply and easily. This page is not intended to be for vanity purposes but is a suggestion for what might work for others,.
Hardware
1.4 Meg HZ Intel
256 Megs of Memory
30 Gig & 8 GigHard Drive
AGP NVidia Riva TNT2 Model 64
16 Bit on Board Sound
ACER 12x8x32 R/W CD
Printer HP Deskjet 930C
A
reasonably priced printer fast. And very high quality printing capabilities,
particularly its photographic mode. Its a work horse and works beautifully right out of the box.
Speakers Generic Crap,
Cheap piece of crap, that was over priced
at the time.
Cirque Glidepoint Touch Pad
No more stinking mice!! Works real
well and is real easy to keep clean.
Sony MVC-CD1000 Digital Camera
2 Mega Pixal X 10 zoom and
it stores on Mini CD ROM! Most photos on this
site are taken with this camera. A wonderful funtional
piece of equipment
UMAX Astra 600P Digital Color
Scanner
An old Standby that still works great. A 8 1/2" X 14" printer port scanner. With Adobe Photo Deluxe 2.0 Makes beautiful scans. A scanner is real handy to copy paper work, faxing or scanning web photo's
Networking and Internet Connectivety.
Network Map.
Two computers are networked full time via Linksys BEFW11S4V4 which is a 2.4G HZ 802.11b Wireless router Equality's machine has a wireless NIC and The Lost Byte is hard plugged in. My printer is shared and we share a couple of folders between us. There is a of Lap tops that we occassionally hard plug into the system. The Router is connected to a Speedstream ADSL modem. This small network is mostly transparrent to us, and allows us to move files easily between systems, share Printer connections, and share the single internet connection.
Internet Connectivety:
SBC is my DSL provider. They switched from Prodigy to Yahoo as their content provider. Yahoo doesn't provide web space. Fortunatly I was grandfathered in with a generous web space arrangement. Right now I have content in 2 of the sites. and both are underutilized. My connection is about 390/120 bps Slow for a DSL connection, but adequate for our needs.
I use a couple of online services worth mentioning. For usenet news I rely heavily on Individual.net If you aren't expecting binaries this is a nice low cost news server. The Blog is maintained with www.blogger.com It is a simple easy way to start and maintain a blog they will even provide webspace if you don't have your own.
Software:
Windows 2000
Profesional Original version
.
Web browser Internet Explorer
6.02
Its big its, huge and its all a part of the Bill Gates conspiracy to take over the world. It does work and works well. I have found that it works a little faster and crashes a little less often than Netscape, So its become my primary browser. I'm fairly happy with it, but I wouldn't recommend it over Netscape Communicator. I have decided that I'm not going through the upgrade paths again with either browser, Its just not worth the download time and the disk space. The organization of Outlook combined with it makes it a potentially very powerful tool. It supports Java and all the major plug-ins. The biggest concern and headaches that I have with IE is that in typical Microsoft fashion it insists on being installed in Drive C: and that it takes over the system. The set up process changes associations and installs itself all over drive C:. The tight integration can be confusing. I'm still trying to figure out how to read my mail and leave it on the server using IE and Exchange. The price is tough to beat also. Its free, with very few strings attached. See http://www.microsoft.com for more info.
Web browser, Netscape Communicator 6.1
I've used Netscape since the 1.0 days. I would still use it almost exclusively if it were stable. Most of these pages were originally done in with Netscape Composer. Although I seldom use it any more for that. I've mostly outgrown it, while it still is big bulky and very slow loading. I
See http://www.netscape.com for more
details.
HTML Interdev 6.0 and .NET 1.0
I use lots of editors, depending on what I'm trying to do. But these days Interdev is used most of all, The ease of going from WYSIWYG to Source code to View is what has me hooked. It works well with my very slow laptop also,
News and Mail, Forté
Agent 1.93
I use this program, for almost all my mail and usenet news, and am a Beta tester for it. It has been in a constant evolution ever since I started using it. The biggest strength it has is its anti-spam capabilities. It is primarily billed as an off-line news reader. As an E-mail program it has filtering and sort into folders capabilities . The editor is not very sophisticated, but it does have spell checking. learning and setting up the filters can be confusing, and difficult. But the elimination of spam make this a rewarding task. There is a manual being worked on by the good folks at Forté but at this time it is nonexistent. A user is does have excellent help files and a couple of FAQs at their disposal. Agent automatically converts to Free Agent after a trial period, It doesn't have mail, filtering, nor a host of other great features. But, It does a good job of getting e-mail and fetching binary UUE post of the news groups. It is a great way to try out the way Agent does things, before you cough up the $29.95. You can get both Agent and Free Agent at ftp.forteinc.com . You will have to pay for the key to get Agent to run though. More information can be found at http://www.forteinc.com .
Forte is currently working in Version 2.0 to be released "real soon now:" I am looking forward to using this looong wating Version.
If you are a current user (Free) Agent and are looking for help you might find what you are looking for here:
Ago
by John Zonk
The all mighty effwun
PGP 6.58 CKT
I use an
unauthorized version of PGP. This particular versio is is no longer
supported by FAid, but it suits my needs just fine. The current
version is 8.0 and is available for free. I reccomend PGP and its GPG cousin. I prefer to accept
mail as PGP encoded. A search for Ghengus Khan on the most
common key servers will find me. My public key is also on link
below.. I don't receive nor encode mail often. But this is handy
to have when you need it J
This represents "The Lost Byte". But is not all inclusive .of all the software and hardware that is here. It is not a tutorial on any of the software., but it is what seems to work here for me. There are some topics I hope to expand on, but if I waited till I was finished this page would never be posted.. I have also considered extending mIRC and Agent to their own pages with some tutorial information.. I suspect that mIRC will be coming out with a new version soon and Agent will have a new manual released within a few weeks. There are many pages right now. that cover these programs. Please give me feedback on how you might want this page to evolve. Loaded on this machine is image editing software, Visual Studio and other programming software and many other programs. I hope at some point I will be able to explain and review more of these programs.