Old and Small Technology

Summary

Old technology is any tech that’s, well… old. Small technology is any tech that has a small footprint: doesn’t require a powerful machine to run, doesn’t have a lot of bloat, doesn’t have anti-features like spyware and tracking. Technology that is old enough is almost always small because, by modern standards, that’s all that was possible back then. Some small tech is old, some is modern. Embedded systems are an example of modern small tech development in many cases. Benefits of Small Technology According to the Small Technology Foundation, small tech is: easy to use private by default peer to peer zero knowledge non-colonial personal share alike interoperable non-commercial inclusive While these don’t describe all old and small tech, they are certainly aspirational values for the movement. They are much more commonly found, and to a stronger degree, in old and small tech than in more traditional contemporary “big tech”. The Value of Old & Small Technologies Older technology - UUCP, Gopher, Usenet, and so forth – often has some properties that are valuable today. We can start with system resources; a Raspberry Pi may be underpowered for many of today’s common tasks, but $40 can buy a computer that’s way more powerful than $200,000 machines from the 70s or 80s. Nowadays it’s common to write client software using frameworks like Electron that often use RAM by the gigabyte. What would the world look like if we still cared about resource consumption? Programs written when resources were a lot more constrained – or modern programs written with constraints in mind – can run on less-powerful computers. Those comptuers are cheaper and therefore accessible to more people. They also use dramatically less power, can be easily powered by alternative energy, and so are environmentally-friendlier also. What’s more, it defeats the cycle of planned obsolescence that so often plagues us now; if a 10-year-old computer is still perfectly capable, it doesn’t have to be replaced or thro...