I noticed I was getting close to 100,000 followers so I thought I should do something to monitor the situation so I know when it happens.
That'll do.

It's a 486 SBC with a Monochrome Display Adapter card in it (The Papyrus-font one, actually) hooked up to a raspi over a serial port.

The 486 is running a QBasic program that listens for numbers and displays them as Big Text, and the Raspi just queries my twitter account every couple minutes and sends it to the 486.

here's the program on DOSBox.
Since the MDA doesn't have a graphics mode, this is ASCII art, using a bunch of block drawing characters.

it's just a bunch of print statements, with the X replaced by that good ol' character 219

I should use some other drawing characters to increase the resolution of the text, instead of just using a monochrome 8x14 font

It's gone up a few times since I started the thread.
probably because of this thread.

I would update it to include a comma but I already disconnected the floppy drive!
how am I supposed to get new code onto the 486 now? :)

modified it to have a comma. it's not loaded onto the 486 yet, but I've got it on the dosbox

but yeah if I leave this on long enough it will burn in. I'm gonna make the next version move the text around to avoid the burn in, and I'm not actually going to leave it on 24/7

too fast timelapse of how it'll update

DOS error messages are so much more insulting when they're in Papyrus

remember the good ol' days when deploying a new build meant copying it onto a floppy disk and then going over to the machine and copying it into the directory in DOS?

hmm. either there's a bug in my update or my follower count has seriously decreased

ah-ha!

so when it gets "98,246\\r\\n", it reads it as two inputs:
98, then 246.
so it shows 98, then a couple milliseconds later, overwrites it with 246.

And fixed.

so it's now gone up a hundred since I started this thread 4 hours ago. Assuming it stays at that speed (which it won't, but yeah), that's 600 followers a day, and I'm currently 1749 followers from 100,000

so late tuesday?

that gives me time to add in some code to detect when it crosses 100,000 and then plays some music on PC speaker

I say "some music" like I'm not 1000% just going to figure out how to encode a PC Speaker beeptunes version of Never Gonna Give You Up

I just remembered that I don't really know anything about music and I'm too misophonic to test it, so probably that won't actually happen.

I could just attach some speakers to the raspi and make it play never gonna give you up, though.

less fun, way more doable

so I found an old PC speaker music format called "NAM", for apparently NetAnnoyMusic. It was used with something called BeepMaker.
https://web.archive.org/web/20081208082524/http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=538628

and a NAM file for Never Gonna Give You Up was provided. The link is dead, even in the archive, but the contents were posted. It's just a text file.

and it looks like it won't be too hard to convert it to something that I could run in QBasic

or at least it would be if I could time it correctly and if understood anything about music

it's timed in milliseconds (and 10s of milliseconds)
QBasic instead uses ticks, which are 55 milliseconds long

damn IBM WOULD IT HAVE KILLED YOU TO PUT MORE TIMERS IN THE FUCKING PC

one last fun thing about this setup: I don't have a separate power supply for the raspi.
I'm using a molex-to-USB adapter to power the raspi off the 486's picoPSU