You might be onto something

> Dock app that simply counts down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds left until 00:00 January 1, 2000.

https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/#wmy2k

What does it do now? Count increasingly negative numbers?

http://www.cs.mun.ca/~gstarkes/wmaker/dockapps/time.html#wmy...

put in printf("%s\n",temp); around line 52 and you'll see it is indeed negatives. This very much confuses this line

    copyXPMArea((*p-'0')*7 + 1, 0, 8, 13, k, 2);

But hey, with a change of the targettime you can re-release this as wmy2k38 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem)

Random thought: should they be “decreasingly negative numbers,” since technically moving left of 0 is a decrease?

Possibly.

To me, sign and absolute value are often separate concerns.

The series 1, 2, 3, … is increasingly positive.

The series -1, -2, -3, … is increasingly negative.

But I understand, and accept, that others may think differently about numbers.

I think you could probably say either decreasing or increasingly negative, but not decreasingly negative, because that would describe a sequence that starts from a negative number and moves towards zero (but hasn’t gotten there yet)

I would argue that using the -ly suffix here is wrong:

The series 1, 2, 3 is increasing (and) positive.

The series -1, -2, -3 is decreasing negative.

The series -3, -2, -1 is increasing negative.

Edit: formatting

No. They may be decreasing, but they're not "decreasingly negative", quite the opposite.

To be fair, a list of things obscure in 2022 will naturally be weighted to dated software that became obscure with age. I'm surprised to see xterm on the list, but I guess most people are using more modern terminals, or urxvt if they prefer it retro.

The obscure part of xterm for me was the built in tektronix (vector) terminal emulation. I remember digging up a .dvi viewer that could display on tektronix by drawing a _lot_ of horizontal lines.

That is badass. Tex lives on but DVI need not.

Still using xterm, thank you very much. :)

I remember some of them from my first forays into linux, around 20 years ago now. Which is late by some people's standards, but still.

I remember checking some of these out from CVS and killing a bunch of processes so my machine didn't hit swap when compiling it.

You'd use ctrl+alt numpad keys to switch resolution and color depths sometimes if you don't have a lot of video memory. You could get high resolution, low color or low resolution high color.

Well then again, some things are timeless yk

I looked at a screenshot from one of them and it says it's from 2002

I think it's best to assume it was a multi-year project that concluded a long time ago.

Countdown to y2k and NCSA mosaic would have been of pretty limited use in 2002 and some of this software didn't exist pre-2000.

There's probably meta information on the images or a last modified date if people really want to map things out.

Regardless, it's a time capsule either way

Not sure exactly when Micropolis was added, but much later than 1997.

SimCity for Unix was originally released as a commercial product from DUX Software for OpenWindows/NeWS/HyperLook in 1992:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-revi...

Then later DUX Software released a collaborative multi player version of SimCity for X11/TCL/Tk in 1993:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-anno...

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.newprod/c/5KWv25ckYHc/m/MgG...

Then it was finally re-licensed under GPL-3 for the OLPC as SimCity, and for any other use as Micropolis in 2008 (with the multi player stuff disabled because the X11 network protocol was not safe or simple enough for kids to use on a mesh network):

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/01/simcity-goes-open-sou...

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

IIRC Micropolis was "born" for the One Laptop Per Child project, so arround 2008 maybe?

WMY2K seems a little obsolete