At the moment there's a [dead] subling comment by the project author explaining what it's about. Because the comment is dead I can't reply to it asking further questions unfortunately.
The project was apparently designed and created on a phone.
The article provides a good foundation for opposing arguments.
Excerpting:
> The researchers wanted to find a way to do the seemingly impossible — to give the military the benefits of a global, high-speed communications network without exposing them to the vulnerabilities of the metadata that the network relied on to operate.
> ...
> There are other implications, as well. For a CIA agent to use Tor without suspicion in non-U.S. nations, for example, there would need to be plenty of citizens in these nations using Tor for everyday internet browsing. Similarly, if the only users in a particular country are whistleblowers, civil rights activists and protesters, the government may well simply arrest anyone connecting to your anonymity network. As a result, an onion routing system had to be open to as wide a range of users and maintainers as possible, so that the mere fact that someone was using the system wouldn’t reveal anything about their identity or their affiliations.
> ...
> Anonymity loves company — so Tor needed to be sold to the general public. That necessity led to an unlikely alliance between cypherpunks and the U.S. Navy.
> The NRL researchers behind Onion routing knew it wouldn’t work unless everyday people used it, so they reached out to the cypherpunks and invited them into conversations about design and strategy to reach the masses.
It was a speech synthesizer package that (I assume) used the CT1748 mentioned in the article (^F "CT1748") to render very 80s-90s sounding but acceptable speech. You could even precisely control the phoneme generation using a scripting language to make the voices sing songs, with surprisingly tolerable results.
My call to action here is that all the SB16 emulation in PC emulators seems to skip over the CT1748 and/or other necessary parts that makes the speech synthesis possible. Here's Windows 3.1 running in PCem stating "The speech engine cannot be opened. Speech commands cannot be executed." - https://imgur.com/a/bBOihec
So if anyone out there wants a fun project, it would be finalizing the emulation in PCem, 86Box (a PCem fork), DOSBox-X or similar so that this software can run. Essentially it's currently in a state of bitrot and in the process of becoming forgotten.
FWIW, X11 also includes a bunch of quaint background patterns as well, in /usr/include/X11/bitmaps.
You can try each of them by just doing `xsetroot -bitmap <filename>`. I have mine set to wide_weave, which is incidentally identical to Pattern 15 in https://paulsmith.github.io/classic-mac-patterns/
> The old HTML mode is still there but is hard to get to and is supposedly going to be phased out.
Can you share any info on how to access it?
Trying https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/ (the /h/ on the end being the old way to get Basic HTML mode) just redirects back to the normal view and changes the loading screen to say "We're loading the latest Gmail version."
Setting my user-agent to IE6, or IE11 in compatibility mode, produces a "Temporary Error (500)" screen that says "We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the Google Workspace Status Dashboard for the current status of the service."