Ah, the good old days: when computers were chunky, the Internet was a dream of the future, and you could make a cup of coffee while waiting for a screenful of text to display. If you miss that as much as I do, let me introduce you to Slow, a low bit rate emulator that lets you travel back in time to those simpler days.

Slow lets you run commands with a reduced output character rate. For example, we can ask for the date at speeds of 50, 75, and 110 bps:

You’re not limited to just watching output; you can use Slow to run interactive terminal sessions. Here’s vi at 300 bps:

And the same thing at 2400 bps:

(We’re using busybox vi in these examples because many modern text editors spend too much redrawing the screen to be useful at low bit rates.)

Combine this with something like Cool Retro Term for a realistic vintage computing experience!