I'm a Canadian. I'd like to chime in on this opinion piece about technology's ability to remain entertaining.<p>It sounds like playing old game consoles is a punishment in itself. Meanwhile there's a whole subset of the Internet focused on using those older devices, complete with bragging rights, and sometimes paying big money for it.<p>Most of all, I get the security issues the prisons are concerned with. It isn't torture, and I bet the inmates don't hate it.<p>My partner and I chat away while we compete viciously against each other's klickety scores. That's a 90's game, and I don't feel like it's a restriction that's turning our lives to misery. We comment on each other's amazing moves as much as each other's utterly stunningly incredibly terrible moves. A lot. It's fun.<p>It does mean though, if you put either one of us in jail and provide such a system to live with, have mercy and also provide MASM or (preferably) TASM, or just install straight up old 90's Linux with gcc (which includes gas) installed, and an old CD copy of some ftp site with a nice collection of tar.z files. Then my computing household would be just fine.<p>Not that we want to. But if there was no choice, 90's technology is right where imo it started getting really great. People in prison are surely not hating this as much as people not incarcerated might think they would be.