
What if personal computers were a mistake, actually? - omneity
https://zge.us.to/counterfactual.html
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ggggtez
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in
coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the
trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”

\-- Douglas Adams

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antisthenes
To go even further:

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very
angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

\-- Douglas Adams

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Animats
That was what Ted Nelson wanted. He called them "Silverstands". Visualize a
cross between McDonalds and Google. Or Starbucks, with built-in machines.

The Berkeley Community Memory Project did it, though. They had dumb terminals
in coffee houses and such, connected to a bulletin board system. Free to read,
you had to put in a quarter to post.

~~~
alexjm
I wonder how well the pay-to-post mechanic helps mitigate spam, trolling, and
other misbehavior. Does anyone know of modern systems that work in a similar
way?

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jodrellblank
_On a local or communal level, all residents would have access to computer
systems, and persistent accounts_

Reading this line, I'm reminded of being in University, having written some
coursework on the shared computer system, and having a peer use their network
contacts of older students to lift my work from my account and copy it,
without me ever knowing how. At least with my personal computers, the bits I
don't understand simply sit there being mysterious, they aren't other people's
playground by default.

It's quite possible that was a formative experience which set me on the path
of current strong dislike and distaste for cloud computing and SaaS
subscriptions.

" _These local computer spaces would be maintained by a staff of people both
serving as administrators and educators._ "

read: would be gatekept by Alan Kay's high priests of a low order. It would be
a real achievement if this could be arranged so such people came to be seen
and respected more like librarians than like IT Crowd characters.

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bcmo
I like thought experiments like this. Sort of along these lines, I've been
wondering more why we don't make displays that just connect to a cloud hosted
VM instead of PC's -- the end user never has to know what or where is powering
the images in front of them. Assuming its just network bandwidth issues
preventing this, but eventually this could make more sense than having an
actual machine in your home. Would be a lot cheaper, there would be hosting
economies of scale, etc.

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cattlemansgold
If I'm thinking about this correctly, isn't this essentially what a Chromebook
does? Google Sheets, for example, shows me a picture of a spreadsheet that's
being generated on a Google server, not my machine. A Chromebook is just a
display with a keyboard - and the Chrome browser is just the software that
passes the images from the server to my display.

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sliken
Chromebooks are full laptops, with a full OS, running a full browser,
windowing system, notification system, device drivers, network stack, etc.

You can even run Android apps, or linux native apps under chrome://settings.

You can edit that spreadsheet locally, just click on offline editing.

Sure when you click save it saves to the cloud, but that's about the largest
difference between Chrome OS and Linux, they are running the same kernel after
all.

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jmccorm
Many people want to create a better Facebook. Open source software, by itself,
won't get you there. A piece of the puzzle is missing.

Forget the article's focus on the PC. I think the real question they're
reaching for is this: out of all the ways the Internet could have ended up, we
arrived at this broken model for online services. The exploration is
interesting, but in the end it seems like a cry for help or a call for action.

We need to make the jump from code based projects to service based projects
which are done entirely for the public good and not for financial self-
enrichment. In most cases, the basic mechanism which allows you to scale your
own service is missing... unless you're willing to bill your customers up-
front or help exploit them behind the scenes.

So here are the questions: Can we graduate from code based projects to service
based projects? How do we contribute code _and operate_ an online service for
the public good, at scale, and without compromising our users in the process?
Is it possible to make this an easily repeatable process? Is this a
significant cure for much of the quiet exploitation behind many of today's
"free" Internet services?

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tyzerdak
This stuff is usefull when you have moar than 1 pc. In fact systems like that
already exist and sone companies use them. But you need professional sys admin
to call to setup all that stuff at least. Most people can't browse internet
without bringing viruses.

Lots of people are fine with 1 pc and don't need more.

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ggggtez
See also: If everything was entirely different, then things... might be
different.

>If we were to assume that there is always at least one responsible third
party

>the administrators interest would be to advance the knowledge the users

So the US government enacts the largest socialist policy of this century. No
one ever thinks to send or view pornograpy over the internet. Cloud computing
is solved in the 80s. Cyber security is never a problem (because surely
SysAdmins can never be phished, and software would never have bugs in it). No
one realizes they can take this (now dirt cheap) simple terminal out of the
public space and into their home...

I know people have different ideas of Utopia, but you really need to bend over
backwards to get to this. Are there any _humans_ in this world of free
software?

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buboard
halfway in it describes Urbit. But i don't think net cafes were very social,
the same way cinemas weren't ever a great place to meet new friends.

~~~
etagobla
(deleted)

