
What if personal computers were a mistake,? - zdw
https://zge.us.to/counterfactual.html
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Porthos9K
If I remember correctly, multi-user computing as a public utility was one of
the goals of the Multics[1] project in the 1960s. After Bell Labs dropped out
of Multics, some of the people working on Multics decided to take what they
had learned and make a new operating system called Unix[2]. You might have
heard of it. :)

Public-access Unix machines still exist. There's SDF[3], and the various
servers comprising the tildeverse[4]. But they're just a dim echo of what
could have been.

1:
[https://www.multicians.org/fjcc1.html](https://www.multicians.org/fjcc1.html)

2:
[https://www.multicians.org/unix.html](https://www.multicians.org/unix.html)

3: [https://sdf.org](https://sdf.org)

4: [https://tildeverse.org/](https://tildeverse.org/)

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jonjacky
Community Memory [1], a counter-cultural timesharing system in the Bay Area in
the early 1970s, was perhaps a step toward something like what this article
discusses. Also the PLATO [2] system might have evolved into something like
that. But microprocessors became available in the mid- and late-1970s and the
focus shifted away from time-sharing to personal computers.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_\(computer_system\))

