This is a card in Dave's Virtual Box of Cards.

Retro-Simplicity

Created: 2023-10-11

Here’s a shower-thought.

Do you ever pine for the simplicity of retro tech?

Back when you could create interesting and useful programs for yourself on your home computer.
Perhaps you remember when you could write a web page with some simple HTML, a text editor, and an FTP client.
Or when a couple tiny text-mode applications were all you needed to create fun and interesting things.

Well, guess what? Those things are still available today. More than that, they’ve only improved!

They’re also easier to install and use, and more well documented than ever.

It has never, ever been easier to create a webpage with HTML in a text editor and upload it somewhere and have browsers around the world render it perfectly.

(Getting a domain and a web host is still a series of choices that remains as bewildering as ever, but each step is far easier to accomplish once you make your picks. Trust me, I first registered my domain with Network Solutions back in 1997 when they had the monopoly on the process. Oh, and despite what old people might tell you, FTP suuuuuuucked.)

Personal websites? There are way more of them than there were "back in the day", you just have to know how to find them (search.marginalia.nu).

There are more simple, reliable applications for every kind of task you can imagine than ever before. And they’re free in both senses of the word.

This is a golden era for simplicity.

Compatibility is better than ever before. Hardware is cheap as dirt (if you don’t need an up-to-the-minute gaming machine) and stays relevant far longer than ever before. It’s also faster, quieter, smaller, and way easier on power consumption than it used to be.

Software is…amazing! There are all sorts of incredible utilities written in Rust, Go, Zig and, yup, C, and more coming out all of the time. These take the best parts of the past and add additional modern conveniences. There are thousands of them and they’re lovingly crafted by thousands of developers around the world. They’re small and fast and completely cruft-free.

(I love dynamic "scripting" languages like Ruby for creating my own utilities quickly. But when it comes to installing external packages, I’ll take the compiled option with no interpreter or environment to manage every time.)

The array of Linux and BSD operating systems to pick from are overwhelming, but there are some really solid choices to suit your needs. There are dedicated communities behind the oldest of these who have seen all of the trends come and go. They have your back. Find one with the right "feel" for you.

All of this, and the knowledge to use is, is available at the click of a link and completely for free over a globe-spanning network that is getting faster all the time.

Nothing prevents us from using the best things from the past with the benefit of hindsight. There’s been a lot of polishing over the years and a lot of innovation, too. And on a whole (the emphasis is important here) everything works together now with vastly better compatibility than it ever did in the past. Only rose-colored nostalgia glasses can see otherwise.

By the way, none of this may be apparent in your day job. The corporate world is gonna do what the corporate world is gonna do. But outside of it, we can, and should, live the dream of simplicity.

We can have nice things.

You don’t need a time machine to experience small-scale home computing.

Simple computing works now and it’s never been better.

The important thing to do now is to grab these things while we have them and hold tight. Fight to keep the simple ways relevant. Don’t allow Big Complexity to take the power away from us.