Old Computer Challenge 2023 retrospective

I didn't manage to write up my experiences every day, so I'm going to do a recap today. Overall, there's not much to say; going to the smol computer made me postpone some things that weren't urgent, but had to be done on the web of *B▲b𝑦ƚøn*, but didn't otherwise affect my computing very much. I used my phone more than I expected or intended to.

Monday

I did an excellent job on Monday, a work from home day. I did job work on my work computer, but didn't use it for anything else. I used my phone mainly as an audio source for my headphones. I managed to pay a bill and read my web comics on the smol computer.

Tuesday

An office day, which went much worse. Being bored and tired meant that I turned to devices for distraction, reading lobste.rs and Metafilter on my work computer, and Mastodon on my phone (even though I could easily have browsed Mastodon on the smol computer with tethering to my phone). I /did/ do a significant amount of journal writing on my smol computer, though.

Wednesday

Even though I was at home, distraction continued. I did read a trashy novel in epub form in Emacs on the smol computer with nov.el. Which is a little silly, as I did not put any restrictions on my use of my ebook reader.

Thursday

Somewhat less distracted than Tuesday. At work I mostly stuck to work, and at home, I used the smol computer for most of my entertainment.

Friday

Other than work time, I actually spent a fair amount of time trying to get Matrix working on the smol computer, using Ement.el and Pantalaimon, a combination that has worked fine on two larger devices (which are both also 10 years old, just higher-end for that time, and with no artificial constraints applied). Eventually, I got it working /barely/, as long as I was running Emacs on a bare console without X.

Saturday

Did a bit of writing and task management, though not as much as I really intended to. Mostly, I did not use the computer much.

Sunday

I was tired, and had the morbs, and had to entertain kids and do some things on the web of *B▲b𝑦ƚøn*. I read Gemini on the smol computer as people were wrapping up the challenge.

Wrap-up

I didn't feel as good about the challenge this year as two years ago. Partly, my setup was actually too good; it didn't feel special or challenging to use it at all. I often use this computer at full power for light tasks like journalling and planning, and it wasn't really any different this week. I used my phone too much, and for a lot of things that would have required my main computer, I just postponed them rather than doing any kind of clever work-around.

I'm thinking the next time there's an old computer challenge, I want to go a lot harder. Using this machine with only 128 or 256 MB of RAM is a possibility (if I get it to boot with 128MB), but I feel like it still wouldn't change much. I'd have to drop out of X into fbterm at some point; a bunch of stuff that's marginal now would become frustrating or impossible. But it still wouldn't feel very different to me. It would still be a modern Linux system; I already use the console alone sometimes anyway I want to do something that feels distinctly different and old.

I'm thinking either Mac System 7, or OS/2, both operating systems I used in their heyday, and both different enough from modern Linux to be a real change for a week. I just need to either get period-appropriate hardware for one of them, or figure out how to limit the speed of the emulated CPUs. And deal with the fact that there's no Emacs for classic MacOS, and the latest Emacs for OS/2 is version 20 (after syntax highlighting, but before custom themes or org-mode!). And I can see what I can get done in 16MB of RAM.