“Collaborative spreadsheets are a solution looking for a problem that email attachments solved just fine,” says Marco Reyes, a maintainer of the Software98 package manager (which is just a shell script that downloads .tar.gz files). “Video conferencing? We have SIP phones and IRC. You don’t need to see Kevin’s face to approve the Q3 budget.”
The name “98” is deliberately nostalgic. 1998 was the year of Windows 98, of course, but also the year of the iMac G3, the peak of the original Doom modding scene, and the last moment before the dot-com bubble inflated the idea that every piece of software needed to be a global, cloud-reliant, VC-funded platform. In 1998, software was finite. It shipped on a CD. You installed it. It worked. If it broke, you fixed it. Software98 isn't a single app. It’s a set of brutalist design rules that developers adhere to religiously. software98
To join, you simply open a terminal. You type cc main.c -o app . You run ./app . It blinks. It prints "Hello, world." It uses 0.4MB of RAM. “Collaborative spreadsheets are a solution looking for a
Critics also point out the hypocrisy: Software98 runs on modern hardware. A 2026 gaming laptop running Software98 apps feels like a Ferrari stuck in first gear—blazingly fast, but underutilized. Supporters call this “headroom.” They say the extra cycles should go to the user, not the operating system. Let the CPU sleep. Save the battery. What began as a development philosophy has become a lifestyle aesthetic. Dumbphones running stripped-down Android kernels that mimic the Nokia 3210 interface are the fastest-growing segment of the mobile market. Zines are back, not as art projects, but as the primary documentation format for Software98 tools. You don’t need to see Kevin’s face to
By Alex M. Sterling