A vast amount of computer equipment is being dumped on the Australian landscape. The glossy advertisements illustrate microcomputers everywhere. Hurtling through space. Nestled on the moon's surface. Artfully sharp in a 21st century space home. Peering out from foliage in a contrived jungle setting. Just occasionally they are even depicted in a practical business environment. How does a business person with little appreciation of this new technology go about rationally deciding what is for the best?Is a computer necessary?How should it be evaluated? Is one ‘system’ as good as another? What are the pitfalls? How is a Selection criteria established? The task of selecting an appropriate computer system from the plethora of possibilities is not easy, but it need not be prohibitive. What is needed is common sense information. UnderstandableandobjectiveanswerstothemanyquestionsyounodoubthaveareprovidedinthisCommon Sense Guide to the Selection of aComputer System!
Basic | The Personal Computing Platform
We build products, tools, and standards to make computers more personal.
About Us
Around the world, building the internet’s operating system—and a better way to work. In a world of tech companies fighting for growth at any cost, imagine one that gives away its most successful pr…
under the hood
This week I’ve been thinking about what it’s like for a new generation to make things with computers. When we were talking in Berlin, Luce made a point that...
Care at the Edge of Automation – Topos Institute
Technologies don’t just solve problems, they change us. We invent technologies, and they invent us in turn, shaping our lives and worlds. This is the phenomenon that Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, in Understanding Computers and Cognition (1986), called “ontological design.” It matters now more than ever—along with a second lesson they saw clearly. Technological research is always guided (and sometimes misguided) by deep ontological assumptions about, e.g., the nature of cognition, agency, and communication. If we are to create technologies that truly serve human flourishing and care, we must bring these hidden assumptions into the open and question them at their roots.
Retrocomputing as a Model for Sustainable and Cognitive Computing: Lessons from Low-Resource Systems
This paper argues that retrocomputing constitutes a conceptually productive model for rethinking sustainability in contemporary computing. Early computing systems operated under strict hardware constraints, necessitating efficiency, clarity, and minimalism in both software and interaction design. In contrast, contemporary systems are frequently characterised by computational excess, software bloat, and attention-fragmenting interfaces. Drawing on examples from early home computing and command-line environments, this paper analyses how low-resource systems make visible forms of computational minimalism with relevance to present-day design challenges. A central theoretical contribution is the distinction between interface-level and system-structure-level design analysis, which demonstrates that cognitive effects arise not only from visual and interactional surface features but from deeper computational organisation. The discussion integrates perspectives from human-computer interaction and cognitive science, particularly in relation to attention, cognitive load, and user experience. The paper adopts a conceptual and exploratory approach grounded in systematic literature review, aiming to identify design-relevant patterns rather than to provide empirical validation. It introduces the concepts of computational minimalism and cognitive sustainability as complementary analytical frameworks, and derives five principles for sustainable system design. Crucially, the paper also address
Computer power and human reason : from judgment to calculation
xii, 300 pages : 24 cm; Includes bibliographical references and index
computational product market fit
‘computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.’ — edsger dijkstra
Redefining our needs: Permacomputing and Vernacular computing
How to ensure an increasing focus on sustainability in computing?
The Computer for the 21st Century
Specialized elements of hardware and software, connected by wires, radio waves and infrared, will be so ubiquitous that no one will notice their presence
What Even Is An OS Now?
Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.
Feeling of Computing — Conversations
Thoughtful, capable, and ethical computing ⋅ elementary OS
Thoughtful, capable, and ethical computing
The Invisible OS
THE INVISIBLE OS – Every massive consumer technology business is selling the same thing: the removal of thought. In the end, convenience always wins. Dishwashers automated hours of domestic chores. GPS externalized our spatial memory. Calculators offloaded routine arithmetic. The pattern acceler...
The Invisible OS
THE INVISIBLE OS – Every massive consumer technology business is selling the same thing: the removal of thought. In the end, convenience always wins. Dishwashers automated hours of domestic chores. GPS externalized our spatial memory. Calculators offloaded routine arithmetic. The pattern acceler...
Hello, Operator!
Part of the WonderOS project, this is presented as the operating manual that would come with the reader’s first machine running WonderOS. It is an exercise in exploring how people familiar with mainstream personal computing devices and systems would become computer literate in an itemized environment. It is written as though the reader is familiar with today’s mainstream operating systems, and is exploring their first itemized OS.
The idea of a "tech industry" has always relied on "computer" being a special kind of medium, akin to alchemy. And if tech demands to be king, AI hype has now elevated LLMs to a king of kings. But the solipsism has hit a dead end. The only way forward is to recognize that computers are not special.
LLMs are just normal technology. But tech is just a normal medium.
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