Thursday, October 28th, 2021

NoViCoGE 2021
=============

Most of my life I'm quite obsessed with using computers, that other
people consider too old to be used. I'm not referring to all that
retro crap that happens more and more, where people buy vintage
computers, turn them on time from time, play some games, record a YT
video, then turn them off again, put them back to the closet and
return to their multicore multigigahertz multigigabyte machines.
I'm talking about people who use their machines for decades because
they are used to them and because the slowest link in the chain is
always the user. You know, you won't type any faster on 3.3GHz
Core i3 than you would on 33MHz 68030. And certainly not better.

That is what brought me to the Gopher twelve years ago and that is
what made me start my own Gopher server in 2011. HTTPS and modern
WWW killed many older machines and my server at least tried to
provide valuable content to people with vintage machinery in daily
use.

I liked very much the rapid growth of the phlog scene some five 
years ago, because by that time my primary machine still was
a PowerMac G5, machine capable of web browing, but working much
faster in plaintext. Now the Gopher and phlogging are again on the
opposite side of the curve. Many people left fo Gemini, which may be
simpler in the UX sense, but with the mandatory use of encryption is
in fact as unreachable for vintage machines as modern web is.

Therefor, inspired by the great ROOPHLOCH[1] event (which I missed 
this year for whichI'm very sorry), I declare the november to be
a month of gophering with vintage technology. I invite you to:

>>>>>>>> November Vintage Computer Gophering Event 2021 <<<<<<<<

The NoViCoGE (pronunciation is the same as with infamous russian
nerve agent killing inconvenient people all around the world[2])
will happen in two categories:

1. I'm creating
Post phlog content, edit your gophermap, or do whatever else from
a vintage machine. No men in the middle. No Raspberry Pi on the
serial line providing your TRS-80 with miraculous SSH capabilities.
No modern WiFi modems with chips faster than the whole computer lab
in the middle of 1990s. The machine itself has to be the one, that
puts the content on the server - if you host your Gophe on your home
Pi, you have it easier. If you do it on SDF, I believe dial-up is
still an option. Or just try to build SSH for that old SPARCstation
to see why I say that encryption is a problem on such hardware :-)

2. I'm browsing
Just browse the vast gopherspac from an old machine. The same 
restrictions apply as in the previous paragraph, meaning it is
supposed to be your machine which is fetching, processing and
displaying the content.

When doing anything from both paragraphs, take a screenshot, I mean
take your camera and point it to the screen, if there is no other
option. Write about it on your phlog. Or Mastodon, or (if you must)
on your blog. Just let me know at logout128@gmail.com because I'd
like to keep track and create an overview after the event is over.
There will be no winners and no losers in NoViCoGE, I'm just keen
to discover if we can make it down to machines made before 1990.

Keep on gopherin'!

(Written on a Compaq LTE5250 with Pentium 120 and Windows 95. Last
available version of SSH client PuTTY used. It's quite hard for me
to consider this machine as vintage, because it can run the current
version of NetBSD, browse both HTTPS and Gemini, still having plenty
of free CPU time to decode an online MP3 stream. I hope we will do
more in NoViCoGE 2021.)

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2021.txt
[2] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Novichok%20agent