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       Old Computer Challenge
       August 30, 2024
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       Written on my phone while on a hammock
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  One month has already passed since my first official 
  #oldcomputerchallenge! I have been willing to participate
  for a while, but haven't had a chance to do it due to...
  life, I guess?

  I moved to UK 5 years ago and left all of my older hardware
  in Italy. And while in the past I had played quite a bit with
  it, everything has been frozen since I moved. Luckily, last
  july I read about the challenge on the fediverse on the very
  same day I was stopping in my old apartment.

  If you haven't read about it yet, you can find more info
  about the OCC here: https://occ.deadnet.se/. The challenge
  took place between 13 and 20 July this year, and I took part
  in it on the 17th.

  "What? Just one day?"

  Ehmm... Yes. One night, to be precise. I know the challenge
  lasts for a whole week, but that was the only moment where
  I, my hardware, and some free time were all in the same place
  (also if that accounts for anything, I have been running a
  gopherhole for two years on a raspi 2, and my main websites
  on a small server with an uptime of... 2341 days today).

  So, for the challenge I decided to take my oldest laptop, a
  Travelmate 514TXV, and use it to connect to a PicoGopher
  instance (if you don't know what PicoGopher is, check out
  https://github.com/aittalam/PicoGopher). The laptop used to
  run Debian, but a few years after I stopped using it I decided
  to install Windows XP and a few videogames for my kids there…
  So I definitely had to do something about that :-).

  I decided to look for a live Linux distro in my old CDs
  collection (yes, I am that old) and found a Knoppix 3.7 that
  -quite incredibly- worked out of the box. And by "out of the
  box" I mean it did not just load a 20yo CD properly (which
  was already surprising enough to me) but it also got all
  devices right including a Netgear 802.11b pcmcia wireless
  card. There were some issues connecting to the Internet with
  my (definitely more modern) access point, but the AP provided
  by PicoGopher was 802.11b compatible so I could connect to it
  and browse the offline content I had stored on it. I could
  connect both to the gopher and the HTTP servers using both
  lynx and Mozilla (1.7.3, gecko version dated October 2004)
  and posted an update on Mastodon with photos:
  https://fosstodon.org/@mala/112803785249460614

  Overall this was a very pleasant experiment:

  - I accessed one of my latest projects with some of my oldest
  hardware (and I still have an Amiga and a C64 to use as
  Gopher clients, perhaps for the next OCC!)

  - as much as I love Lagrange as a gopher browser, it was nice
  to see a version of Mozilla that still supported it <3

  - I enjoyed going through my old CDs so much! I realised how
  much I cared about preserving the things I liked (music,
  movies, software, photos) and I was happy to see how much was
  still there, after more than twenty years, ready to be used
  again.

  This made me think about how much of what we love we don't
  own anymore. If going digital already seemed like giving up
  some control over our artifacts (remember how many digital
  photos we used to print? Who is still doing that?), now we
  don't even control digital artifacts anymore: we pay for
  services to store our data, see movies, listen to songs,
  read books, and so on. I found 20-year-old digital comics
  collections on those CDs, something that I owned and could
  have read anytime, on old hardware, with no Internet
  connection. Who feels confident the same will be possible
  with any of the services we are currently using?

  I am not. But I am quite sure I will find a way to make that
  data more redundant and share it more widely. Who knows,
  perhaps old data might be a nice theme for one of the future
  OCCs...