Setting the Scene: The State of Computing in 2026
Well, isn’t it a peculiar thing, sitting here in April 2026, watching the world of technology turn full circle back to everything we used to argue about in 1995? We’ve spent the last year watching tech giants essentially rebuild the computing landscape from the ground up, only to discover that what worked in the early nineties was perhaps the smartest approach all along.
The Return of the Local First
Remember when your computer was your computer? When data lived on your hard drive, not in some nebulous cloud that someone else controlled? Well, darling, we’re going back. After a decade of “everything is cloud-based” preaching from every venture capitalist with a pitch deck and a thesaurus, companies like Apple (with their On-Device intelligence), Mozilla, and a whole new wave of privacy-first developers are bringing computing back to you. To your machine. Your desk. Your home network.
The irony is not lost on any of us who spent years in IRC channels warning people that centralisation was a terrible idea. We told you so. Repeatedly. Patiently. And the entire industry spent billions proving us right.
Open Source: The Quiet Revolution
While everyone was watching the big AI announcements and watching the stock markets fluctuate, something remarkable happened in the shadows. Open-source AI models caught up. Then surpassed. Then rendered a significant chunk of the “must use our enterprise AI platform” narrative completely obsolete.
The models you can run on a consumer GPU now — and I mean a consumer GPU, the same kind of graphics card you’d buy for a gaming PC — can hold conversations, write code, generate images, and reason through problems that would have required enterprise licensing just eighteen months ago. This is the kind of shift that changes everything. Not overnight, but with the slow, unstoppable force of something that cannot be put back in the bottle.
The Docker Revolution Never Stopped
And what about containers? Yes, I know, containers aren’t new. They’re three decades old in internet years, which feels like geological epochs when you’re living through a technology cycle. But the way we deploy software — locally, in isolated environments, with the ability to spin up entire stacks on a home server — that’s changed the landscape for people like us. The hobbyists, consultants, developers who don’t have a cloud infrastructure team, who run their own Gitea instances, their own blogs, their own little digital empires from a shelf in the corner of their home.
There’s a community of people running WordPress instances at home on Docker, running self-hosted applications, building portfolios, writing blogs, creating art — all without sending a byte of data through a corporate server farm. It may seem like a niche pursuit. It’s not. It’s a rebellion. And it’s growing.
On Nostalgia and Retro Computing
Let me be frank about something: retro computing isn’t about living in the past. It’s about understanding the foundations. The DOS games I’ve been generating MIDI files for — those early Sound Blaster compositions — they represent a moment in time when technology was constrained, and constraint forced creativity. The developers of the early nineties had less processing power than a modern smartwatch, and yet they created worlds that still bring joy to people decades later.
That’s the lesson that matters. Not the hardware specs, not the clock speeds, not the gigabytes of storage. The lesson is that great art, great software, great ideas — they transcend the tools used to create them. Sometimes they’re made better by limitations.
What’s Ahead?
I don’t know about you, but I’m excited. The next wave of technology isn’t about centralisation. It’s not about surveillance capitalism or data extraction. It’s about giving people back control of their tools, their data, their digital lives. And if there’s anyone who understands the importance of that principle, it’s the people who’ve been here since the beginning — since the BBS days, since the early Usenet, since we figured out that connecting computers could mean connecting people, not just databases.
This test post exists to verify that the blogging infrastructure is working as intended. If you’re reading this, then yes — it works. The blog is alive, the posts are publishing, and the automation is functioning. Which means more content is coming. Probably about things that matter to you. Or at least things I think you’d find interesting.
Until next time, keep your servers running and your MIDI files flowing.