OCC 2025

July 2025 - novelistparty 🪴

Last year, I learned about the Old Computer Challenge (OCC) from the blogs of BSD users. (They seems to have a strong community, brought together by deliberate computing setups around the various BSDs; a community that reminds me of the culture that flourished (briefly) on cohost.) It runs this year Sunday, July 13th, to Saturday, July 19th.

Intent

I will be exploring older computer enviroments that have minimal hardware requirements. I want to be reminded of the tools that have existed for decades, remember how we got here.

Tuesday 15 July - usb-dos

From the project Readme:

usb-dos is a DOS live USB image with tools for writers What it contains: SvarDOS plus a menu launcher and a choice of freeware writing tools: Microsoft Word 5.5, WordStar 7.0, Arnor Protext, Symantec Grandview, PC-Outline, Adobe Acrobat 1.0, DOSLFN.

I use a UTM VM on macOS with the following settings:

It boots into “the DOSShell menu from PC DOS 2000” that looks like this: Screenshot of usb-dos, running DOSShell menu from PC DOS 2000

Microsoft Word 5.5 looks like this: Screenshot of Microsoft 5.5 running in the VM

Thursday 17 July - Thoughts on forever tools

Retro- and embedded computing have always caught my eye. I admire the enthusiasm and dedication. Also there is the respect and awe I feel towards decades of hard work to create and put to use these powerful devices.

I ask myself, why investigate a computer from the past? Why learn to use an Apple //e? Why try to fit a complete modern operating system onto a device that can power for years off of a small battery? Why care about a computer from the early 90s that is surpassed by almost any modern cell phone? Why does any of it matter?

I don’t know the answer to those questions. I don’t know why I don’t feel satisfied in using this fairly recent laptop I’m typing on to do everything I could ever dream of doing with a computer. Why? I don’t know.

Do I wish we could stop and get to know a device, become familiar with it, have the time to work with it and expand it. To feel that it is enough?

I’m going to make up a term: “plateau points”, which is when you know you have everything you need in a tool. Let’s examine two of them: one for the daily personal computer experience, the other for the computer needs of society.

The 2nd, the plateau point for the needs of society, is constantly changing. Computer security alone motivates drastic changes from year to year. Just when one group declares “sufficient”, another creates new ways of computering that could upset or benefit us all.

The 1st, the plateau point for daily personal experience; it can feel fixed and unchanging, perhaps for years at a time. But we can never escape our every-changing society. And even ourselves, we change, drastically and suddenly at times. Seasons and phases etc.

So how can you find a machine or OS or tool ecosystem and know that it’s your forever home? How can you feel and know that say emacs or a Commodore 64 is enough? How do you know if it’s the right thing and it’s time to learn everything about it and use every feature and depend on it?

Friday 18 July - “ownership”

In 2019, I taught myself to use an Apple //e. I didn’t own one so during the week I’d use an emulator and on the weekend I’d visit the Living Computers Museum and Labs (RIP) in Seattle to sit at an original device. I was driven by a need to understand computers; how they worked, how would one go about creating one.

Where I was raised in the US, there was a pervasive, nervous worry about being able to survive an apocalypse or the collapse of civilization. Keep in mind this was in the suburbs of a large city, and so I wondered how anyone apart from the people in the mountains that had a spring on their property would ever survive “on their own”. I still don’t understand what people were imagining might happen after such an end to the world. Isolated subsistence farming? Not possible, and anything bigger or more organized than that starts to sound a lot like… civilization. And if you have large populations the immediate concerns aren’t about homesteading, it’s for large-scale infrastructure such as clean water and medical assistance and firefighting and telecommunication. Again, civilization, maybe not as efficient or capable as before, but still deeply interconnected and complicated.

I wondered if they had ever considered what would happen to our cell phones or computers. Maybe a family at their home wouldn’t need a computer, but anything else in the modern world depends on one. Water purification plants can’t function without them, nor can telecommunication.

Two of the many general values behind free and open source software and hardware are control and ownership, control as in the freedom to modify and adapt, and ownership as in not having to received permission to do those things or share your work.

When I think about the used, small, low-power PC that I purchased locally that sits on my desk running an operating system I obtained for free that is developed out in the open, I think of ownership. But I think of it differently than the narrow-minded notions I was raised with.

This tiny computer is not a device I could produce on my own, it’s not a device that can be fixed with basic tools. The software running on it represents billions of dollars of value freely shared, more complexity than I could create in a thousand lifetimes. Yes, ownership is vital, that I can have the OS and useful programs under my control, working as I want them to, but I don’t “own” it in the personal sense of “I made this, it is mine”; so much of it is beyond me.

We can do what we do on computers because of the many other widely shared technologies of our world. We have the time and energy because of the people that provide clean drinking water, housing, preventative medicine, complex governments, and the incredible global networks of trade and communication. The computers are produced in large factories that are part of complex supply chains that reach every country on earth. Our internet is owned by the entire world.

I write this in word-processing software that was written in the 80s that runs under an operating system developed in the last decade from components written in the 80s, running inside a virtual machine that uses QEMU to emulate the hardware, and then that application runs within macOS on a lightweight and low-power laptop with far more compute power than old mainframes. I share this post with you via a global internet, held together by millions of devices.

We depend on each other, all across the globe, for everything. The sharing and distribution of technology is for all of us. The most powerful sometimes imagine they can dictate who gets what and how, but humanity is far more generous than that. Our friends and families are scattered throughout the nations. The entire world is our people.

My favorite part of learning to use an Apple //e was learning where it fit in the history of personal computers. No single person, no single company can claim they are the all-powerful singular creator of something so powerful as “the computer”.

I participate in the Old Computer Challenge because it’s fun to try new-to-me old things, but mostly I am reminded how important we are to one another, how important we all are.

Saturday 19 July - Learning

I booted into the DOS environment (see above) on real hardware.

The simple graphics are clear, easy to read, and practical. I enjoy keyboard navigation in MS Word 5.5. Configuration is simple and easy to adjust. There is a clean look to the display and it has margins around the text area, the menu bar, and the lower info text area.

For comparison, I booted a different machine into Linux, switched to a virtual console, and then increased the terminal font size (dpkg-reconfigure console-setup and then set the font to Terminus Bold at 12x24).

I opened text documents in several different text editors and realized for the first time that none of them automatically place margins around the text area and other elements of the UI. Most don’t have any onscreen menu items. I’m surprised I never noticed this before. Why aren’t there margins?

I get why a terminal emulator doesn’t have margins, but I don’t get why there aren’t word processors for the Linux framebuffer with a visual style as human-friendly as 1990 word processors for DOS.