What if personal computers were a mistake, actually? | Hacker News Reader

What if personal computers were a mistake, actually?

zge.us.to

16 pointsomneity18 comments

“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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, I've used like Citrix desktop before at my job, but I'm still using a computer to connect to that. I was thinking just a screen that just has the basic ability to connect to different cloud hosted VM's, and no OS other than that. I'm not sure I've seen anything like that before, either for enterprise or consumer.

I think as years go on the network access issue becomes less and less of a problem though. Plus, for home dekstop computers there is pretty much constant access.

Sun sold something calls a sunray which was basically a dumb display. Just enough compute to handle the usb devices and send the events over the network and decompress and display the resulting video stream.

Unfortunately sun tied the sunray to incredibly expensive/slow sparc servers. So while the terminals would never need upgrading, the servers where never competitive in the first place.

It's also silly to have expensive server ram filled with frame buffers and the zillion client processes that normal desktops have for weather, date, time, calendar, notifications, speaker volume, notification mirroring, etc.

A more enlightened approach would be something more like plan 9 where compute can transparently happen client side or server side.

I still have a couple SunRays running in my house attached to a Linux server in the basement. I've upgraded the host 3 times but the terminals have aged in place. They are truly magical devices.

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.

Yeah, I think chromebooks are halfway there -- but like chromebooks still have CPU's and an OS. I guess I was thinking that the network connection could be, for instance, to a windows 10 client VM, so you could run games and other things you couldn't do in a chromebook.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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