Old and Small Technology

Article links to the Small Technology Foundation.[1] That's a tiny group pushing their own web server and front end HTML technology. Not that small; they still use JavaScript. Not clear why theirs is better.

There are some no-Javascript HTML systems that do everything with HTML and CSS. That might be worth pushing. Especially if coupled with a GUI editor like Dreamweaver. It's embarrassing that most web design isn't WYSIWYG.

[1] https://small-tech.org/about/#small-technology

If we're being honest with ourselves, I think most people who like old software like it the same way people like vintage cars.

Most modern software that needs to be built with performance on mind has that requirement because it's being built for commercial purposes. Most end-user software simply doesn't face that same constraint, although it's a property many claim to desire, because we all tend to have gigabytes of RAM and megabytes of network speed at our disposal. We have so much of these, in fact, sitting idle most of the time, that companies like Microsoft notice very few of their actual users max out their system usage and start building in their own ... stuff, to make better commercial use of it, let's say. (Whether that is a good outcome is a debate everyone is wrong about in a different way.)

Sounds an awful lot like my dad complaining about all the junk they put in modern cars these days. And yet, I don't see a lot of vintage cars in active use. They're kept around mostly for the fun in the off-clock hours. Maybe you drive them to and from the job interview to leave a certain impression upon the interviewer. Who knows.

> Nowadays it’s common to write client software using frameworks like Electron that often use RAM by the gigabyte.

It's nice to know some people out there also fucking hate this. My friends are annoyed with me because I refuse to use Discord because I'm sorry, TeamSpeak had this issue solved in 2002 and it ran on my piece of shit emachine tower. Why the hell does Discord need 20 goddamn updates per day and a gig of RAM?!

Funny to see Emacs with a Y for small... one of the humorous expansions of "Emacs" I once read was, "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping", alluding to how bloated it was perceived to be.

I think it would be more productive to define tech in terms of "constant size vs variable size". Small is relative, but constant is constant, and the lie that is particularly enabling of bloat is that we scale between "zero and any amount" of something: any amount of data in a file, any size or color depth in an image, any number of parameters in a function call, any number of APIs, any number of processes, and so on. This is both a question of the memory/storage quantities and the amount of compute being done - when you vary both, you end up with complexity in terms of resource management.

Computers today do routinely scale to quantities so large that it seems like "any," but they are not good human-interface scales. Old and constant tended to be the case because the design was overtly burdened by the additional logic needed for variability, but the way that we engineer and program computers now tries very hard to do variable-everything, from the system power management on upwards to the top-level presentation.

I thought it was going to be old old tech. Typewriters meet the requirements. As do tables, vases and vacuum cleaners.

If you want a chip then older personal computers. Like Acorn Electron or ZX Spectrum that boot immediately, and the only telemetry is the telly you connected it to to behold the 8 colour glory.