Spotify

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. ...

Or: how fifty-nine builds taught me that someone has to own the state, and why I shipped b59 with the seams still showing. Last week I put Spotify on Mac OS 9 over Gopher. That post ended with a small confession baked into the architecture: the “client” on the OS 9 side was Netscape Communicator, browsing gopher menus. It worked — Netscape speaks gopher:// natively, and a menu of tracks is just text — but it’s a browser wearing a remote-control costume. Every action was a page load. There was no queue, no now-playing that updated on its own, no seek bar, no app. ...

Streaming 2026 music on a 1999 Mac via a 1991 protocol. Because the only thing better than making old tech work is making it work wrong.