2022-03-16 from the editor of ~insom
------------------------------------------------------------
Getting off C's crutches so I can learn Rust better
continues.
I got a new PC recently which lead me to thinking about
giving computers personality. It's hard for me to tease
apart <am no longer a teenager> from <technology has
changed> because both of those things were happening at the
same time, so forgive me some muddled thinking.
I'm 39, and I was pretty lucky to have a computer at all
growing up, and I remember buying my first (second hand)
which was a 486DX2/66. I'd _used_ other computers, but this
one was mine.
It ran Windows 3.1, and later 95, and I squeezed Slackware
onto its 130MiB HDD. At some point it probably had a Debian
install on it and I know it ended its useful life running
FreeBSD 4.
It did _not_ have a stable name, to be fair, but that kind
of made sense: I didn't have any other computer or a
network, so why would it need a name? When a name was
mandatory (like a unix hostname) I probably put "aaron" or
"insom".
Then I read Cryptonomicon and I was intrigued by Tombstone,
the mail server which plays a medium-important plot point in
that novel. I thought "oh, maybe _servers_ should have
names".
I spray painted that machine in day-glo red and silver, like
a bad version of the Half-Life branding. (Keyboard, too!).
It had various RAM and HDD upgrades through its life, many
CD-ROM drives and ISA cards.
Later I got a Pentium II 300 as the payment for my summer
job, and even later I got a Dual Pentium 100 (yes, that's
slower, but it also was SMP which is cool and it had a SCSI
drive). _Even_ later, the only real Unix machine I used as a
personal device: a DECstation 5000/200 which was being given
away by NUI Galway.
These machines had long lives, being repurposed again and
again, upgraded, customized and very rarely sold (which
meant they didn't have to be left in good enough condition
to sell at the end of their life).
When I ran my first company, I built the servers we used,
they had quirky names and were built in two's.
The turning point in this (for me) is ~2005 when I started
working for someone else. The servers were called
<customer-name>.<employer-name>.co.uk. The machines on the
network were named <employee-name>. The machine you used was
yours for 3+ years and then it was scrapped and you got
another. You probably never got an upgrade from its original
specification.
While I worked at the company, we started using
virtualization. Now the physical hosts were things like
`xen3` or `jcb8`, a number and a class of machine use and
the VMs followed the familiar <customer-name><number>
pattern.
Anyway, I don't want to be all "the problem is capitalism"
but ...
For my personal use I've ended up amassing too many
computers, of arguable quality, and I rsync my homedir from
machine to machine, and install my dotfiles from a GitHub
repo on a new machine. This means every machine feels like
the exact same environment.
Work computers are an aluminium slab that starts off fast
and gets slow over the years and is replaced with a new
slab. That's okay, my data is barely stored on it; I don't
even back up my work laptop. That's what the cloud is for.
(I did variously cover them in stickers, though, but I'd
hardly say I've "loved" a machine in the last 10+ years).
When I got my new computer I got my first new desktop in a
very long time. Even desktops that I've had were repurposed
work machines, HP G5 or G6 machines or an 8300 workstation.
I decided to sell my laptop, which was also kind of
powerful, and consolidate onto this new machine. This means
that instead of having several "okay" computing devices, I
have a _very fast_ desktop. It also means that to "do
computing" I need to go sit in my office. I am hoping this
makes practice helps create separation between computing and
not computing (unrelated to separation between work and
home, which I'm already okay at).
I do have a remaining laptop, a spares-and-repairs
Chromebook which I bought because it was non-functional from
water damage but that I was able to get back to health. It's
not powerful enough to do more than one thing at a time
(certainly not on the web). I like that. It's not signed
into my 1Password or synced with my Firefox account and it
doesn't even have my dotfiles. It runs Bunsenlabs Linux and
it's unlike any environment I use.
It's its own thing.
