day1

   You're here? Good.

   It's been done before. The computers of old are timeless. They are not
   built like consumer toys to be replaced. Many have forgotten this, but a
   few still remember, now cowering in damp meadows, protecting their machine
   brethren from what grand new development in the tech world will attempt to
   render them useless. For now they still compute, no thanks to the profit
   hungry.

   The old computer challenge won't break anyone in half. Nobody who would be
   broken, would dare to participate. These are the friends of the machine,
   its worshippers. Those touched by the brief glint of the leaking screens,
   loud fans and rambling drives. Those who remember, what it was like.

   Some have voiced their concerns that the challenge is no challenge at all
   - this is how they do their computing on a daily basis - and these are the
   ones you should listen to. Let them dry out that alien muck which sits on
   your brain and forces you to chase the shiny, the sexy, the new. Stop
   surrendering your freedoms for the illusion of comfort. Stop treating
   technology as a commodity. Look upon it again with wonder and respect.
   Don't ask for permission. Earn it by understanding the machine.

  9front is fine

   Its philosophy and history has been appealing to me from the first time I
   learned about it a few years ago. It is what network computing should've
   been, but the world wasn't ready then, and now it never will be. I commend
   those who keep it not just alive, but potent. From encountering some of
   the cyber faces of its developers and hackers, it's obvious this is more
   than a hobby to them. This is their system. And they care for it well.

   I didn't intend to become some sort of a 9front power user. In fact I
   wanted to see, if I could just start using it as a general machine for my
   needs, without having to limit myself. 9front simply works. You can just
   install it and not worry about it. Learn the tools it comes with and
   you'll have a good time even as a regular computer novice.

   Initially I saw this year's challenge as a chance to take a week off from
   poor routines. 9front helps me with that. And then there's uxn, which I
   wanted to dedicate my learning time to for quite some time. And now I
   finally did. And in 9front.

   I had no intention to make some sort of a statement or earn bragging
   rights, so in some cases, I use TUI software through ssh, which runs on my
   OpenBSD server (conforming to the challenge's hw specs). I wanted a week
   in 9front and that's what I'm doing. And since I really want to dedicate
   the time to uxn, I have no reason to limit myself further.

    softcore primitivist

   what software I'm using

   I like experiencing 9front in its fundamental state. Similarly to how I
   enjoy OpenBSD with as little software that's not in base. I enjoy
   customization as much as you, dear reader, but to me it is a humbling task
   to use a fully featured operating system the way its authors may have
   intended. Therefore I refrained from experimenting with customizing what
   already works well. It's just me, who didn't get it.

   It took me just a few hours to get used to mouse chording, though I must
   admit, it is much more natural to me to be using a 2 button mouse and the
   Shift key to simulate button 3.

   I don't like using ircrc(1). I like it, but not using it. Now that the
   #oldcomputerchallenge channel has grown considerably, there is always
   something going on, and keeping up with a large number of messages and
   maintaining private conversations is just not very viable with ircrc for
   me. Come tomorrow I'll use irssi through the OpenBSD server.

   mothra on the other hand is a good browser. In appearance it is a lot like
   graphical links2, but built with plan9 workflow in mind, but unless I need
   pictures (I don't), I just use links2 through vt(1). I do use it with
   brutaldon though, but without rendering images, if I see an image
   description I'd like to see, I pass it to hget.

   I adore hget(1). You could get away by using it alone for anything that
   comes from the wild web. I suppose this is not too dissimilar from ftp,
   curl or wget, but in the BSD world, I am used to different tools for
   different types of media that come from the internet. Having everything
   pass through hget just makes sense here.

     * someone sent you an image url? % hget url | page
     * want to listen to anonradio? % hget url | play
     * found a tar balled stash of uxn roms % hget url > stash.tgz
     * read an article? % hget url

   For emails I just use my mutt setup on the OpenBSD server.

   Apart from uxn and npe, I only installed phil9's gopher client. It is by
   far my favorite gui gopher browser on any platform. I use it to read news
   and get a tarot reading.

   The rest of the time I use acme and uxnasm and uxncli.

  one past midnight

   I'm glad the community has grown since the inception of the challenge in
   2021. I'm grateful to matto, who didn't let our idea of making the
   occ.deadnet.se archive die.

     ----------------------------------------------------------------------

  Resources

     * gopher://box.matto.nl
     * https://9front.org - Don't touch the artwork!
     * https://brutaldon.praetor.tel praetor's brutaldon instance
     * https://triapul.cz/automa/100-1 uxn in 9front
     * https://only9fans.com software for 9front