What is Softpanorama?
Softpanorama is an educational society started by Nikolai Bezroukov in 1989. At beginning, it even didn’t have its own website (it’s founded in Russia, which made sense) and the first five bulletins/zines were published on floppy disks and spread out beneath the ground.
Softpanorama self-claimed that its mission was to offer “‘slightly skeptical’ positions regarding computer science education, system administration and software development professions”. In fact, the site contains uncountable treasure on all fronts of sysadmin and computer including:
- detailed tutorials on scripting languages as well as classic UNIX tools;
- remarkable criticisms and jokes on bloatware and overcomplexity in computing;
- precious history documentation on UNIX and FOSS, and considering the age of these files into account, themselves are rare slices of UNIX/FOSS history for us hobbyists.
The site also comprehends some contents of skepticism, pseudoscience, and info about Neo-liberalism and Neo-conservatism, which would certainly arise some 4chan users’ attention and inevitably mark Nikolai as one of “our guys”. (Again, it’s in Russia, kek.)
Anyway, I’ve learned a lot from Softpanorama, and I do hope you will enjoy visiting it. But here is a little trouble: the site is about to close down.
What happened to Softpanorama?
Softpanorama was actually dissolved in September 2021, and no new articles have been pushed to its site since then. However, the website is promised to exist till June 2024. Then you can foresee the problem: It is already January 2024 now.（時間がない！）Those invaluable pieces of comments, tutorials, and humor dated back to the golden time of UNIX would soon disappear. This would be a huge loss to programmers, sysadmins as well as retro-computing lovers.
What should I do?
Fortunately, there is a way to save those collections. That is archiving. We can make snapshots of pages in Softpanorama with the help of online archive services like archive.today and wayback machine, or more directly, save websites to local. Indeed, people have been doing so long ago. Yet, we don’t know whether we have already archived all the pages, nor how many contents are left unarchived. I unashamedly ask you to do a part: you needn’t save many pages, and just archiving contents you are interested in would help a lot. Thank you.