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Ultimate Hardware 2019, the rebirth of Total Hardware 1999

D

Deksor

Member
Joined
Nov 13, 2016
Messages
35
Location
France
Hello !
I am glad to introduce Ultimate Retro : https://www.ultimateretro.net/
What's UR.net ? It's a project I've been working on for quite a while now (the year in the name is a hint ^^) and many people joined me afterwards which helped me a lot !
It's basically the motherboard section of TH99 (more will come later) pimped, editable and ... searchable :)
We are also adding BIOSes, photos, original manuals in it and hopefully we'll be adding drivers later. We also managed to identify many boards that were "unidentified" in TH99, we have fixed many mistakes in the pages (but many remain as well), etc.
(more infos on the development of the app here : https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=74070)

Feel free to use it and if you want, submit new content :)
 
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Congrats man, I know you've been working hard on this. Looks very nice and a great start. Are you the content creator for those PDF manual pages? They look like custom work.
 
Thank you !
Well some PDFs are the Microhouse Technical Library doc files transformed to PDFs. But since the build I have found is from 1998, many boards were missing so I generated those from the TH99 html page with a python script.
 
The future of Ultimate Retro

Hello everyone, the ultimateretro staff have got a big announcement to make today.

Since January of this year, we've been very busy building a large update behind the scenes which took place in partnership and collaboration with The Retro Web.
Those who are familiar with this site and community, may already know this project has a very similar focus to ours, and a lot of the content is overlapping.

After the sudden and disastrous departure from the win3x.org webhost, Ultimate Retro also suffered from poor Google rankings.
Said departure was caused by the difficult working condition with the host owner, who later took retributive actions to hamper UR search ranking, including an Internet Archive mirror, which was later taken down.

Fortunately for us, the developer of The Retro Web @zago27 has been very collaborative with us and signaled to us early on that he would have liked to hand over the reins of his project to someone with more time and resources.

Taking all these aspects into consideration, we have made the decision to merge the two projects into one, under the name The Retro Web.

Q: Why are you changing names again? Who is The Retro Web anyway?

A: It wasn't an easy choice, we had endless conversations about this between both project leads and developers.
Unfortunately, as familiar as you all are with the Ultimate Retro name in mind, it has been permanently dented by the events described above, some by chance, others by intentional malice in retribution.
The members of TRW, although not as many as we have on our discord (we've surpassed 400 members, my gosh 😅 ) or vogons, they are still just as passionate about documenting and preserving computing history as you are here. We know a lot of folks already made their way here, that wasn’t by pure chance.

Q: Fine, you changed domains/name etc, what consequences will this have for the project and server?

The answer is actually simple, there will be some visual upgrades at first, with some needed code improvements inherited from TRW, but everything else stays unchanged. The board limit will be lifted in the future, but we're still working on that, so for now it stays the same at LGA 775/AM2+.

Furthermore, this project will continue to be open source and community driven!

Through this merger, we intend to combine the skills and strengths of our communities and gain a stronger position through collaboration.
If you have any other questions, write them down in general .

Thank you for your contributions and understanding.

Signed
[The Retro Web Team - Ultimate Retro]

And yes the existing links to UltimateRetro.net will still work.
 
After the sudden and disastrous departure from the win3x.org webhost, Ultimate Retro also suffered from poor Google rankings.
Said departure was caused by the difficult working condition with the host owner, who later took retributive actions to hamper UR search ranking, including an Internet Archive mirror, which was later taken down.
Click to expand...
As someone who has no idea what was going on behind the scenes, what I'm getting from this was someone at win3x.org was salty as all hell to the point they wouldn't even let you copy part of or all of their work to the point they wouldn't even let you archive it?
 
It might be useful. Title needs changing though-retro what?

Adding the word hardware might help those searching for info. Just my 2 cents.....
 
As someone who has no idea what was going on behind the scenes, what I'm getting from this was someone at win3x.org was salty as all hell to the point they wouldn't even let you copy part of or all of their work to the point they wouldn't even let you archive it?
Click to expand...

Not exactly.
Basically we used to work with win3x.org's owner (which hosted the site on their server). I used to be a team member at win3x.org myself. However as we coded the site, we noticed that some choices (mostly being backwards compatible with very old browsers like ie5) imposed by the owner were going to tamper us. First we negociated, but we didn't get enough. So after some time we chose to be on our own, leave win3x.org as is and make our choices like we wanted them.

So that's what we did. But for some reason the owner of win3x.org didn't make a 301 redirect to our site, like everybody else does when you move a site. He decided to redirect to an archive he made on archive.org.
This made google think that archive.org was the new location and we were the "copy". So we got shadowbanned by google. I managed to get that archive deleted from archive.org in order to stop that.
Now, after 4 months the site is visible again, but we think that this still causing issues with our ranking.
Unlike the last time, I own ultimateretro.net domain so there will be no archive.org bs involved and I'll make a proper redirect :)
 
So it's a whose on first thing?

I'd imagine not having retroHARDWARE in the domain title would be problematic also....
 
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