The 19th-century poet, whose verse still resonates with its open-ended sense of how language produces meaning, is a model for a group of Brooklyn coders inventing a more humane computer.
» 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.
Notes from my Beginner Computer Literacy Class Part 1 - Alex’s Writing Journal
Helping the uninitiated navigate this brave new digital world
The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution
This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.
The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution
This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.
Daring Fireball, by John Gruber
Commentary on Apple, technology, design, politics, and more.
Writing With and Beyond AI: Fieldnotes from Computer-Mediated Poetry
Apr 10, 2026, 12:15 pm - Large language models can make writing mind-numbingly efficient — but the point of writing with AI should be to write what we couldn’t have written alone (without generating bland, derivative “slop”).
Lexicon Garden is growing - Nick's Blog
Lexicon Garden is growing and moving! With community support, the service is migrating to new infrastructure in Europe, offering better hardware and more space for new features.
ben guo 🏇 on Twitter / X
i gave this talk last night at @southpkcommons about why the personal computing revolution never happened, and what we can do about it. pumped about the feedback afterwards: "it's giving early tumblr", "you guys are like punk apple", "i want more early internet mixtape vibes" pic.twitter.com/0Lwz3CaWBX— ben guo 🏇 (@0thernet) November 6, 2025
Melissa Lozada-Oliva - Like Totally Whatever
Humanities in the Machine - Blain Smith
There is something quietly remarkable about the people who built the foundations of modern computing. Not their technical achievements, though those are extraordinary. What is remarkable is where they came from before they ever touched a machine.
Libra Season: iPhone Modernism by Travis Diehl
The shock-of-the-new is back in literature, rebooted for screen time – and with it, the question: To what end should writing reflect our networked selves?
Apple at 50: eight technology leaps that changed our world
From Apple II to the iPhone, time and again this extraordinary company has anticipated the value of opening up computing to everyone.
