💾 Archived View for gem.sdf.org › jdd › posts › 20220306-1998-4.gmi captured on 2022-04-28 at 17:38:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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<2022-03-06 Sun>
Warning: This entry contains a spoiler for Herman Hesse's novel, "The Journey to the East." Read on at your peril.
It is news to no one that the past 24 years have seen a lot of changes in our physical computing environment. Computers are in general a lot smaller, more powerful, and a lot more ubiquitous. The only computers the size of my beige beauty still being made tend to be very high end workstations and gaming rigs. At the same time, the rate of obsolescence has slowed, at least for general purpose computers (phones maybe not). A computer made in 1980 would have been ancient in 1985; a computer made in 1990 would have been pretty much useless by the year 2000. A computer made in 2010, however, would still be usable for most day-to-day computing tasks in 2022, hardware-wise.
A computer made in 1998, not so much. Still, it's worth asking: how many of the advances of the past 24 years can one live without?
For a pleasant experience I'd say one still needs to keep the hardware relatively current, though that is becoming less important as noted above. I've already gone over my reasons for using a modern motherboard, power supply, storage and so forth in earlier installments, so I won't repeat them here.
Apparently it is less important to keep up with advances in software. Let me immediately clarify what I mean by that: of course, it is important to keep your OS and application software up to date. You run a pretty significant risk if you don't, on any networked computer. But apart from security considerations, you can do quite a lot with software that has been around for decades and doesn't change that much from update to update. Emacs is the obvious example here. Midnight Commander is another ... coreutils ...
Keeping up with modern UI design is, for me at least, worse than a waste of time. I actually prefer Fvwm to modern window managers. Unlike most UI, it enlists me as a participant, rather than starting from the assumption that it understands my needs better than I do myself.
When I began this project, I had pretty much resigned myself to the idea that the ersatz 1998 experience would be confined to my local computing environment. The University where I work no longer provides unix shell access, pine, and other mainstays of 1990s computing as a matter of course. Due, I'm sure, to security concerns (and probably, a declining user base). And I didn't know anywhere else to go for that kind of thing.
That's right, dear reader: it pains me to admit that despite my years of floating around the IT space, and more recently the retro-computing sub-basement of that space, I had never heard of pubnixes, the tildeverse, phlogs, gemini ... none of it. So imagine my surprise when a chance mention caused me to check out sdf.org, just a month or two after I'd finished my 1998 build. It was almost like, in creating this computer, I had accidentally performed a summoning ritual that brought an entire online world back from oblivion. Almost like ... I am not quite so far gone as to think that's what actually happened.
Upon reflection, it was even more like that moment in Herman Hesse's novel, "The Journey to the East," when the narrator realizes that, far from being the last remaining member of the League of Eastern Wayfarers, he was simply a wanderer who had lost his way:
So there was a still a 'League' of which I no longer knew anything, which existed without me and which no longer considered me as belonging to it! [1]
Mutt, gopher, emacs, (s)ftp, personal web space (SSI enabled, no less!) - it was all still there! Not to mention more recent arrivals, like gemini, building on the pre-commercialized Internet and very much in the spirit of it. Nice to know I'm not the only one who still thinks, quoting Frank da Cruz, "There is something to be said for the old ways." [2]
[1] "Journey to the East" on Gopherpedia
[2] Frank da Cruz, "The DECsystem-20 at Columbia University (1977-1988)"
1998 Computer Project, Part 4 was published on 2022-03-06