Slow Computing Speedrunning

Welcome to the Slow Computing any% Speedrunning Contest; also known as watching digital paint dry.

The goal of this contest is simple. To celebrate the long code [1] times, we're running an informal contest to celebrate this era of batch processing.

Objective and Rules

It's pretty simple:

• Using any vintage computer of your choice, perform a long-running task of some sort
• Livestream, or otherwise provide regular status updates that show how far you have gotten.
• Emulators and the like are A-OK; just let us know what it's doing.

After each run, success or failure, our judges (which is mostly just the regulars in #paint-drying on Discord) will deem what, if any titles such run has earned, and an entirely subjective place on the Wall of Pain. There are absolutely no prizes besides the knowledge that you might be immortalized here for the life of the wiki.

Do you dare step up?

Examples of projects

For example, upgrading through every version of OS/2, building GCC, or the like. Livestream or otherwise regularly update the panting drying competition community. For NCommander's entries, VoDs on YouTube were provided. Europa livestreamed the terminal on Discord throughout the duration. Any sorta long running log with regular updates is acceptable.

The Wall of Pain

New categories will be added as needed

Idle Pain

Idle Pain refers to tasks where they're started, and mostly left untouched until they finish (excluding minor tweaks, build failures, etc.)

GCC 8 on an Ultra 5 running OpenBSD/sparc64 (Europa)

• Status: Complete!
• Duration: Approximately 5.375 days (4.5 days GCC, 0.875 days CDE)
• Proof: Livestreamed on Discord, updates periodically provided via Discord, Twitter, and Mastodon
• Comments:
  • The build that started it all, Europa's attempt to install CDE which required upgrading GCC, and starting a multiday build process that lead to the creation of the paint drying community ... I'm still wondering how we got here - NCommander (talk) 14:54, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
  • It finished! She managed to build CDE with her new GCC after some help from NCommander, and is now working on configuring her newly built CDE! - Kraaabs ((talk) 01:56, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Forcing Windows 7 onto a 66MHz CPU (Griffin)

• Status: Complete!
• Duration: About 14 hours
• Proof: Livestreamed on Discord, and live-updated in a Discord thread
• Comments:
  • The first entry to finish, I believe! They used 86box emulating a VIA Samuel, and a lot of trial and error to get the thing to boot at all. Was a fun one to watch. Nice and painful. N tweeted about this one, too. - Kraaabs (talk) 03:02, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Installing Gentoo in DOSBochs in QEMU on Void Linux on a PowerBook G4 (Krabs)

• Status: Ongoing
• Duration: About 52 hours so far.
• Proof: Livestreamed on Discord, and live-updated in a Discord thread
• Comments:
  • Yep, still going. It's been about 52 hours (~24-ish of which was prep work), and we're still decompressing the kernel on the Gentoo install CD. In for the long haul, this one. Being that I have to babysit this, is it active pain? There's a lot of waiting. Hybrid pain, maybe. :^) - Kraaabs (talk) 03:06, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Compiling every major release of NetBSD on a SparcStation 2 (Daghdha)

• Status: Ongoing
• Duration: 54 days (as of 2 Jan 2023)
• Expected to Complete: 15 March 2023 (~73 days)
• Proof: Livestreamed on Discord, and live-updated in a Discord thread. Each release takes a week to build.

Installing Windows 98 inside of Windows XP inside of Windows Vista inside of Windows 8 inside of Windows 10 (Autumn)

• Status: Ongoing
• Duration: 13 days (as of 1/12/23)
• Proof: Discord live stream + milestones in the corresponding channel
• Comments:
  • Autumn (12:13 1/12/23) FFS the XP installer took 11 straight days to boot TEXT MODE... I am going to be in for a long wait on this one...

Compiling Rust on a Mac OS X 10.7 VM (Bridget)

• Status: Ongoing
• Duration: 3 hours (as of 2022-01-24 02:37 PM)
• Proof: Discord live stream + occasional milestones
• Comments:
  • Bridget (2:32 PM on 2022-01-24): Crap, I didn't tell Macports to download the source versions of the packages. :/ Still took an hour to install the binaries, so we're in for a wild ride here, huh? :P As of writing, it's installing the ncurses dependency.

Active Pain

Active Pain entries are livestreams or single projects that are actively worked on over the period of the competition. They can be over multiple sessions, with time being tallied up.

Windows 98/ME on the Cursed 486 (NCommander)

• Status: On Hiatus/Ongoing
• Proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uaINJAktLA (and messages in #content + Fedi)
• Duration: Multiple attempts over multiple days, one 9 hour
• Comments:
  • You can't install ME on 32 MiB of memory. Upgrades ordered. So far, Windows 98 First Edition was installed from floppies, second edition from Netware, and ME from NetWare and local install, with each attempt taking literal hours. NCommander (talk) 13:44, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Upgrading Through Every Version of OS/2 (NCommander)

• Status: Complete/Historical
• Proof: VoDs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeaRlhz96mI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwGTHZzzF4
• Duration: Approximately 22 Hours
• Comments:
  • ow - NCommander (talk) 14:54, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Windows 10 in QEMU on a PowerBook G4 (Krabs)

• Status: Complete/Historical
• Proof: Was live-updated on Discord, and also in the writeup here
• Duration: About 10 active hours, and about 18 more waiting for it to boot
• Comments:
  • This was painful. Good way to spend a few days with COVID though. - Kraaabs (talk) 02:00, 7 November 2022 (UTC)