Re: "A Forth OS In 46 Bytes"

On 2025-05-29, Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> wrote:

anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:

My phone is from 2009.  Nobody forces me to abandon it.  What chance
are you not given.

>
You can't use a 2009 phone in the US.  All the 2G and 3G networks are
shut down.  Even my old 2016 phone was very marginal (I had to install
some kind of unreliable patch to get it to use LTE for voice) and I
upgraded to a 2023 phone that is pretty good. 
>

E.g., our web server was bought in 2021 and replaced one from 2005.
But the 2005-vintage machine is still there and can be used when the
need arises.

>
For servers you can run pretty much the same software as before, but on
the client side you have to use web browsers to get by in today's world,
and those browsers have to run awful bloaty Javascript monstrosities
that are on everyone's web sites now.  It used to be Microsoft Word
driving a "Wintel" upgrade loop, but now it's the web, and it's harder
to escape.  I think my laptop in 2005 was a Pentium 3 with 512MB of ram.
It would be almost unusable now.

Your laptop with GNU/Linux/OpenBSD would be perfectly fine
for tons of tasks:

- Links/Dillo Mainline as a browser
  - Dillectory: https://alex.envs.net/dillectory/

- Gopher and gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org
- MPV + yt-dlp, max 480p or 360p.
- Mocp ofr music
- SLRN for this
- IRC+Bitlbee-libpurple for IRC and IM
- Abiword/Ted + GNUMeric + Gnuplot
- PFE runs pretty well as a Forth, altough I hate it's block handling