Some weeks ago I switched on my old Falcon030 for the first time since 1997. The operating system feels surprisingly modern and fast. If it weren't for the low screen resolution, you could almost mistake it for an up-to-date window manager like XFCE.
I used the TOS alternative MagiC with NVDI and an alternative desktop called Jinnee on my Falcon back then (when I wasn't using it for music production, those programs where usually incompatible with MagiC).
This made the system feel pretty much state of the art.
These days they do. Everyone does their business on the web.
Sorry I get where you’re coming from but I was just adding this because as a vintage technology enthusiast this is an issue I come up against constantly.
Put the baseball bat down bro. You are describing something I do a lot, I play with old computers and try to put them to use. Pervasive cryptography has changed everything even stuff that’s ten years old has issues with certificates and deprecated versions. In any modern setting this is a serious handicap.
tl;dr our hardware requirements would be vastly slashed if we didn’t have an expectation of TLS everywhere.
His point seemed pretty simple to me. If you're running local apps, not going on the Internet, you don't need TLS. Nobody expects a 30+ year old retro system to run a modern browser.
That's true. When I didn't have internet at home in early 00's I did far more tasks than today.
The thing is today, except for Debian (DVD/BD sets/ISO's), Hyperbola (offline mirroring, the repos are small) and few systems more, working offline seems odd as lots of things depend on fetching software via repos, or documentation, where you can't get that any more for lots of programming languages or software such as MS Office.
But, well, at least systems like 9front have static binaries, so they are easily shareable, and all the documentation it's offline.
And, universally, there's mbsync/msmtp for email, and news spooling via usenet. Sometimes I'd love an NNTP->Usenet bridge, so everything could be done offline from nearly any modern OS since the 90's, and just connect once to answer to all threads.
