Rust

Here is the whole idea in one sentence: I control Spotify from a Mac OS 9 machine, over the Gopher protocol. This is a real System 9 desktop. The now-playing, the search, the queue — all of it is plain Gopher menus going to a box in my closet. That screenshot is the fun part. The load-bearing part is duller and more useful, and it’s the reason a 2001 Power Mac and a 2024 Android phone can both talk to the same server without sharing a single line of code. ...

There’s a screenshot on my other monitor right now that I can’t stop looking at. An M4 MacBook is running a VNC viewer. That viewer is connected to a Mac OS 9 machine with a broken display and broken clamshell (new parts on the way) running bare on my workbench. On that classic Mac desktop, a little app called Casquinha is playing The Fate of Ophelia off Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. Album art loaded. Scrubber moving. “Up Next” queue populated. ...

A few days ago I put live CTA trains on gopher — the 1991 text protocol, no JavaScript, no cookie banners, the internet with the volume turned down. I called that post “Live Trains on a Quiet Internet” and figured that was the end of it: one weird little gopherhole, scratching one itch. It wasn’t the end of it. This morning I opened the project back up “just to add a link,” and by the time I looked up it was dark out and I had a whole neighborhood. A shared library underneath. A phlog. An interactive tarot reader that draws three cards and reads them against the actual sky overhead. And a hub tying the three of them together. ...

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. ...