As I use all this retro tech around me, I'm reminded of something deeper. The peace wasn't discipline to only use one or two apps at a time, it was the hardware enforcing it for you. You didn't monotask because you were wiser; you monotasked because opening a second heavy thing would've brought the machine to its knees. The scarcity was the feature. And the quietly funny part is that we've now spent twenty years building software with things like focus modes, tab suspenders, "do not disturb," app blockers, to manufacture the exact constraint the old machines gave us for free. We're paying to re-impose the limit we celebrated escaping. And I find a huge irony in this. Back then, you went online to download files, check the news and read your favorite forums. You then closed the browser, and ditn' think of it until next evening. That's how it worked. There was no "let's check Mastodon because Claude's grinding away on a work task" thought. And the latency did something we lost too: it gave every act a beginning and an end. Downloading an album was a thing you did because you committed, you waited, and at the end you had it. It was yours, finite, sitting on a disk you owned. Streaming is infinite and borrowed and never finishes, so nothing is ever a completed act, it's just ambient flow you dip in and out of forever. A finite collection you've curated has a shape. Infinite access has none. That's a real loss to me.