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Stardate: 20230716.1344
Location: In an airplane
Input Device: Gemini PDA
Audio: Rumble of airplane
Visual: Flip-out tray table, safety information pamphlet
Emotional: Slightly refreshed from nap.
NOTE: This was phosted on 20230727.0942 since I was overseas.
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The Old Computer Challenge has concluded. I enjoyed taking on the
challenge, as well as reading about everybody's experiences in various
protocols out there, gopher, gemini, irc, hypertext transfer, etc.
When I first read about the challenge, I told myself that I needed to
particpiate this year. I enjoy when the "smolnet" communities call
for participating in shared experiences like occ, or ROOPLOCH, or
christyotwisty's monthly 5 questions, and we are able to
come together as community and have fun![1][2][3]
There are many things I have learned, not just from my direct
involvement with my old hardware and software, but also from you
people in the community. I have been keeping notes and still continue
to take notes of what you all share.
It is refreshing to be in a community where we can do stuff like this,
even if it is on a smol scale, but also a global scale! I observed
that there were so many different countries across many different
time zones involved. Just being on IRC on #oldcomputerchallenge in
libera.chat had people greeting me "Good morning," when I was still
finishing up "yesterday's" dinner and have not yet phosted my occ
notes for the day! Sometimes this feels like what I miss about
local BBS from before...it feels local...but global (globally local?),
and we can all feel free to participate without getting too lost with
overcrowding, drowned by the firehose, people with troll agendas, and
other distactions that has kept me away from the larger social media
groups. Plus, the comments and feedback are m0ar intimate and personal.
It is also nice to be among friends, old and new, who share the same
interest and curiosity with old computers and just getting things to
work just for the joy of old computing. As I have experienced,
there is still much worth there and much that can be repurposed or
reimagined into old hard/soft-warez.
From my dealings with the Sun Ultra 10 (voltesv), the hardware, aside
from the NVRAM, is still in decent shape and still has current
options available to explore. The installed Solaris is very limited
but I have found other operating systems to try. I plan on spending
m0ar time exploring the Ultra since it is no longer in pieces in my
garage.
The Asus eeePC 701 is still very useable and quite frankly, can be a
"modern" replacement for my general daily use. My "killer app" is
still the terminal with all of the different tools that I keep using
there. I still mostly use the web like I did during the web v1.0
days of static web pages and web searches. Even with mastodon, there
are alternative clients and I do not have to be stuck using the web
GUI.
The OCC had me revisiting the toot CLI client and it showed me that
I do not need a GUI to stay connected. My masto-scrolling is much
m0ar efficient and for pics with descripions, I can still open the
images in a separate window. If there are no descriptions of the
image and I cannot easily guess what the picture is by the fugly URL,
then I guess I miss out on the picture. Oh well, no FOMO for me
there.
It was nice to be able to connect to both old computer's desktop
environments remotely from my Wind0ze workstation for work during
my breaks or long virtual meetings that did not require my active
participation. I would connect to the eeePC's desktop via the
x2go client and then connect to the Ultra from the eeePC's
desktop via x11vnc. Still very functional.
Overall, this was a really nice activity that I enjoyed and gave
me a chance to (re)connect with old and new friends in the smolnet,
learn some new things, and revisit personal computing's past. I
think I will continue the adventures with the old computer and
make m0ar of an effort to spend time in that area. Thanks to
Solène for the challenge and the community for participating!
Hope to do this again with you next year!!!
(HTM) [1] Solène's Old Computer Challenge
[2] Solderpunk's ROOPHLOCH
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/1/%7esolderpunk/roophloch
(TXT) [3] christyotwisty's 5 Questions
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/christyotwisty/5Q-Index.txt
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