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Comment by laurent123456 | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how local-first is now considered "a new type of application". Ten years from now there will be a blog post here presenting a revolutionary type of application - "online first", to reduce the need of all this annoying complexity, synchronisation, multiple clients, etc.

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In the beginning there were mainframes and VT100 dumb terminals. (Well, after punched cards and switches.)

Then we got personal computers.

Then we got mainframes again with HTML5 dumb terminals, rebranded as "cloud."

Now we're starting to see renewed interest in personal computers.

> Now we're starting to see renewed interest in personal computers.

'cept this time round, those slick black rectangles are so locked down you can hardly program on them. And not to mention that people using them are mostly just looking at tiktok, twitter, instagram, snap, youtube.

The number of technical people today is vastly larger than it was back then. Their number just looks small because there's a new phenomenon of mainstream casual computing and those numbers dwarf anything else.

Personally I don't consider the black rectangles real computers. They're consumer content consumption devices, basically like televisions. They are to computers what a TV is to a production studio.

It's a weird way to phrase it, but "local-first" is different than "local-only", which was my gut reaction to the phrase. I think as a flip over the remote-then-sync model, it's apt, but could probably use some rebranding.

Haha, yeah, exactly what I thought when I read that.

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