Braille

I spend my days in cloud control planes, dashboards that auto-refresh, tabs that beg for attention. So when I go home to tinker, I keep reaching for the opposite: machines and protocols that sit still until you ask them something. Vinyl instead of an infinite feed. A POWER8 box humming in the corner instead of someone else’s serverless. And lately — gopher. If you’ve never used it: gopher is a protocol from 1991, older and simpler than the web. No JavaScript. No ads. No cookie banner asking permission to track you while pretending it’s about your “experience.” No fonts loading from six CDNs. You connect to a server on port 70, send it a short string called a selector, and it hands back either a menu or a plain text file. That’s the whole thing. A menu is just lines; some lines are links to other selectors. You navigate a worldwide information system by reading and pressing enter. ...