During periods of short supply and/or increased coffee has been often been replaced or augmented by various other ingredients. For example:

… during the American Civil War, Louisianans looked to adding chicory root to their coffee when Union naval blockades cut off the port of New Orleans. With shipments coming to a halt, desperate New Orleanians looking for their coffee fix began mixing things with coffee to stretch out the supply. Acorns or beets (cafe de betterave) also did the trick. Though chicory alone is devoid of the alkaloid that gives you a caffeine buzz, the grounds taste similar and can be sold at a lower rate. – source

I ran a FidoNet BBS back then on a 386-16 and 2400 baud modem. Woot! It would run WordPerfect 5.1 while people were logged on to the board but compiling brought it to its knees.

In 8th (?) grade our larval computing lab was a row of Commodore 64 but there was only one 5.25" floppy drive between them. When you wanted to save or load your proglet you had to

• walk over to insert your floppy
• return to your seat to do your load/save
• walk back over to retrieve your floppy to free up the drive for someone else

At some point I realized that while the owner was walking back and forth you could load their code to see how they approached the assignment. And doing so did not affect their workflow or anyone else at all. It felt like the earth shifted a bit at that moment.

why am I tempted to find install images for DESQview

Acoustic-coupling modem for a TI 99/4a. 300 baud?

most of our discussions here are centered on Jacquard looms

I there a way to somehow reduce the ranking of these communities so more niche content have more chance to appear in the front page?

I sort by NEW. If the niche communities have posts they will show up.