What if personal computers were a mistake, actually?
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: What if personal computers were a mistake, actually?
#2That 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.
Re: What if personal computers were a mistake, actually?
#3“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
Re: What if personal computers were a mistake, actually?
#4I 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.
Re: What if personal computers were a mistake, actually?
#5I 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 lo…
The fact that you would need constant network access in order to view the display would be one thing that potentially hinders the experience.
There are however many desktop as a service providers in existence that effectively host desktops in the cloud and allow users to connect to those desktops from a thin client or their PC.
Re: What if personal computers were a mistake, actually?
#6I 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 lo…
Because "the cloud" has horrible applications, tracks you, owns your data, is intermittently unreachable and terminates your account with using sketchy algorithms with no explanation or recourse.
Re: What if personal computers were a mistake, actually?
#7halfway 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.
Re: What if personal computers were a mistake, actually?
#8halfway 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.
(deleted)
Re: What if personal computers were a mistake, actually?
#9See 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?
Re: What if personal computers were a mistake, actually?
#10I 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 lo…
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.