But not at once. I have already found exactly the latest collection of software and documents, dated November 2005, that is, it turns exactly 15 years old. It is already recorded on DVD-R, the set of programs is not so complete anymore, working documents and music have been added for the volume. In any case, it turned out to be an interesting historical artifact, a repository of irrelevant and often non-working programs. There are no inscriptions on the disc at all, but I will call it traditionally: DISTR 2. Today there will be a story about my findings.
I keep a diary of a collector of old pieces of iron in Telegram .
Historical context
In 2005, events took place that now seem to be significant, but then it was not a fact that someone paid attention to them. For example, the YouTube service started working, the first video was uploaded there. Google bought the startup Android, and it was the right investment with long-term impact. EBay bought the Skype messenger, and it was the right investment (later resold to Microsoft at three times the price), but not long-term. Oh yeah, there was a big deal in the fashionable social networking arena where the News Corporation conglomerate bought MySpace for $ 580 million. And that was the wrong investment.
I remember 2005 for the revolutionary upgrade of my home Internet connection. It so happened that during the year I changed three rented apartments. The first had only a modem. On the second - ADSL from the Stream provider, initially at a speed of 128 kilobits per second, then there was an upgrade to 256 kilobits.
It's not even about speed (two active users easily consumed the entire channel), but about the constant availability of the Internet without the need to dial. It was incredibly cool, although now it is difficult to imagine that it is somehow different, that you have to "connect" to the Internet, and that most of the time you are actually disconnected from the network. The third apartment had a homebrew provider with space two megabits per second, but with a traffic limit of 20 gigabytes, ridiculous by the standards of 2020. They were often lacking until the end of the month.
As a mobile device, I still have a regular cell phone Sony Ericsson Z600, the iPaq hx4700 PDA is connected to it... Pocket computers on Windows Mobile or smartphones based on Symbian are present, but there is no fashion for them. Fans of hot new products prefer the Motorola Razr V3 , released in 2004. Computer - desktop, based on Pentium 4, with a 17-inch LCD display of mediocre quality. In 2020, I run the old software on a 2007 Sony Vaio TZ laptop (from the previous article ), it is slightly out of date, but the installed 32-bit Windows XP is mostly compatible with the set of programs.
Livejournal
Unlike DISTR 2002, in the folder with the software of 2005, nothing is broken down into categories, everything is dumped into one folder. Among them, there are two now-forgotten utilities for the Livejournal service. Official client of Semagic:
An irreplaceable utility for LJ, which was super popular at that time. If in ICQ in 2005 there was communication with acquaintances, then in LJ these acquaintances were made. Unlike modern times, with a rather strange atmosphere in any social network, 15 years ago the atmosphere in LiveJournal was "lamp-like", cozy, albeit with its own dramas. Many kept their Journals as real diaries, with a predominance of the "large" format (by the standards of later Twitter and Facebook). It was very exciting to read (write and discuss) "lydybry" about life, politics and technology, and the audience was naturally limited by the penetration of the Internet in the country.
In a couple of years, everything will change, I will put my magazine under lock and key, many friends and acquaintances will do the same, we will lock ourselves in our bubbles of communication - without early openness, it will become difficult to expand our circle of acquaintances. The equivalent of the current YouTube and Instragram stars are thousands of people - if you have more than a thousand friends, you are already considered popular. The counter of my LJ stopped somewhere at one and a half hundred, and this is actually enough. In 2020, the friend feed is almost not updated, but I visit LiveJournal regularly because of the old-timers who prefer the blog format to more modern, video and picture-focused social networks.
Semagic version 1.4 of February 2004, of course, cannot log in, but this is not necessary. An offline mode is provided, which is relevant at that time: you can write posts for future use, connect to the Internet and send in a batch. It is possible to manage different LJs or post to communities where you have access. Branded social network features are supported: choice of an avatar, Current Music (there was a possibility of automatic setting of the current track from Winamp or Foobar), posting, and so on.
The second utility is a little more specific - Alex LJ Downloader, a program for downloading the contents of your own (or someone else's) Journal, which creates a set of HTML files, each with a separate post with comments, or all posts on one page. The archive of my magazine is in the same place, alas, without pictures, but this is better than nothing. In Livejournal itself, my earliest entries from 2001-2003 were saved with a broken encoding, and images from (at that time) a separate LJPlus hosting are no longer available.
Music and iPod
In 2005, I put together my first large collection of music on a PC, digitize CDs, buy my first 40 gigabyte iPod - and get the opportunity to take my entire music library with me, entirely. Handling thousands of music files is becoming increasingly difficult, and most importantly, Apple's infrastructure requires careful tagging of each file. Any other hardware MP3 player can play directly from folders, and tags are optional. The capabilities of the standard (in the previous seven years) WinAMP player are no longer enough.
Nevertheless, it is present in distributions, in version 5.05, with the ability to play video and features for managing the music library. It quickly ceases to be the mainstream, it is often used for listening to unsorted audio in order not to make a mess in the iTunes library.
But the iTunes combine until about 2013 will be my main program for working with music. First, this combine is required to work with the iPod, and in the next decade it will come in handy for copying music to iPhone and iPad. iTunes is even installed on my modern PC, but I haven't started it for a very long time. Apple devices do not require a computer: music, backups, videos have long been available from cloud services. To organize an offline music library (also a rather outdated hobby), I use a specialized combine JRiver Media Center and Foobar.
ITunes has an interesting fate: Apple computers don't have it, all functionality is integrated into Mac OS. And in Windows, the program exists as the only (but not particularly necessary) way to work with Apple's proprietary hardware. Interestingly, the 15-year-old version 4.6 has managed to reach Apple's servers and tell me that a more recent release can be downloaded. I still remember that when installing, you must uncheck the strategically important place, otherwise iTunes will try to remake your MP3 dump to its own standards, and with depressing consequences.
Finally, the third media combine in the selection of software is Windows Media Player 10. The ninth version was installed in Windows XP as standard. Was installed exclusively for experimenting with the WMA Lossless audio compression format, which one of my players supported. Despite the rather convenient interface for working with a large music library and editing tags, it was rarely used. For tags in 2005, I buy a license for the MP3Tag utility that still exists today.
Blanks
In 2005, the decline of the era of optical media begins, but we do not know about it yet. On the contrary, in the mid-2000s I write a huge number of discs, mostly Audio CDs to CD-Rs and data to DVD-Rs. Double-layer blanks are expensive, and some even use the hot new 25 gigabyte Blu-Ray recordable discs. I never got to know Blu-Ray: the volume of hard drives at the end of the decade became sufficient so that backup to external media was not required, or it was economically unjustified. Because of this, quite a lot of information is lost when moving from one hard drive to another.
The set of programs for writing and reading discs in the 2005 collection is extensive, but it does not differ much from the 2002 version. These are Easy CD-DA Extractor and Exact Audio Copy for AudioCD reading. PowerDVD for watching DVD movies that came with some kind of optical drive. I already mentioned them in the previous article, I will show for a change the Nero Burning Rom version 6.3 combine:
Speaking of multimedia, here's another artifact: the Zoom Player media player (not to be confused with the Zoom service). The player seems to be alive , but on modern PCs it does not support HiDPI displays, and the 2005 version did not cope with the videos available on the same disc. In general, it is somehow strange to pay money for a simple media player in 2020.
the Internet
There are few network programs in the collection - even then it was easier to download them directly from the network, and they began to be updated regularly. Now, naturally, nothing works. Neither the Miranda IM messenger (but it is valuable for the preserved archive of messages), much less the Mozilla Firefox browser version 1.0.5:
Only retrosites are expected to open in the retro browser:
Things are so bad that even the most recent browser supporting Windows XP (version 52, 2017) cannot display modern web pages correctly. From 2020, in terms of interoperability of network technologies, 2005 is not much different from 1995: both are ancient, prehistoric times.
However, one historical artifact related to network services is still of interest. This application is Internet.Wallet, an ancient utility for working with the Yandex.Money service, when it was still impossible to interact with it via a web interface. A backup of the wallet has also been preserved, with the history of transactions. There are only two of them: transferring money to a friend (try how it works in general) and paying for a mobile phone (also try). Such is the dawn of Internet payments, I will begin to use fully Internet wallets only in the next decade, when it became possible to link a payment card to them. Now the division into "Internet money" and ordinary banking services has completely disappeared, everything is more or less virtual.
About time and decay
The programs not included in the review are of moderate interest. A set of DivX codecs and drivers for the Intel chipset. Some kind of utility for working with a RAID controller on the motherboard - I suspect that the file from there had to be dropped on a floppy disk when installing Windows XP. IrfanView image viewer and editor that I have been using for 20 years. Drivers for some Toshiba laptop.
Demo version of Neat Image for noise reduction in digital photos. Utility for authenticating audio files in CD quality. Oh yes, Punto Switcher is an auto-switch layout that everyone once had. With a very strange feature, in fact, a legal keylogger that records all keystrokes in a file. A couple of times he helped me out - he helped me restore the text after the program crashed.
Since there was a lot of space on the 4GB DVD disc, it also contained the "My Documents" folder as of the end of 2005. There is not much of interest even for me: working papers, a table of income and expenses for September 2005 (rather sad), a bunch of notes in text files and the like.
I also came across four videos from the Pink Floyd performance at Live8 in July 2005. The performance was streamed on the AOLMusic website and appears to have been grabbed from there in dull 320x240 resolution.
And here's what I thought. We, usually without realizing ourselves, regularly do something for the last time. Burning a blank DVD, patching KDE 2 for FreeBSD , watching a live show of Pink Floyd with the original line-up. Although my whole hobby is about trying to disrupt the natural change of technology and life priorities - I think it's okay to do something one last time. Don't get upset about the passing times. It is only desirable that the old be replaced by the new, and not create an emptiness in its place. Let the progress move on, but if something goes wrong, I now have another laptop with a full set of suitable software, music and video for pleasant nostalgic excursions.