[Edbrowse-dev] OT: Fastmail and the good old days

[Chuck Hallenbeck <chuckhallenbeck@gmail.com>]

Hi friends,

I was a fastmail user for about ten years until a month or two ago.
When I began, they had a single interface which was totally accessible
from the command line, but later they named that interface "classic" and
introduced their "standard" interface.  Soon that became the default
and one had to ask for classic for a fully accessible experience.
In recent months they began disabling several specific functions in
the classic interface, so it became impossible to create a new account,
maintain websites on fastmail, configre aliases or spam/virus tools, etc.
One was told to use the standard interface to perform those functions.
It was clear that by "classic," they meant "old-fashioned."

I got nervous about becoming the last passenger with a ticket on the
Titanic, so I abandoned fastmail before they abandoned me.

Hopefully resolving the current issues on fastmail will lead to more
general solutions on other sites as well.

So far I remain a text console command line junky, but that world
is rapidly shrinking, as everyone knows.  No longer a groundbreaker,
I've been morphed into a bitter old caretaker.  I wish I had my first
computer back.  It was a Digital Group desktop box with a Zylog Z-80
8-bit CPU clocked at a blazing4.0 MHz, fully expanded to 64 MB of memory,
with a Votrax VS-1 synthesizer.  It originally used audio tape cassettes
for data storage and retrieval.

I added two eight inch floppy drives, and got it to run CP/M with speech
access in the late 1970's.  I wrote a grade 2 braille translator in
C for it when the Perkie was announced (The Cranmer Modified Perkins
Brailler), and it also provided me with a talking terminal to access
the KU campus mainframe.  Those were the days.

Chuck
-- 
Willoughby Ohio
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