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I saw this blog post from late 2023 show up on Hacker News earlier. Beto Dealmeida talks about how his latest computer is actually a USB stick running Qemu and Alpine Linux, the idea being to use an emulator to run a system-independent computer available anywhere there's a free USB port.
Perhaps predictably, the HN crew got hung up on the what, rather than the why. You know: "why Qemu and not..."; "who's relying on USB ports being safe in 2023...", that sort of thing. And as for the why, Dealmeida lays it out:
I'm not sure how I had this idea; it's probably influenced by what I've been reading about permacomputing, combined with my general dissatisfaction with the modern user experience with computers and the internet in general. I'm fortunate enough that I can say "I want none of this", and I can go back to my nostalgia bubble where I interact with people via email, Mastodon, text-based websites, and Gemini.
I get it. More than a dozen years ago now, just before I left my first dev job, the company was giving away some old hardware. I snagged a big server - 1.5 GHz, 2 GB RAM, some minimal hard drive. This was back in 2011; the server was old, well past its time. I think it had been sitting in a corner, running some internal webapps used for time tracking or accounting or similar. This was back before cloud computing ate the world, this computer old enough that I don't think it was even used for virtualization. Just a single server used for a single purpose.
I brought it home (actually lifting it was a challenge - the case was incredibly heavy - maybe steel? - lightweight consumer hardware this wasn't). I got a plug n play wireless card for $30 or $40 at the local computer store. Installed it, wiped the hard drive, put FreeBSD on a USB stick, booted it up, and got that running via net install. It was great! I had a ridiculous, heavy server sitting in a corner of the guest bedroom of our first house, a little 780 sq ft post-war bungalow framed by three huge pines. I hooked up the server to a 14" Sony Trinitron monitor I snagged off my in-laws. And for years, it just worked. I used it to play nethack, ADOM, and Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. I worked on Project Euler problems using Chez Scheme. And I got my first *nix builds of my big project running on it. It took ages to compile, ages. At least an hour. But when I started it up, in those early years of the project where I had a barely functioning game, but still a game, it was magic. I was playing a roguelike in bash in text mode. It was like playing ADOM on my old 486 in the 90s, only it was my own game. It was special.
There's something wonderful about text. If you're reading this, in Lagrange or kristall or amfora, you get it. No amount of twice-a-decade braying about how video is the future will ever convince me of such; I don't care what's on TikTok, I don't care about the latest challenge or trend, about teenagers talking to the camera in super-quick cuts, I just want to read things. And if this describes you, you understand how a page full of text and links is transporting, whether that's here or on gopher or the small web. Yes, I was a kid in the pre-Pentium age. I remember the early days of the internet, but also the BBS era (flamewars and romance at 2400!), and the era before that, where I swapped disks with my friends. All this to say there's comfort in the familiar, but also clarity in sparseness, in that way you're free to experience things at your own pace, in your own way.
Road to Lisdoonvarna/Morrison's Jig/Musical Priest (Stephanie Claussen)
Paul Hindemith: Sonata for Four Horns: 1. Fugato
Anyway, I know there's an irony in how I'm writing this: in a putty session to RTC, typing in a little window while YouTube plays me a selection of what I've been listening to lately (Road to Lisdoonvarna; Hindemith's Sonata for Four Horns; Whitehorse, Bashia Bulat, and others). I've got Firefox open. I've always got Firefox open. I do all my computing on a Windows laptop, even though, outside of Visual Studio, most of what I do doesn't require Windows at all. The fire of my youth has tempered somewhat. When I was 18, I would've put Linux on anything. I tried out a new distro every six months. But I don't have time for that anymore. I have too keen an understanding that time ticks on. Annie Dillard said, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." I've felt this more keenly the last few years. Too many deaths. Even though I'm not old, I'm not young anymore, either.
I understand Dealmeida. I do. I use amfora on the regular, I used pine (and now use alpine), I used tin, I used to use lynx back when it would throw up its hands whenever it experienced frames. That's a smaller world, a clearer one. In my opinion, a better one. And one I glimpse again whenever I see Lagrange's coloured text on black.