A Bulletin Board from the backside of the internet

I thought I'd just start a thread about the aftermath of OCC 4 in 2024.
How would you describe the result of the week in a few sentences?

For me: immersion in noughties (camera from 2004, Nokia candybar phone although recent manufacture because GSM is fading in UK, Samsung NC10 netbook with 1Gb RAM and slow spinning rust).

Along with serious engagement with vi (actually nvi providing the command) and groff being used to produce an actual document (4000 words, tables, equations, and possibly a diagram or two in pic).

The result being a focus away from the noise of the general Web. As another participant said in their blog/gopher/gemini site a psychological outcome rather than a hard retro-tech one.

http://www.k58.uk/pages/occ24/

My experience of small computers has always been graphical / personal. So Apple ][ being used to process data and fit curves, to a wordprocessor, to Acorn Archimedes then to Apple and finally Linux.

Software highlights: Seamonkey for most graphical sites (not Sharepoint!), w3m for gopher and text rendering of Web sites, mtPaint for basic photo processing, and vi (I'm beginning to get the idea).

mtPaint is one of my fave apps even on modern hardware, and I always use a text editor to take notes, mainly on vi, but I've also used Pluma on MATE Desktop. And browsing gemspace and gopherspace is definitely a refreshing change to today's Web.

My experience so far has been mixed. It's been nice to use this laptop's fantastic keyboard instead of my phone's touch keyboard for some stuff. It's also been nice to read books instead of watching YT. It's been nice in some ways to take things slowly, though the enforced slowness of a dodgy connection is just annoying. The boredom on the train has been annoying: I should make an exception for ebooks. Lack of software that works on little RAM has also been an issue (and I didn't expect to receive images in emails too big for flpicsee to cope with). I'm pleased with how quickly I got the scripts for Xidel working, but I haven't read as many of the feeds as I was expecting to. I guess, in a terminal, they all end up looking the same, somehow?

Anyway, here I am posting a retrospective when I started Sunday, so I've got a day to go!

Very successful challenge for me. My 2009 MacBook Pro running Linux has been up to the task for everything I tried to do with it. It worked so well that I’m planning to keeping it out of retirement and use it as my “home computer”.

I feel like I found the sweet spot of using hardware that’s old but not too old in a way that makes it difficult to find software for it. Using a modern OS definitely helps a lot on that front.

I guess the main takeaway for me is that a 2003 machine is
a bit "too far" when it comes to have a daily PC in 2024.
While I still daily my 2012 X230 without any isues,
the T40 is just too much hassel.

The challenge by itself was a really pleasant experience,
especially for the calm of going around without being reachable at
all; and also spending more time with books, records and less on
the internet.

I still spent too much time tweaking my Emacs config. Some things
never change!

I decided I would not stick to an old machine for daily use - but I could make an old machine useful. And so it took a week of sporadic time, but I got a terminal based Music machine set up for my garage, via aux cable to stereo: https://the.teabag.ninja/old-computer-challenge.html

Thanks for replies, all focusing on a different strand of using old hardware. Looks as if the idea of a 'diy' OCC has surfaced a lot of ideas for future challenges.

I'm posting this off a Debian 12 live usb session on the Thinkpad T61 that I keep specifically for its keyboard, so a 'special use' I suppose. The contrast in processor speed and hard-drive speed between this tank of a laptop and the little NC10 is highlighted by just typesetting my little troff handout. The NC10 has to think about it (around 1 to 2 seconds). The T61 is a blink of an eye with its SSD.

I'm thinking along the line eltheanine has taken with a special use case for an old machine for next time.

The challenge went well overall. Stumbled initially with OS selection on a Raspberry Pi 3 due to a wireless networking requirement, and eventually configured a Void Linux installation to use for the week.

Had a 2 GB storage limit on the root partition (/ including /home) as part of the challenge. Did without a few development tools to conserve space, started swapping packages in and out due to low disk space by day 4, but got a better sense of which software will fit. CPU was more of a constraint for certain GUI applications, but also could be because of missing graphics acceleration running headless over VNC.

Uncovered a few ASCII/ANSI art programs. Revisited mtPaint as well and was pleasantly surprised by the feature additions. Don't recall there being selection and rotate the last time, which is telling about how long it has been.

The Pi 3 performed marginally better than expected as a small server and secondary daily drive device, and the OCC was a great opportunity to get some use out of it.

I think it went very well. The roll your own format worked out, and I wonder if this would be a better format going forward. Just a week of "used an old device or something completely different".

Some people had some imaginative setups and ran into odd issues that was fun to read about.

The outcome is the realization that I can do pretty much everything I do on a current machine, on a 2009 machine. Maybe I don't do too much, I don't know, but I've written some simple tools on it, web browsing is decent, development tools are current, yt-dlp + mpv works great, I did play some oldie-but-goldie games without any stutter.

But then again I didn't do OCC on a potato machine with Z80 and running CP/M, like others.

Also fuck Apple. Heil Steve Ballmer! Developers!