What happened to my /edu page, and why it came back
I got some reader feedback the other day which amounted to "what happened to your /edu stuff" and "wasn't there a lot more in there?" These are legitimate questions, and I figured it's worth explaining what that was and then what happened to it.
Way back in 2013, I was post-one-big-company and pre-another, and got the idea in my head that people would want to watch screen captures of me writing code. I even had the thought that there might be some money to be made in the process.
I didn't like the fact that most of these "screen recordings" were literally videos of people's terminals (or IDEs, ick). They lost the ability to copy and paste from the screen since it was no longer character-based and instead was pixel-based. It also meant way more bandwidth to serve up such things.
Back then, I was on still on my ancient ServerBeach machine which ran its Ethernet port at 10 Mbps *half duplex*. I'm fairly sure they provisioned their network this way deliberately. It had the effect of limiting just how much load you put on their network since they didn't charge for bandwidth back then. (Now you know why YouTube used them for their video serving pre-Google, and why only their db stuff was on the Rackspace side of things!)
As a result, I didn't want to get into the business of serving videos over that anemic pipe. The link already slowed down way too much when someone would post an image-heavy post like the "Apple Maps sucks" series to HN or reddit or whatever.
That got me thinking, and I built something that would record my terminal as text, control sequences and all. Then I took a whack at writing a VT100 emulator, got far enough along and realized it had already been done (tty.js), and had a compatible license, so I grabbed a copy of that instead. Then I just chopped out all of the stuff that made it able to take input, and hard-wired it to my playback system.
Then I started putting up recordings of various dumb things, like me using my non-Makefile-based build system. The idea was that maybe if people saw me using a tool that didn't suck and which made my life better, they'd want a piece of it, too.
At some point, this craziness was linked up to my existing code which talked to Stripe, and so you could pay me a buck to add an item to your "account", and it would let you play back some "lessons".
Then I got hired to serve up cat pictures... or at least, to keep the serving of cat pictures working. All of my time and energy went into that, and things on this side of the world slowed way down and eventually ground to a halt. Weeks or months would pass with very little going on.
About two years into the cat-pic-wrangling gig, it was time to leave that ServerBeach machine behind in order to get IPv6 since they were still too clueless to offer it. All of the data was copied from one machine to another, but I didn't want to go to the work of rebuilding all of the CGI programs for RHEL 5, or validating that it actually worked. It required too much effort.
I just didn't have the energy to do much more than moving the web sites over and repointing DNS, and that included what it would have taken to make it work without the payment integration stuff - "free mode". The impact was that both /store and /edu were shut down.
That was pretty much it for /edu until someone reached out to me in May 2022 and said they were wondering what the page had been like, and if they could explore the old code. Fortunately for them, at that point in my life, I had cycles to spare, so I dug out some of the old stuff, chopped out the payment integration, and put some of the recordings of the old "protofeed" project online.
I didn't mention this anywhere, but if you happened to go there after that point, it would have Just Worked. It also means that some of the links in those old posts "came back to life", and that makes me happy on a certain nitpicky level that I don't expect most people to understand. (Cool [URLs] don't change, yadda yadda.)
So, if you haven't been keeping track, the virtual terminal is back online, and has been for about two years, but without new content.
If you like watching terrible code happen, you might enjoy it.
If you like badly-written web pages that tell you to reload to start over, you might really enjoy it.