The Useful Personal Computer

Reliving the days when the possibilities were endless and we weren't already captured by an entrenched computing path is important. 50 years ago, every marketer intuited that a home computer would be used for storing recipes. It never happened. Why not? (Reasons aren't hard to come up with, but the process of doing so draws our imagination toward what computer interfaces could have been and should still be.)

"Appliance Computer" is such a cool name

This article really resonates with me. Sometimes I stop and think that in actuality people do very little computing with their devices. If people actually used computers to manage their life, a windows 95 dekstop would already be plenty powerful to run all the necessary software.

As always, entertainment and ads are what keeps the treadmill going

I remember how computer enthusiasts had hard time explaining to “regular” people what personal computers were good for. They would often mention things like cooking recipes and balancing checkbooks which really was not convincing at all…

In the 60s, my dad told me that the greatest coming inventions would be:

1. a TV you could hang on the wall like a picture

2. a typewriter that would enable correcting what you wrote

He was right!

(I remember when my dad was writing a book, my mom spent endless hours retyping the revised manuscripts. It seemed like a hellish task to me. I'm glad that job is gone.)

Classic tech is still a source of very important lessons, and potentially software and hardware options. Both in regards to focusing on building for the hardware, saving energy and power, but also even in relation to software that had it's time but could be rebuilt for modern hardware and serve a new purpose.

We had a Commodore 64 and an Amiga back in the 80s. I used to type up books reports and research papers which was really nice.

Once, I got in trouble and had to go home and write sentences. I used the word processor to copy/paste the sentence 500 times (or whatever it was). The teacher was dubious of this, but not fully understanding personal computers, gave in and accepted it.

Win! Win! Win! ...

This article really sells short the importance of user groups and even more informal networks, as well as type-ins, in providing software, whether deliberately released by the author to the public or not. Upwards of 99% of the software on the personal computers I saw in the early 80s was non-purchased. Computers are awesomely powerful copying machines, and we took advantage of that to the fullest!

A few of the most important software packages, like Microsoft BASIC, VisiCalc, and WordStar were motivated by the opportunity for profit, and those have disproportionate visibility in the historical record because people bought advertisements for them.

Nobody bought ads for the software distributed on the monthly HUG disks, because you didn't have to be convinced to part with your money to get a copy, and the author didn't have any incentive to convince you. If you wanted any software from the "HUG Parts List" you could get it for roughly the cost of copying: https://vtda.org/pubs/REMark/1980/remark-issue12-1980.pdf#pa....

The dominance of not-for-profit software copying never ended, from my point of view. We went from in-person user-group meetups and mail-order disks to BBSes, computer clubs at schools, and colleges, and then to FidoNet, Usenet, and the internet. Shareware was a big deal starting in the mid-80s; it was sort of nominally profit-motivated, but most shareware authors never made any significant money, and kept writing shareware anyway. Exceptions like McAfee Antivirus were exceptional. See https://bbs.retropc.se/smmvirus/00index.html for some kind of idea about the environment McAfee came from in the BBS era.

That Apple II font is so crisp. Just learned it came from the Signetics 2513 character generator chip (1970):

https://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Signeti...