[pjerem]

If you want something more tangible than old demos, try HaikuOS. It works wonderfully from a usb drive.

I’m too young to have known BeOS (well I was a kid in the nineties so not too young but afaik, BeOS was pretty rare (overall and) at home. However I’m old enough to have known OSes that were build around offline usage and that’s what I loved trying Haiku is that it remembers me when your OS was made to use your computer, not to be an internet client.

I feel that having your emails as files is a good example of that : you connect to the internet to get your mails. You disconnect. You want to work to those mails on another computer ? No problem, just copy paste them on a USB d… I mean floppy disk, answer your mails put the answers on your floppy disk and send them tonight when you’re back home.

It may feel pretty cumbersome when we have today’s tools but that’s the feeling I feel I lost : owning my data not only legally but physically. And not only physically but physically in a useful way.

It remembers me the time when you just had to understand simple abstractions like files and folders and windows to own the computer (and you were just learning some programming language away to master it).