What a Terrible Day to Have a Computer - Stuff Rob Wrote

Looking Back: oh, how much I’ve been wrong in the past

I’m starting to write this blog post while sitting in a room full of system administrators and system…

TIME Magazine Cover: Computer in Society - Apr. 2, 1965

TIME Magazine Cover: Computer in Society

The rise of Whatever

This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.

A programmer's loss of identity - ratfactor

This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me. In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be. Everything I wrote there is still true, but amplified.

Feeling of Computing — Conversations

Brett Scott (@brettscott)

Despite all the rhetoric about automation supposedly making our lives easier, the true story being told by Big Tech is that our lives are better when speeded up You are supposed to be in an ever-accelerating race, packing more units of experience into the same unit of time, a phenomenon that requires a contraction of patience and a blurring of experience as everything quickens In the end, this is what ‘convenience’ actually is. It’s a state of being in which you become disassociated and disengaged from the texture of the world around you. You pass through it dreamlike, and suddenly wake up decades years later as an elderly person on your deathbed, thinking “WTF happened”, as then the memory slips away

Optimistic Computing

I recently made two new friends: Abhinav Omprakash and Dawn Walker. Abhinav said I’m an optimist and I should write about it. Dawn said I shouldn’t try to coin any new terms. I should know better, but this essay follows Abhinav’s recommendation — and credits Dawn, in the very likely event I should have followed her advice instead. I have been alive for approximately four decades. Each of those decades was witness to its own fun brand of computering.

Never Forgive Them

In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More

softer computing club

a cozy community of humans and computers on the planet earth

When Cursor Wiped a User's PC: A Cautionary Tale of AI Overreach

We recently received a sobering story from a subscriber, a stark reminder of the potential pitfalls when granting AI agents unfettered access to your system.

I Love the Computer

An exploration of how I became a massive geek.

A Systems Literacy Manifesto

In 1968, West Churchman wrote, “…there is a good deal of turmoil about the manner in which our society is run. …the citizen has begun to suspect that the people who make major decisions that affect our lives don’t know what they are doing.”[1] Churchman was writing at a time of growing concern about war, civil rights, and the environment. Almost fifty years later, these concerns remain, and we have more reason than ever “to suspect that the people who make major decisions that affect our lives don’t know what they are doing.” Examples abound.

» Apple, Carmen Sandiego, and the Rise of Edutainment The Digital Antiquarian

If there was any one application that was the favorite amongst early boosters of personal computing, it was education. Indeed, it could sometimes be difficult to find one of those digital utopianists who was willing to prioritize anything else — unsurprisingly, given that so much early PC culture grew out of places like The People’s Computer Company, who made “knowledge is power” their de facto mantra and talked of teaching people about computers and using computers to teach with equal countercultural fervor. Creative Computing, the first monthly magazine dedicated to personal computing, grew out of that idealistic milieu, founded by an educational consultant who filled a big chunk of its pages with plans, schemes, and dreams for computers as tools for democratizing, improving, and just making schooling more fun. A few years later, when Apple started selling the II, they pushed it hard as the learning computer, making deals with the influential likes of the Minnesota Educational Consortium (MECC) of Oregon Trail fame that gave the machine a luster none of its competitors could touch. For much of the adult public, who may have had their first exposure to a PC when they visited a child’s classroom, the Apple II became synonymous with the PC, which was in turn almost synonymous with education in the days before IBM turned it into a business machine. We can still see the effect today: when journalists and advertisers look for an easy story of innovation to which to compare some new gadget, it’s always the Apple II they choose, not the TRS-80 or Commodore PET. And the iconic image of an Apple II in the public’s imagination remains a group of children gathered around it in a classroom.