Never played Thief, but I logged a lot of hours in Unreal, 1998. I was (and still am) amazed at how full-featured the software renderer was. I always wished I could peek at the code behind it.
If memory serves, the only thing my 3dfx Voodoo3 could do that software-only mode could not was surface reflections. Maybe something with colored lighting too, it's been a long time. Point is, it was a decent enough substitute for dedicated graphics hardware.
There are definitely outside organizations whose sole responsibility is to monitor TV/radio broadcasts and nowadays even podcast sponsor breaks to ensure that ad copy is inserted as agreed. (Source: I was contracted to do some of that work for a time.)
I'm the person who reimplemented Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (DOS, 1992) and my original reasoning was a desire to know how it was able to do some of the graphical tricks it did on such underpowered hardware (it could run on an IBM AT). The game wasn't anything special by any metric, but it was an important piece of my childhood and I felt an attachment to it. I also learned a hell of a lot about the PC platform, the C ecosystem from the 80s, and my own tastes as an engineer.
I gotta say, I don't have the right personality traits to enjoy this kind of personal attention a lot of the time.
I've had experiences where the counter staff at my daily breakfast place started to recognize me and know what "usual" my order was going to be without my having to say it... and it really weirded me out more than anything else.
Sometimes I just want to be a faceless nobody, forgotten day after day by the businesses I visit and the public spaces I navigate.
Percy Livermore: We must rid our speech of slang. Now, besides "OK", I want you all to promise me that there are two words that you will never use. One of these is "swell" and the other one is "lousy".
Lucy Ricardo: OK, what are they?
Percy Livermore: [with emphasis] One of them is "swell" and the other one is "lousy".
I have been nerd-sniped into conjuring up a less-traveled-path technique:
Portable Python on the Windows computer. `python -m http.server`. On the Linux computer, something like `wget -mkp` followed by `find … -delete` to get rid of the index files.
(Lots of disks are soldered in nowadays, or the procedure might require multiple M2 slots that the destination mobo might not have. Is your company IT department happy to know their hardware is being disassembled?)
I have not benchmarked to see if this would sustain the 120 Mbps the original scenario would require.
The thing I found interesting in trying to type out a single test sentence is how many of the letters were reachable with just a tap. It wasn’t until I really studied the layout closely that I noticed that it wasn’t in true alphabetical order. Oddly intuitive, although I would probably despise using it long-term.
To my ear it sounds like AFSK, kind of like the Bell 202 scheme. Here's the first passable search result I found with a clean recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PXxSHGrF-8
Data Becker Music Center, the first real MIDI composition software I ever used. Came with a pretty decent dead-tree printed manual. Hadn't thought about that one in a long time.
Fun fact: In the US the concept of time-and-a-half (also minimum wage, and not hiring child labor) was created by the Fair Labor Standards Act. Most tech employees are classified as "exempt" -- the FLSA and its protections doesn't apply to them.