Old Computer Challenge Day 2

Things have sort-of vaguely settled down with the old computer setup.

Changes from yesterday

Went back to graphical setup with i3 now that I added swap.

Am running graphical Emacs, and it looks pretty good.

Added some more optimizations to Emacs, mostly related to when it’s allowed to garbage collect and when not. Also deferred loading of more packages, but it still takes around 30 seconds to start.

Decided I actually did want to read mail on this machine, set up mbsync and maildir-utils, but set a lower max number of messages to sync.

I have not yet decided if I want to run Gnus on this machine. I don’t use it for mail, but I subscribe to both a private NNTP server, and some groups on the old Usenet via Eternal September¹. I’m afraid it will use too much RAM, but I certainly did use it from 1995 to 2005 without that problem…

¹ Eternal September (HTTPS)

Things I noticed

I found it easier to concentrate on $DAYJOB, because I couldn’t just switch from the VM my $DAYJOB work was running in to other things on the same laptop. I don't actually know if I consider this a good thing. Some of my procrastination on that laptop is very productive.

When I *did* need to access the Babylon Web for something quick, I mostly found myself doing it on my phone. My smartphone habits have not really been changed either way by this experiment.

NetSurf works okay, but it doesn't really handle any web pages that EWW doesn't, even if you turn on JavaScript support.

I remember swapping!

Headline for this one, because it’s kind of important, but also ignore this if you don’t want a bunch of nostalgia. A lot of my computing experience through the years has been defined by swapping, waiting on something to finish swapping in and become responsive, and waiting to see if swapping will actually terminate, or if the computer is thrashing itself to death.

With my first PC that was my own, and that *feels* like it was the one I used for the longest time, that was really significant. It was a 386SX-16 with 3MB of RAM, and came with MS-DOS and Windows 3.0, which I soon upgraded to 3.1. It sometimes swapped, then, mostly trying to run anything alongside SimEarth, but the swapping really began in earnest when I started running OS/2. I upgraded the onboard RAM to 5MB when I installed OS/2 2.1. The main advantage was I could multitask 2400-baud ZModem or CKermit downloads without errors, while running “productivity” software or games. The disadvantage was I was tempted to try to run too much. I eventually added another 4MB of RAM — on an ISA card, so I now had a bunch of very slow RAM, but at least it was faster than the hard drive.

For my desktop machines, once I had my first real job, I always prioritized having more than enough RAM, much higher than having a fast processor or video card. Still, on my 256MB PII laptop that this challenge reminds me of, swapping was a fact of life, partly because it was non-upgradeable, 5 years old, slow laptop HDD, and running what was then the most up-to-date Linux distribution (Fedora Core 2 or 3, with Linux 2.6.x and Gnome 2.6 or 2.8?). I remember compiling CK-series kernels for it to try to maximize interactivity while swapping…

With this “old computer” setup, I get the experience of waiting on things to finish swapping again. I’m not sure if the drive in this netbook is a really slow SSD or a really quiet HDD, but either way, I don't get the “crispy” sounds of a loud old HDD swapping while I wait. Mostly, I notice it pause, and then look at the HDD light to see it pegged on. Still, it’s simultaneously both a very nostalgic experience, and one of the pain points that keeps me from switching very often to this machine for distraction…

Things I'm missing

The keyboard on this laptop is absolutely trousers. It’s both very small, and the keys are very flat with no travel. Also, and more seriously, it lacks a TrackPoint™ brand pointing stick, so on the rare occasion I need to use a mouse, I have to reorient myself to the touchpad.

I have one niche web forum I like to follow that is unfortunately not usable without JavaScript. I was hoping the JavaScript support in NetSurf would be good enough, but it’s not. I've been using my phone for it, but it’s better on desktop.

Things I've not yet tried

I have played DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) on this machine, when it had both cores and all 2GB of RAM enabled, but I haven't tried it now. I suspect it will work fine without tiles, bad at best with tiles.

I haven't installed Roswell on this machine or enabled Common Lisp support in my Emacs here. I will get around to it eventually. I expect it will be fine.

I kind of want to install Nyxt (the Common Lisp Webkit brower), since it's lighter than Firefox but more powerful and keyboard-driven than NetSurf. I need to figure out some way to install it without having to build it here, though, because I don’t see that ending well.

If you’re doing the old computer challenge, please let me know by email or XMPP. I'd love to hear what you’re using.