Ask HN: An interrupt-free computing experience?

When I first started computing, everything was text-based. It was awesome, nothing could distract my attention. No Instant Messaging, no software asking two or three times if I really want to do that, no pop-up windows telling me there are updates available, no software interrupting my current focus to give me some pointless status message, and no software in the background trying to steal my pointer and cursor's focus when I'm doing something else.

How can I get back to this? For every Growl that I disable, there's another piece of software popping something else up, playing on my ADHD and making it that much more difficult to get anything done.

Any tips/tricks/suggestions?

(I wonder if I can post this, being a new user means Hacker News only lets me post once or twice a day before telling me that I'm submitting too fast".)