Nathan Campos

This post has been very long in the making, as you can clearly notice by the timestamp in it, exactly 2 months have passed since my last OCC update and a lot has happened since then. Even though I missed my deadlines for the OCC posts it wasn't because I failed, quite the opposite, it was because I was having so much fun that I was simply not bothering to write a blog post. Although after all this time I did feel that a wrap-up post was needed.

During the last couple of days of my OCC week I talked a lot to my fellow peers over IRC and worked almost non-stop on my Gopher client Rodent and its Win32 port, so there wasn't a lot to share as well apart form some Visual Studio screenshots and chat logs. I do believe this was also one of the reasons why I wasn't posting any updates.

After the end of my OCC week I continued working on the Gopher client and got it to a point where I was confortable releasing binaries for the Win32 port. I also quickly ported the project to Visual C++ 6, so now the WIn32 port is capable of running on Windows 95 through Windows 11.

One of the interesting aspects of the OCC was that afterwards I felt like I was almost in a perpetual OCC, I even talked to some other members in our IRC channel and some are feeling the same way. After this experience we all noticed how usable some of these old machines are and realized that we should fire up our retro computers more often, not just play around with them occasionally, but if you have some free time, actually enjoy it using an older machine.

After that amazing week I've been using my retro computers a lot more and I'm constantly thinking of ways of forcing myself to use them more as well. One clear example of this is the fact that I'm writing this blog post from my Power Mac G5, the same one I did a lot of OCC from, simply because I felt like using it, something I woudn't have been so inclined to do previously. I do believe every retro collector should try to have an "off season" OCC to properly experience their computers but also to get this "retro bug" and use their machines a lot more frequently. If any of you actually do this be sure to join the #oldcomputerchallenge channel on Libera.Chat and let me (nathanpc there) know about it, I'm sure you'll enjoy your stay there.

Apart from using my retro machines a lot more these days, something extremely positive that I got out of OCC was a new set of online friends and an amazing community to hang around with. I think this was the best part of OCC. After it all ended most of the participants stayed in IRC and we chat regularly. This is very refreshing for me and I feel great about having fun talking endlessly to like-minded people on IRC, something I no longer felt for at least 10 years.

I would like to end this post by thanking everyone that participated in OCC this year, the organizers that put on such an amazing challenge and a special thanks to the amazing Headcrash for inviting me over to the challenge, I wouldn't have had this amazing experience if it weren't for you.