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title: Marchintosh 2026
tags: gopher telnet marchintosh macintosh retro tty
date: 2026-03-30
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I am writing this phlog on a telnet client for my Macintosh Plus
called Flynn. I didn't build it myself, but used Claude Code to
code it for me while I acted as a product manager and QA. For the
last few years I've been using NCSA Telnet, which worked well
enough, but was missing a lot of features and was just overall
difficult to use on a regular basis. Previously I didn't get the
whole AI thing, thinking chatgpt was a novelty and not very useful.
But once I figured up Claude Code and asked it a few things, I saw
it had the potential to do actual work with agentic coding.

I never have been, and never will be a Macintosh programmer. I
tried Comp Sci in college, only to change majors my first semester
because I couldn't hack the math. I did find I was good at systems
and making a computer do things in the way I wanted, even if small
shell and perl scripts were the most I could ever scrape by. With
agentic coding that changes things, now code is no longer a barrier
to something I want to build. In less than a week I had a telnet
client that allowed me to log into a remote system and use my
original Macintosh Plus in a way I had only dreamed of a yera ago.

On top of that, after seeing how successful I was with a telnet
application, I built another classic macintosh application, but
this time to address the issues I had with the TurboGopher
application to browser gopher://. This application is Geomys, and I
released version 1.0.0 today. It builds off the same foundation as
Flynn, similar style and features and is good enough to replace
TurboGopher on my Macintosh Plus.

Now I have a suite of Internet tools that I envsioned and brought
to reality. AI has a lot of problems, and we're going to have to
deal with a lot generated slop and other issues from it. But the
fact that I now have a tool that basically lets me create whatever
I want for retro computers, most of which have very little new
software made for them is extremly liberating.

Now the question I have is what can I make next?

You can download Flynn and Geomys from the apps section on my phlog
or the Macintosh Garden:

gopher://sdf.org/1/users/ecliptik/apps/
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/flynn
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/geomys