I’ve been digging on tiny and simple computers hardware like RPis, ARMs, trying to reuse old stuff that I have. Shrinking my digital life.
It all started with the idea of getting everything I own to fit into a small metal box. And then I thought: I need simple things, small things, use less resource, get less digital footprint.
Readings about permacomputing, thinking on how could I get a simple system, a simple OS, less bloat, align with suckless ideas, Plan9, 9front, cat-v, RISC cpus.
RISC OS, yes! because it’s crazy to see a full GUI desktop OS running on such low requirements! and smoothly – I know it lacks lots of moderns features and security but still, that’s an awesome personal desktop experience.
Then on Alpine, I’m mostly on ttys, and on Slack I alternate with IceWM – I like the nostalgia I can get when running IceWM like W95.
Sometimes a jump a bit on 9front.
I always had old hardware, and trying to make some good use of them had always captured my attention and efforts. Like an old Gradient MSX that I got from recycle at a time people used to get Pentiums. It was good to start learning coding, put stuff to work, troubleshoot, understand what’s going on, etc.
Years after that I could get better ones. Those were a 486 and Pentium I PCs where I could install DOS, Windows 95, 98 via floppies. It didn’t take long to drop them all although they were good for surfing the web, ICQ messaging, Delphi and VB coding.
Linux was the next step, I’ve been using it and BSDs since then. I had the opportunity to experience it by installing Slackware 8, Connectiva –which is long dead– and Debian 3ish back in the days where they came on CDs in tech magazines. FreeBSD and OpenBSD followed up.
BASIC, VB and Delphi5 were my first programming languages, they were fun and insteresting. Shellscript, when I jumped to *nix, since it was easy to play with. C and COBOL when I joined university. My first professional work started at the university as well, setting up PCs, handling Squid proxy and other linux servers, later on, somewhere else, I touched on more linux servers and xen hypervisor. Back to programming, Java got my paychecks for long and recently – 2025 – Python has just take over the role.
Outside of work, c, hare, go, lisp dialects, smalltalk, assembly, have all enticed me to code a bit.