Old Computer Challenge 2026Day 1, Sunday |
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Ecce FloraI've tried participating in the Old Computer Challenge in past years (My failures to post the last day(s) of my experience are on my Gopher Site). It's not to hide this embarrassment that this year I'm going with a new name, on a new site. I'm taking the old part of the challenge personal this year: PinkDaisy was my nick name when I first ventured forth onto the Linux and open source side of the internet in the 1990s. Along with my first Linux distribution came a copy of the Jargon File aka. the "Hacker's Dictionary". And there I found the quote featured on the home page. Going against an imaginary grain was just what I thought was cool in this new "hacker" sphere I was entering. Some played along nicely, I got some automated "A/S/L" (age/sex/location) private messages whenever I joined the German Linux IRC channel as a joke. So yeah, nostalgia… (My current common nickname, "mhd" is also imitating others. Full initials are short and convenient, but rarely seen in German.) So going a bit back in time to my "Pinkdaisy days" is part of this year's OCC. I won't try to recreate the system(s) I had around the Y2K time, I barely know what those were anyways. I just want to do a few things that I did back then and don't do as much these days, at least with the same level of innocence and old-fashioned tech stacks:
The SystemsMy systems of choice were simple thin clients, as they were resource-constrained enough for the purposes of the challenge, but easy enough to set up. I've always been more interested about the software side of retrocomputing, rather than making yellowed systems with blown capacitors working again. This year, I didn't want to go that way, though. Frugality isn't the point as much, and I wanted something with a CD/DVD drive and ease of maintenance. Reasonably old, but this being the year 2026, Core Duo CPUs are now 20 years old! Tempus fugit etc. Alas, I ran into one major problem: I moved this year. And that meant I got rid of some equipment. For a while, I almost went minimalist, but as usual, didn't quite commit. It still means that basically all the cases I got for various projects went for sale or the landfill. I do have two cases left: One houses my current gaming PC, a 10th generation intel i3. Surprisingly workable, although lately most of my gaming was on my work Macbook (X-Com 2016 and Loop Hero). But I didn't want to disassemble it, and it's a way too modern looking thing anyways. The other is an old PII or P3 that doesn't work currently, but will soon, so I leave that untouched, too. So we're back to the worst of all the computing devices - laptops. EbonyMy main machine will be a glorious Thinkpad T60, one of the last ones that still had the IBM branding. It's 20 years now, so both old enough, and somewhat close enough to my glory days as Pinkdaisy. I'll use it as a desktop system, so
I'll experiment with speakers and different keyboards once things get going.
IvoryWhile setting up the system, I noticed that listening to music on that system is harder than I thought. I completely forgot what CD ripping software is good enough, and what mp3 player (preferably looking like winamp) works best on Slackware 15. But then I remembered that I had this problem before. You see, in late 2001, I bought my first laptop (again, worst computing devices ever). I wanted something Unix-y, and Linux just wasn't ready. But then, reasonably cheap Apple laptops came out, the iBooks. I didn't get the "clamshell"/"toilet seat" version, but the "snow" successor was right up my ally. Along with the rather quirky OS X 10.1. I mostly used this while being on site for a job, doing a bit of internet net and playing some pirated DivX videos. But I also used it to rip a lot of CDs to my also-new iPod ("classic"). So why not do that again? I think I might even have some iPod here that has a few minutes of battery left. Not the original one, as that got a bad headphone jack rather soon. But I'll stick with playing music on speakers for now. I did find an external hard drive with a Firewire connection, let's see if that works.
The ProjectThis year's theme for the OCC is "making something". I thought about some programming project, but found that I was much more excited about writing something -- and to be fair, period-correct GUI development would probably mean C++, and that's a bit too much of a challenge. This time was a bit of a "filler" stretch of time when it came to role-playing games for me. I did my first ventures into LARPing, but the "Dark Eye" games of my youth were a bit behind me, and the third edition of D&D didn't yet arrive (the time where I had my longest running group. We actually still meet.) But it was also the time when I talked a lot about games on the internet, and the first shared games (not pirated) were common then. I remember PDF support on Linux being very bad, but I made it through to read games like Fuzion. Also talking about other games (Shadowrun, GURPS) on Usenet. So I'm going to write something that would fit into that time frame. A short mini-setting and adventure that's very 90s-me. As I might want to put this out for download, having a rule set that was both on my mind back then and has a semi-decent third party license would be neat. Fuzion was shared, but is rather proprietary, but FUDGE was also part of that time frame. The 1992 version is still available as a plain text file! Sharing PDFs was common, but we're also still all hyped up about hypertext, so that's where I'm heading. Not as finicky about typography yet and more interested in "open" formats, that's the PinkDaisy way. These days, that probably would mean MkDocs or some static site generator, but we're operating in Y2K territory. Which would involve me writing some Perl or Tcl scripts to do a primitive version of the same, but the challenge is also to get things done. So I'm picking the hypertext format no one cares about: GNU TexInfo. I mostly did this on a whim, and oh boy, what did I get myself into? More about that tomorrow… What I did today
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