Although I resist categorisation and hurd mentality anyway, it does
strike me how I tick many boxes of groups here in Gopherspace
without quite feeling I'm one of them. I stick with my old
computers, mostly a mid-90s desktop and an early 2000s laptop, more
recently backed up by my headless 'internet client' Atomic Pi SBC,
which with its 1.44GHz Intel Atom CPU and 2GB DDR3 RAM is still the
sort of thing people use in that Old School Computer Challenge. The
permacomputing mob seems more political and idealistic than
practical, while retrocomputing is often about trying out new
things with old hardware, and not just doing the same old things
everyday with the same old hardware like me (though I dabble in the
former for fun sometimes too). There's also the software. I'm just
as happy with sticking to old software as old hardware. So far as I
can see both reached a point in time when, maybe by deliberate
effort, maybe as the result of compromises that the developers
themselves weren't happy with, something was created that worked
just right for my purposes.
A software developer might have since gone on to write new programs
on top of a string of bloated libraries, or with stupid
smart-phone-inspired graphical interfaces, or in some inefficient
scripting language that only runs similarly fast on a top-spec PC
bought in the last couple of years. A hardware developer might have
scrapped customisability and repairability in preference for sleek
design and reduced maufacturing costs, or compromised on the
quality of construction and electronic components, or failed to
achieve a thermal design that allows the components to last for
more than a few years.
Those developers, or their employers, might hate the work they did
years ago. Even hide it away, deleted from their websites in shame.
Given the chance they'd probably erase it from the global
consciousness, if indeed they remember it still themselves. But in
fact those abandoned works serve my purpose far better than their
services today.
I've realised that what I want is dead hardware and software.
Technology harvested at the point where it does what I need, before
the rot of alternative ideas and techniques withers it away.
Therefore I've decided that I'm a necrotechnologist, out to reap
usefulness from the abandoned wastelands of technology's past. Do
what you like with your new software, standards, encryption
schemes, and transistor count dreams, I'll be here peeking out from
the scrapheap of tech left behind you.
