OK. I dunno if it’s possible but could we put aside the combative tone for a minute and try to come to an understanding over where we disagree?
When I look up the word “internet” I see:a global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities, consisting of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols.
What does that definition mean to you, and what does it include?
For me, UUCP mail routed using bang paths, that is then routed on to the world wide TCP/IP network via an SMTP mail gateway are in fact by the above definition “part of the internet”.
Love the ideology here but this article is not very well informed or up to date really, various annoying errors (hat: i do community WiFi stuff, have built some long range links, connected to guifi and freifunk people).
I think the most promising post apocalypse tech is LoRa (paired with low power cpus and screens), which is not even mentioned. Nor is imaginative reuse of the tons of copper pairs in the ground in cities or laying your own fibre which is reasonably doable.
I’d love to read a follow up article written by yourself. This area of technology is of interest to me but finding quality content to read up on can sometimes be difficult.
Can you elaborate? I am in a rural area, so I would like to understand how someone uses this practically. Do you own the “long range” antenna and pay for the internet/WiFi service that it connects to?
I live in central London and all I can get on my building is a 10mb ADSL connection, it feels the early 00s. I’d be quite happy at the moment with 25mb. :-)
This is perfect. Three days ago I was talking with my brother and he asked which would last longer, information stored on the internet, or information stored in books and physical things? If major grids were to one day go down, I suppose digital information would not be confined.
Lots of footnotes, yet still doesn’t feel particularly well researched. Many factors here–the majority of which are quantitative–yet hardly any math! Same story with the footnotes–wifi as a base assumption, very little math.
If low-tech and low-power are the goalpost, what makes a mess of wifi nodes the winner? Is wifi lower-tech than fiber or DOCSIS? Is blasting radio waves through unlicensed spectrum more energy efficient than sending the bits through a shielded cable? How do the maintenance costs stack up?
I don’t know what the answer is. What I do know is that our Delaware-based paperclip-optimizers always seek maximum profit at minimal expense. Equipment, energy, and maintenance are expenses. Why do they use wires?
I agree. I think the article brings up some great points, but does not actually tackle the “Low Power” aspect. I think there’s a point to be made here that our current internet is not very resilient (i.e. it relies on a backbone of high throughput, highly available interconnect) nor is it very easily compatible with renewables (the high availability does not map cleanly to renewables which aren’t always highly available, without the use of batteries or other storage solutions which may be quite complicated in practice to implement).
The other thing I’m a bit disappointed by this post with is that there is actually ongoing research and implementation work on creating networks in situations where links are not always available (such as Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking) which is not discussed in the article even once.
For all their talk about low-tech, for them it’s obviously just an aesthetic, not something they practice.
This is a low-tech website. It doesn’t need CSS or images or any of the other stuff this site is built on, and it conveys information much better than this site does.
The stylesheet is 3kb and you don’t have to use it. Why care about css that minimalistic when the page loads several images, with the header image being 2,900% the size of the stylesheet? Weird priorities.
Contextualization is information and CSS contextualizes. Anyways, it’s absurd to liken CSS to the great founding member of famous rock band King Crimson when I doubt he has to spend time doing web design. Jokes aside, the page works completely fine without the miniscule stylesheet, and it’s really not that hard to turn it off. I can show you if you like.
Also, using the downvote mechanism to disagree discredits your arguments.
I didn’t downvote your post, don’t be so full of yourself, and lighten up :) we’re talking about stylesheets, not taxes. It’s not that serious of a topic.
I think that might have been me. CSS is 25 years old, and is quite low tech. You may not like it, and you don’t have to use it, but that doesn’t make it “high tech”.
If I pull out a 20-year-old computer, meaning something like Windows 98 and IE5, because I have nothing better, will the website be functional using that browser?
What about a 23-year-old computer with Netscape 3? What about NCSA Mosaic?
What about just a 10-year-old iPad with iOS 5 on it?
For an English-language website which is only sharing information as text and perhaps some images, there is no good reason except effort required that the answer to those questions can’t be “Yes”.
Lynx will actually handle a lot of things that, e.g., IE6 will not, because it is actively maintained. One of the hardest stumbling blocks standing between a retro browser and a modern bare-bones site is TLS versions (and ciphers). I run a self-consciously retro front-end for a modern web service, but I keep the TLS up to date because it handles logins. Lynx works fine on it (because it’s compiled against current OpenSSL), while anything older than early Firefox releases usually won’t (because of dropping support for SSL and for TLS 1.0).
Yeah, I just tried to get a Win98 VM to go so I could actually try it. Finding an Ethernet driver for it that worked was far more work than it should have been, so I just saved it as a file and loaded it into the VM.
The rendering of the page itself wasn’t exactly pretty or flawless, but worked okayish: see here (offer good until 2020). Does look better when you just take out the CSS entirely though.
That is interesting. I suppose there are two different spectrums: one for human technological achievement, and the other for personal technological fluency. Relative to a state-of-the-art web app, this website/server is decidedly low-tech, but to my grandmother, it’s anything but.
yarchive is low-tech because it’ll render correctly in the simplest possible web browsers. The linked site conveys information using images and a permanent footer, neither of which will render in low-tech rendering engines. There’s very little way to claim the linked site is as low-tech as yarchive.
Kinda surprised the article/page doesn’t even mention the grand daddy of delay driven internetworks - UUCP.
Neither FidoNet, which is apparently still kicking.
Maybe because it’s possible for something to be a network without being any part of the Internet.
Yes but the UUCP system was part of the internet!
First, gatewaying email and Usenet news isn’t the same as being part of the Internet in a persistent fashion.
Second, bang paths aren’t an example of UUCP being part of the Internet.
Got a cite for that assertion? Are you confusing “being part of the internet” with “having interactive login access” ?
I’m not confusing anything. You’re the one who thinks every computer network is “The Internet”.
OK. I dunno if it’s possible but could we put aside the combative tone for a minute and try to come to an understanding over where we disagree?
When I look up the word “internet” I see: a global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities, consisting of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols.What does that definition mean to you, and what does it include?
For me, UUCP mail routed using bang paths, that is then routed on to the world wide TCP/IP network via an SMTP mail gateway are in fact by the above definition “part of the internet”.
What part of that do you disagree with?
Being part of the Internet means passing IP packets. No more, no less.
Love the ideology here but this article is not very well informed or up to date really, various annoying errors (hat: i do community WiFi stuff, have built some long range links, connected to guifi and freifunk people).
I think the most promising post apocalypse tech is LoRa (paired with low power cpus and screens), which is not even mentioned. Nor is imaginative reuse of the tons of copper pairs in the ground in cities or laying your own fibre which is reasonably doable.
You can leave your comments on the non-solar version of the website, and the author could post corrections from that.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/how-to-build-a-low-tech-internet.html
I’d love to read a follow up article written by yourself. This area of technology is of interest to me but finding quality content to read up on can sometimes be difficult.
I get my internet this way. “Long range” antenna is about a mile away.
Can you elaborate? I am in a rural area, so I would like to understand how someone uses this practically. Do you own the “long range” antenna and pay for the internet/WiFi service that it connects to?
There’s a local service provider that caters to semi rural areas. As long as you have if you have one of their antennas you can join their Network.
I get about 25 megabit, with low enough latency to play video games. Have never had trouble with rain or fog.
I also have an alternative which is DSL in this area. Not as good or as reliable.
Would love to have fiber or cable internet but it’s never coming here.
I live in central London and all I can get on my building is a 10mb ADSL connection, it feels the early 00s. I’d be quite happy at the moment with 25mb. :-)
This is perfect. Three days ago I was talking with my brother and he asked which would last longer, information stored on the internet, or information stored in books and physical things? If major grids were to one day go down, I suppose digital information would not be confined.
Hope the sun comes up in Barcelona soon, we’ve got it down to 10% battery!
It’s currently 9:36 PM there, so… probably going to go offline tonight.
We should link to their infrastructure site instead, right? https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/how-to-build-a-low-tech-internet.html
The sites is archived, so just use that instead.
Lots of footnotes, yet still doesn’t feel particularly well researched. Many factors here–the majority of which are quantitative–yet hardly any math! Same story with the footnotes–wifi as a base assumption, very little math.
If low-tech and low-power are the goalpost, what makes a mess of wifi nodes the winner? Is wifi lower-tech than fiber or DOCSIS? Is blasting radio waves through unlicensed spectrum more energy efficient than sending the bits through a shielded cable? How do the maintenance costs stack up?
I don’t know what the answer is. What I do know is that our Delaware-based paperclip-optimizers always seek maximum profit at minimal expense. Equipment, energy, and maintenance are expenses. Why do they use wires?
I agree. I think the article brings up some great points, but does not actually tackle the “Low Power” aspect. I think there’s a point to be made here that our current internet is not very resilient (i.e. it relies on a backbone of high throughput, highly available interconnect) nor is it very easily compatible with renewables (the high availability does not map cleanly to renewables which aren’t always highly available, without the use of batteries or other storage solutions which may be quite complicated in practice to implement).
The other thing I’m a bit disappointed by this post with is that there is actually ongoing research and implementation work on creating networks in situations where links are not always available (such as Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking) which is not discussed in the article even once.
For all their talk about low-tech, for them it’s obviously just an aesthetic, not something they practice.
This is a low-tech website. It doesn’t need CSS or images or any of the other stuff this site is built on, and it conveys information much better than this site does.
CSS isn’t exactly high-tech though. The linked site isn’t all talk, either.
The stylesheet is 3kb and you don’t have to use it. Why care about css that minimalistic when the page loads several images, with the header image being 2,900% the size of the stylesheet? Weird priorities.
Images can be used to convey information. CSS is just frippery, at least as that site uses it.
Contextualization is information and CSS contextualizes. Anyways, it’s absurd to liken CSS to the great founding member of famous rock band King Crimson when I doubt he has to spend time doing web design. Jokes aside, the page works completely fine without the miniscule stylesheet, and it’s really not that hard to turn it off. I can show you if you like.
When you stop joking around I’ll take you seriously. So far, nothing you say is worth very much.
Also, using the downvote mechanism to disagree discredits your arguments.
I didn’t downvote your post, don’t be so full of yourself, and lighten up :) we’re talking about stylesheets, not taxes. It’s not that serious of a topic.
I think that might have been me. CSS is 25 years old, and is quite low tech. You may not like it, and you don’t have to use it, but that doesn’t make it “high tech”.
This seems like the spark of a very interesting conversation - how do we define “low tech”?
Standing on a mountain and banging two electrically charged rocks together? Oh, you said ‘spark’ already. Hah! :)
If I pull out a 20-year-old computer, meaning something like Windows 98 and IE5, because I have nothing better, will the website be functional using that browser?
What about a 23-year-old computer with Netscape 3? What about NCSA Mosaic?
What about just a 10-year-old iPad with iOS 5 on it?
For an English-language website which is only sharing information as text and perhaps some images, there is no good reason except effort required that the answer to those questions can’t be “Yes”.
Example: http://hike.qdb.us/demo_oct15/
I dunno about IE5, but it works fine in text-only browsers like Lynx and Links.
Lynx will actually handle a lot of things that, e.g., IE6 will not, because it is actively maintained. One of the hardest stumbling blocks standing between a retro browser and a modern bare-bones site is TLS versions (and ciphers). I run a self-consciously retro front-end for a modern web service, but I keep the TLS up to date because it handles logins. Lynx works fine on it (because it’s compiled against current OpenSSL), while anything older than early Firefox releases usually won’t (because of dropping support for SSL and for TLS 1.0).
Yeah, I just tried to get a Win98 VM to go so I could actually try it. Finding an Ethernet driver for it that worked was far more work than it should have been, so I just saved it as a file and loaded it into the VM.
The rendering of the page itself wasn’t exactly pretty or flawless, but worked okayish: see here (offer good until 2020). Does look better when you just take out the CSS entirely though.
That is interesting. I suppose there are two different spectrums: one for human technological achievement, and the other for personal technological fluency. Relative to a state-of-the-art web app, this website/server is decidedly low-tech, but to my grandmother, it’s anything but.
I personally like to call it “Lo tech”
yarchive is low-tech because it’ll render correctly in the simplest possible web browsers. The linked site conveys information using images and a permanent footer, neither of which will render in low-tech rendering engines. There’s very little way to claim the linked site is as low-tech as yarchive.
What you’re saying sounds like some robert “frippery” to me, because this page renders just fine with (external) css completely disabled!