!More lateral thinking with withered tech --- agk's diary 9 June 2026 --- on ThinkPad x61, 1024x768 VGA screen, Model M keys in the garage --- Peter, a retired electrical engineer, came over today to look at my cyber scrapheap and decide what potential projects interest him. Solderpunk, two days ago, responded to the Free Thinker's reflections on lateral thinking with (salvaged) withered tech. Solderpunk specifically noted the community/industry that repairs, hacks, modifies, and repurposes gaming consoles into PCs, terminals, or entertainment systems, and potential of old routers as smol servers. INDUSTRIAL/SCIENTIFIC SALVAGE CONSIDERED Peter used to repair hardware in industrial and scientific settings, and threw out a lot of the durable, embedded, low-power kinds of things I like. The hardware that controls industrial manufacturing and test equipment often runs for decades with minimal maintainence, until one day it breaks, and someone has to open up that Ship of Theseus and replace a part so the line can start back up. I'm sure there are more video game system owners than factories, particularly when considered, not as a snapshot, but as a bucket of time from 1985 or 1990 to present. The cast-off console/router combo may prove a better target for this kind of thinking than my industrial special interest on any scale beyond personal/hobbyist. I'm curious to learn more. DOS ON SALVAGED THINGS FOR KIDS Talking to Peter for a few hours as we opened up various boxen of yesteryear (starting with an old friend's IBM 5155 PC Portable from 1985 with a bad power supply, ending with a girlfriend's 2010 netbook that just needs a charging cable) helped me clarify thoughts on lateral thinking with salvaged tech. I have cast-off laptops intended for business or educational use and cast-off routers. When the laptops are gone, I'd like to start working on cast- off thin clients or game consoles. What I'll do to them: - Remove wifi/bluetooth module - Remove hard drive - Remove or disconnect any camera - Potentially remove some RAM - Configure to boot from removable media - Underclock/undervolt CPU - Write FreeDOS, appropriate software collection, and menu/launcher batch file to bootable medium (SD card, low-profile USB) - Test and give to kids Upgrade path: - Parents trade me old removable media for remova- ble media with new software collection, or DIY Security: - Airgapped - Save files and documents on different removable media, system disk is ROM Use: - Put in system card/drive (SD card/USB drive) - (Optional) Put in drive for documents/save files - Press power button to boot - Study, play. write - Press power button to turn off RESEARCH QUESTION: DUMB TTY ON SALVAGE What's the corresponding way to turn $OLD_LAPTOP into something like a dumb terminal? Goal: push power button, help text/menu and user prompt appear nearly instantly. Ssh and maybe telnet (maybe in a sandboxed network or overlay network) are possible, but not much else. RFC "tty dumb console mode": - Plug in ethernet or serial cable, or LORA device - Put in system card/drive with stripped-down, nearly instantly-booting UNIX livesystem (like OpenWRT, Alpine, or FuguIta). If possible, it should be ROM, boot into RAM, single-user, tty only, with everything not required for I/O, networking, and ssh/telnet/serial terminal stripped out or locked down. - Press power button. It should autologin to a non- root account and display an options menu or short help file on how to connect to something. - Connect to something. Login if whatever you're connecting to requires it. Logout or break the connection. - Press power button to turn off I haven't built a livesystem USB drive to do this with OpenWRT or FuguIta yet, but wasted about five hours trying to achieve it with Alpine before pausing this research project for now. I don't have deep knowledge of Linux/UNIX internals; someone who does could probably either suggest a path or tell me to abandon this. The computer hosting the dumb terminal kiosk could obviously have its wifi board and antenna reinstall- ed if desired. It could possibly be locked into an overlay network like Reticulum. Fun/useful services to access could include a BBS with unfederated email, chat, bulletin boards, and door games; or a multi- user unix system. FUN At least I think these things are fun. All the kids I've allowed to play on the family computer think a DOS system with an appropriate software library is super fun. My only experience with kids on a tty console was in a small poor community in the South Carolina lowcountry after a catastrophic flood more than ten years ago. My friends had a stack of retired thin clients. A small business owner donated a c.2004 laptop from her storage unit. Friends had yagi antennas. We built an 8-machine computer lab in the community center/youth center/distribution hub, originally for FEMA benefits registration, then for kids who were out of their destroyed schools. The storage-unit laptop was the server in a LTSP (Linux terminal-server project) system, and the thin clients and even older laptops were the terminals. They ran edubuntu educational software (most of it not as good as the DOS stuff I've since discovered) in an X GUI. Each kid had their own login, and of course it worked on any computer they sat at. Updates only needed to be run on the server. Internet access was over a wireless broadband link through those yagi antennas to the home internet connection of a willing neighbor a half-mile away. Filtered through a cacheing squid proxy, the computer lab caused her no trouble, and her rural telephone cooperative ISP said it was fine. One of the boys got really into a computer programm- ing game that was like LOGO or Scratch, learning C while commanding a critter to run around the screen. One of the girls wanted to learn to write a resume in LibreOffice to help her mom get a job. But hands- down the most popular thing was when the kids learned to ctrl-alt-F2 into a tty and use ancient social unix tools like wall(1), talk(1), and write(1) (all available on sdf, if you're using it) after checking to see who(1) was online. If they had more previous computer/tablet experience, maybe the web access would have appealed to them more. But instead, all these "computer-illiterate" 8-year-olds were sitting in the same lab as each other, snickering as they switched back and forth from GUI to tty to chat with each other about who stank etc., on machines that were previously e-waste. Over the years, when I put little Linuxes on old laptops for not particularly computer-literate friends, they generally only used the web browser. That's specifically what I'm trying to avoid now. CHALLENGES OTHER THAN THE RESEARCH QUESTION & UEFI Obviously, on older computers, substitute a boot CD, DVD, or floppy, and on gaming consoles substitute a CD, DVD, or ROM cartridge. One challenge I've had with using older laptops this way is that they're damaged (particularly screen or keyboard) or unergonomic. I don't like laptops much. When I use them, I like to plug in an external key- board, monitor, and sometimes mouse or joystick. Junkyard computing the way I do it generally doesn't involve sourcing, buying, shipping, and installing expensive device-specific components, potentially damaging other aging stuff along the way. I like to turn a laptop into a desktop or a server. It stays plugged in to mains power and has peripherals. I want the machine to recognize the peripherals. I want it render at the resolution of the external display, not the laptop screen, and I want it to turn off the laptop screen. On the 2006ish ThinkPad I'm using that way now, in X, I turned off the laptop screen with arandr(1), but when I switch to the tty like those kids did, it comes back on. I hope to fix that before this laptop's hard drive is decommissioned and it starts only booting (DOS or dumb terminal) from low-profile thumb drives, like the rest of the fleet on the shelf behind me, silently awaiting their children. I also wish I could find low-profile thumb drives with less than 16GB of memory. FUZOMA's less than 2MB. My DOS system with the biggest pile of office software, utilities, REPLs, documentation, text and spreadsheet files, and games saved in its director- ies for me to test is less than 100MB. Where are the 500MB low-profile USB drives and SD cards? LEARN ME SOME MORE HARDWARE Next week Peter will visit again. I should have my first bench-top power supply by then. I'll finally learn how to use the variable-temperature soldering iron I inherited. Some torx screws will come out of the CRT high voltage-region of something that doesn't currently power up. More will be revealed, as always, through the doing of the thing.