Old Computer Challenge
Posted Fri 19 Jul, 2024.
Is not that I'm going to do it this *this year*, but I'm writing a note here so I can remember about it for 2025, perhaps.
This is the 4th year of the Old Computer Challenge:
Old Computer Challenge community is a smol group of enthusiasts, who like to use old computer hardware and every year come together to challenge themselves in spending a single week in July exclusively with machines many would consider outdated.
It did start with Solène Rapenne in July 2021 with a challenge to replace your daily personal computer by a very old one and share your feelings for a week.
Which sets some interesting limits, that don't sound *that limited* to me (1 CPU/Core/Thread, 512MB of RAM), specially because I still remember using those computers as my daily driver. For example, my first laptop was a Compaq Armada 1573DM (Pentium MMX 266 Mhz, 64 MB of RAM), that I used with OpenBSD.
OpenBSD on Compaq Armada 1573DM
It was already old when I bought it, so I guess it was similar to this challenge, in a way. The main difference is that I didn't have money to get anything better (and I enjoyed tinkering with OpenBSD). Of course, I didn't really share my experience, either.
In fact, the older machine I own today is an Acer Aspire One, a netbook with Intel Atom CPU that my wife bought in 2010 and was her daily driver for a couple of years. And it is OK with Debian and i3wm to do most of my computing, except web.
And that's essentially the main limiting task today: the web is heavy and requires tons of resources. Without doubt, a browser is the heaviest application that I have running all the time on my machine.
At the end, I use that netbook for the occasional coding, IRC and SSH to remote systems. I could write a blog post --or in this capsule--, but that activity often requires fact-checking or linking other content, and that requires accessing the web.
Even if I use some specialised application that aren't web apps, I don't use off-line applications that much. It is mostly when I'm coding (or related tasks; for example, I use GIMP as part of game development). That means my computer is mostly an Internet connected machine, which I think it is part of the challenge of using an old machine.
So let me use this post as a reminder of sorts. Perhaps I can do a variation of this challenge, by limiting the activity to one hour a day for a week --like other people are doing this year--. And who knows? I could even give a go to one of my more capable 8-bit machines, even if that makes it mostly an off-line experience.
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