# techbunker: I wish small computer clubs existed

When I was a kid, I used to hang out at a cybercafe near my aunt's place. Places like this were later dubbed "internet cafes", but back then the internet wasn't really a thing. The machines were connected to each other and people played Quake II, Red Alert II, and typical LAN games like that. Lacking pocket money, I mostly just watched other people playing. It was quite fun. Such local play has a completely different vibe than online gaming.

Later I hung out at my high school's computer room. This was much better because I didn't need to pay to use the machines there. But the machines were older and not connected to a network. We mostly played local multiplayer games. Eventually we got more powerful, networked machines and then we could play shooters too. We had a blast!

These experiences died down during my university years even though the university had a much bigger computer lab. I don't fully remember why. We probably started having our own laptops, so we could play anywhere we wanted, and thus we didn't need the lab machines. Maybe we had rules against installing games too.

But at university I had another local activity: programming contests like ACM. Those were thrilling too: you tried hard to solve the problems and afterwards you hung around and discussed solutions. Even I could somewhat socialize there as a person who is otherwise incapable of even rudimentary social interactions.

This atmosphere is completely gone from my workplace nowadays. We can't even reinstate it. Everything has to be locked down, everything has to be secure, just because the internet has become such a crazily dangerous place.

These computer labs were like a third place for me. They are gone and I realized I quite miss them. So let me braindump what I wish existed.

## Description

I wish that bigger cities had a small, non-profit, offline computer club that anybody could join. Imagine a big room with about 12 machines mostly for playing simple video and coding games together.

I want this place to be an escape from the modern distracting world, a technology bunker. The machines are networked with each other; people can interact with each other within the room, but not with the outside internet. The room is a Faraday cage; the wifi modules on the machines are physically disabled. If people are there, I want them to be present, not chatting on their smartphones with outsiders.

The machines would be cheap Raspberry Pis with a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and two gamepads attached. They would run some niche OS like a BSD or similar, just to avoid mainstream stuff. The OS would be ephemeral so if you reboot a machine, you get back a pristine machine. Games, compilers, documentation, user data could be stored on a NAS that is also accessible by all the machines.

Ideally it would be near the city's transport hub but somewhat hard to find. I don't want to attract foot traffic; I just want it to be at an easily accessible place so I have fewer excuses not to hang out there. Knowledge about the club would spread via word of mouth or people could discover it when they searched online for old-school LAN party places or local coding competitions.

## Usecases

Old networked games like Doom, Warcraft, Red Alert would run just fine on old machines. Emulated SNES games could also be played with the two attached controllers. These games are still quite fun with the right people!

Or this would be the perfect place to host small, local programming competition parties. For example, host a weekly 45-minute programming competition with some AI generated tasks. You don't even need to have strong testcases. Just have another 20-minute section after the coding part where you can read other people's code and submit testcases to break it. I love this, and I bet you can find 12 interested people in a big city for this to be a regular weekly event.

People could hold local game jams or coding hackathons here. Educators should be able to reserve the room to teach programming basics to interested people. You don't need the internet for this either. Believe it or not, it is possible to code without internet and AI. If you didn't know something, you would need to ask ... the human mentor in the session! It's enjoyable to learn together, which is another experience that we are losing through the internet and AI.

## Rules

I want to have some strict rules to maintain the retro bunker / sanctuary vibe for the place:

• Initiation: you need to register, do some short training, and accept the rules of the bunker to become a member and gain access.
• Crumb-free zone: no eating / drinking in the bunker.
• Player two: you can bring one visitor but you are fully responsible for the person.
• WYSIWYG: no plugging in outside devices or tweaking or hacking the machines in the bunker; you have to embrace the limitations. Keep your smartphones and laptops tucked away too.
• Sauron: you accept that cameras watch over you.
• Airgap: let the admins know if you need a package installed, a file downloaded, or a file emailed to you from the NAS. They will fulfill the request after three days. The delay is there to reduce the dependency on online connectivity and to teach people to plan ahead.

Anyway, this is just a raw collection of ideas. The point is that this space could be a nice third place for folks with the above described niche interests. I would love to regularly attend such a place, especially for the low-tech coding jams. Plz, start such a club if you have the means for it.

published on 2026-04-06

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