- Oregon Trail didn’t ask you for your cookie preferences
- VisiCalc didn’t require an always on internet connection
- WordStar didn’t auto-update and restart in the middle of an essay
- Applesoft BASIC didn’t require a fully provisioned S3 instance
- Impulse Tracker didn’t try to feed your composition to an LLM
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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- You can run Oregon trail in the palm of your hand, and many much more sophisticated games offline using emulation. Not just that, there are thousands of people making offline-friendly indie games.
- Visicalc was not cloud-based. You can run LibreOffice Write completely offline now.
- Wordstar didn't have to deal with the threat landscape of the internet as we know it today. If you want you can turn off updates in your office suite of choice and manually update as you need.
- Apple basic can still be run, emulated, on a machine that runs a whole day off a battery. So can Sinclair basic and gw basic and logo. Python and perl run natively on my phone and tablet that work as all day servers that I carry everywhere.
- I use Renoise. It doesn't either. OpenMPT is available if you don't want to pay. There are tons of open source options. Sunvox is available for mobile devices. I make music professionally and neither Cubase nor Reaper force me to use AI. If there are plugins like that they are uninteresting to me and I ignore them. And I started making computer music on screamtracker. I love the tech we have for music now.