NECROTECHNOLOGY

Although I resist categorisation and hurd mentality anyway, it does 
strike me how I tick many boxes of groups here in Gopherspace 
without quite feeling I'm one of them. I stick with my old 
computers, mostly a mid-90s desktop and an early 2000s laptop, more 
recently backed up by my headless 'internet client' Atomic Pi SBC, 
which with its 1.44GHz Intel Atom CPU and 2GB DDR3 RAM is still the 
sort of thing people use in that Old School Computer Challenge. The 
permacomputing mob seems more political and idealistic than 
practical, while retrocomputing is often about trying out new 
things with old hardware, and not just doing the same old things 
everyday with the same old hardware like me (though I dabble in the 
former for fun sometimes too). There's also the software. I'm just 
as happy with sticking to old software as old hardware. So far as I 
can see both reached a point in time when, maybe by deliberate 
effort, maybe as the result of compromises that the developers 
themselves weren't happy with, something was created that worked 
just right for my purposes.

A software developer might have since gone on to write new programs 
on top of a string of bloated libraries, or with stupid 
smart-phone-inspired graphical interfaces, or in some inefficient 
scripting language that only runs similarly fast on a top-spec PC 
bought in the last couple of years. A hardware developer might have 
scrapped customisability and repairability in preference for sleek 
design and reduced maufacturing costs, or compromised on the 
quality of construction and electronic components, or failed to 
achieve a thermal design that allows the components to last for 
more than a few years.

Those developers, or their employers, might hate the work they did 
years ago. Even hide it away, deleted from their websites in shame. 
Given the chance they'd probably erase it from the global 
consciousness, if indeed they remember it still themselves. But in 
fact those abandoned works serve my purpose far better than their 
services today.

I've realised that what I want is dead hardware and software. 
Technology harvested at the point where it does what I need, before 
the rot of alternative ideas and techniques withers it away. 
Therefore I've decided that I'm a necrotechnologist, out to reap 
usefulness from the abandoned wastelands of technology's past. Do 
what you like with your new software, standards, encryption 
schemes, and transistor count dreams, I'll be here peeking out from 
the scrapheap of tech left behind you.

 - The Free Thinker