Project Quiet Ground: the prequel

I’m sitting on the sofa in the offline outpost.
TV turned on to a fire crackling YouTube video, blanket on, reading a book with Angie by my side. She’s somehow enchanted watching the fire, but still leaning against me, as if making sure I’m still there.

All of a sudden, I put the Kindle down, turn to Angie and blurt:
“You know… if I am unable to buy an AS/400, I’m going to build my own midrange.”

Angie turns to face me, tilts her head a bit to the side and raises one ear, in the way only a curious plush rabbit can sweetly say, “What?? Go on, tell me more.”

I exhale.

“It’s going to be long, so make yourself comfortable. But before we start, I want you to know that this is not nostalgia, but rather a way to cope with myself.”

She relaxes. That’s enough. A cup of tea, our favourite Waitrose biscuits, and I begin.

Between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 was one of the worst periods of my life, with two very difficult personal events immediately one after the other, somehow two last straws that broke the camel. I was devastated.

After everything that has happened to me, my desire for a cabin in the woods and a more disconnected life grew stronger.

I have been hurt. A lot.

And despite my curiosity for complex computing engineering, my body and my mind told me otherwise. I needed a safe and contained space. Both in physical life, but also in my digital world.

A self-contained space. A workstation. A digital shelter that could hold everything, that could be easily backed up, without the need to access the external digital world (the Internet) to function. An offline-first. Access to the Internet would be relegated to the basic tasks I needed for life: mail, banking, perhaps some occasional online shopping. Away from the hurt. Away from what I later understood as the noise.

I decided to embark on the challenge of understanding where this desire was coming from, and ultimately how my brain works. It was hard, painful and very long. I already knew this in my heart, but these last few years made it even more clear. My brain is like an old mainframe, with a punch card reader as input and a dot matrix printer as output. You put the cards in the reader, my brain elaborates the batch, and you get the output on the printer. One job at a time.

So I reviewed my history in computing and understood what I liked, some of which I’ve shared in blog posts. While I’ve always been attracted to complex engineering, networking, large architectures, part of me was also drawn to more tangible and self-contained programs.

Creativity and structure were constantly fighting in my brain.

And I understood that structure was trying to balance the inevitable noise that comes with creativity in my industry. Designing and implementing, for example, complex private cloud, HPC or software-defined storage infrastructures fosters my creativity and desire to explore, but that world comes with additional tolls: lots of politics, bureaucracy, meetups and conferences, constant presence on social media, just to name a few. All those things were constantly fighting for my attention, making creativity a lot of work for my brain, which is designed for one task at a time. It’s not that I can’t do that. Creativity still brings me joy. But it comes at a cost: the burden, the “noise”, was wearing me out. And in this moment of my life, where I am fighting for some energy in that little remaining battery, it just couldn’t work.

So, instead of fighting back, I tried to reshape my work life around that. This is where the codename “Project Quiet Ground” came to life. After so much internal work, I decided that I could balance my life by splitting my freelancing time: four days per week doing creative work around Ceph, ZFS and other software-defined storage, and one day per week returning to my roots, to IBM i, which would provide me with structure, predictability and a lower-noise environment, especially in the way people interact, that is typical of that midrange platform.

That would have been “rad”: the perfect balance, I thought.
Except I failed. Despite putting a lot of energy and time into it.

It took me a while to understand that the job market has profoundly changed, and this kind of fractional work seems to be less appreciated than it was before.

But I wanted that balance in my life, so I decided to get up to speed anyway with IBM i and try to buy a system.

That’s when I hit reality.

On the usual second-hand channels, very few systems were available. Mostly very old ones, late 90s 9401-150, the small desktop-like tower with the red stripe that is still part of my history, and despite my love for that system, it was not practical. It takes so much space that I could not keep it at home. Others had missing pieces and/or no IBM i license.

On the flip side, older but more recent rack-mountable Power systems with VIOS (PowerVM) that I could have placed in my colocation were mostly available through IBM partners providing refurbished units, with costs that are unaffordable for a hobbyist like me.

So, in a moment of resignation, I blurted those words to myself:
“If I am not able to buy an AS/400, I will build my own personal midrange.”

I decided to dig further into the history of software and hardware that I liked, the evolution of IBM i and midrange systems, including the birth and evolution of BSD, to understand why certain technological choices were made, and what trade-offs shaped them.

The lack of any economically feasible systems and all the research I did, both on myself and on the systems, brought me to a point where I just decided to build my own personal midrange environment. Not for nostalgia. Not for fame. Just a way to create that low-noise, single-task space that could keep me sane in a world that praises noise and multi-tasking. The codename “Project Quiet Ground” inevitably became the name for it.

Angie turns back to me and hugs me, her paws and long ears wrapped around me.
A sweet hug that silently says, “I love you as you are.”