Casquinha: a native Mac OS 9 remote for gopher-spot

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. ...

July 7, 2026 · 7 min · Felipe De Bene
Mac OS 9 desktop showing Netscape Communicator displaying a Gopher menu with 'Now Playing: Budapest by George Ezra', with a media player actively streaming at 44 kHz

I put Spotify on Mac OS 9 — over Gopher

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.

July 1, 2026 · 8 min · Felipe De Bene