I found that my habits and enjoyment changed considerably during the
challenge due to a number of factors.
## Hardware
My choice of hardware for the challenge was probably a bad one. Using
old systems is one thing, but when you use old uncommon types that
probably weren't particularly well supported when they were in common
use, then you're in for double the pain. They are usually the first
to be abandoned by developers.
## Software
The most significant impediment to my being able to use the computer
meaningfully was the software. Software rot, not due to the software
itself changing or degrading but goal posts change due to external
factors. My biggest bugbear was that I couldn't connect to modern
websites using SSL/TLS due to the age of the libraries the software
was built against. You might think, as I initially did, no problem I
will just update the libraries and rebuild the software. Let me tell
you, it's really not that simple, neither libressl or openssl would
build on this system using the version of gcc and libc that I had.
Compilation on such old hardware is also painfully slow, lots of
wasted time trying to get stuff to build that ultimately failed. I
don't have the knowledge or experience to understand or fix the
errors reported by the compiler, that's on me.
I found myself falling back to using the tmux session on my usual
computer just to use lynx. I hoped I'd only have to do this to
download the software libraries to fix the issues on the laptop but
it was a futile exercise.
If I had started this challenge again I should have at the outset
tried to find a more recent operating system for the architecture.
NetBSD would probably have been a good choice. NetBSD is a rare gem
in that it still supports many of these old architectures which have
been left behind by Linux.
## Final thoughts
If you decide to do this challenge then do it with as modern OS as
you can find. Don't expect to be able to connect to modern webservers
with old versions of browsers, wget, curl etc. If you're lucky you
will find a few that still have ftp, but non https webservers seem to
be becoming more scarce.
On the positive side I found myself using the computer a lot less and
in a more focused way, because it was a bit of a chore and I didn't
have easy access to things like youtube or podcasts.
Getting into the habit of switching your computer off is a good
thing. I leave my normal computer on 24/7 as it serves gopher, it's
too convenient to just sit down and start wasting time.
I have a VPS so I'm thinking I will move my gopher service there and
also everything I currently run in tmux, so I can attach from any
computer that has a terminal application. With a change to my backup
strategy I should be able to switch this machine off when I'm not
actually using it which will save wasting electricity too. I don't
need to be connected to the internet all of the time.
