Horneker Online

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About Horneker Online

Horneker Online is a collection of web resources that is about Linux with emphasis on the PCLinuxOS distribution, digital photography, commentary about technology issues that effect us, and most importantly, our freedoms, including freedom of choice, freedom of access, freedom to collaborate, and freedom to think.

Why Neocities?

While watching a YouTube video about the history of GeoCities, Neocities was mentioned as a reincarnated version of GeoCities. So far, it has been a lot more than just a reincarnated GeoCities. It is a place where I can continue to build on my website with freedom from those that want to take away our creative freedom.

I have obtained this space to complement my flagship website, Horneker Online, and potentially this space could become the new home for the entire website.

I, too, believe in net neutrality and creative freedom as these are the values I have shared with the world on my website. As a result, I am a supporter of Neocities, and plan to be for some time. At Horneker Online, I:

Not only do I support the PCLinuxOS distribution, I write articles for their online magazine!

With this space on Neocities, I would like to bring support for PCLinuxOS to Neocities.

Privacy Policy

Here at Horneker Online, I do not request information from the viewer, that is, name, e-mail address, passwords, and so forth. Never had. Never will. Period. My privacy policy is simple: Private means private. No exceptions. No nonsense. I never had to ask for information for the viewer in the past twenty years, nor do I have any intention on starting such a practice.

For this reason, the only contact information available is an e-mail address. I consider physical addresses, and phone numbers to be private information, and hence will never be given out here.

Fun Fact

Horneker Online was established as a GeoCities website back in July 1996 called "OS/2 Junction" and was a one page website about OS/2. I was using OS/2 back in 1996 on a Compaq Presario 425. Today, I run PCLinuxOS on a HP/Compaq 8510p, a 13 year old laptop with 4GB of RAM and a one terabyte hard drive.

A Bit of History

OS/2 was a great operating system. It was a true 32-bit operating system with 16-bit compatibility (for DOS, Windows 3.x and 16-bit OS/2 applications). The problem was that IBM was not able to market the product effectively. IBM started discontinuing support back in 2002 for version 2.x and earlier. Version 3.0 (Warp) was discontinued back in 2004. Finally, in 2005, IBM pulled the product off the market. What is left of OS/2 is now ArcaOS 5.0, and is being developed by Arca Noae of Leesburg, Virginia.

ArcaOS is a commercial product, and costs $129.00 for three machines for the Personal Edition. The good news is that like Linux, it is not vulerable to malware, viruses, or other problems Windows has (and never has), and ArcaOS is still OS/2, with the difference being that it can run on computers built in the past 15 years.

The Comdex event in Fall 1998 introduced the mainstream computing market to Linux (as well as Open Source software in general) and its benefits in the enterprise, as well as in the consumer market. The introduction of the General Public License to the mainstream changed the way that software was distributed. Linux was the first operating system for consumers where the cost for one installation is the same as the cost for a thousand installations. In other words, Linux itself does not cost anything to install, configure and use. What you pay for is the cost of the disks, and the labor to download and produce the distribution disks.