Microsoft Windows 3.0’s conquest of the personal-computer marketplace was bad news for a huge swath of the industry. On the software side, companies like Lotus and WordPerfect, only recently so influential that it was difficult to imagine a world that didn’t include them, would never regain the clout they had enjoyed during the 1980s, and would gradually fade away entirely. On the hardware side, it was true that plenty of makers of commodity PC clones were happier to work with a Microsoft who believed a rising tide lifted all their boats than against an IBM that was continually trying to put them out of business. But what of Big Blue themselves, still the biggest hardware maker of all, who were accustomed to dictating the direction of the industry rather than being dictated to by any mere maker of software? And what, for that matter, of Apple? Both Apple and IBM found themselves in the unaccustomed position of being the outsiders in this new Windows era of computing. Each must come to terms with Microsoft’s newfound but overwhelming power, even as each remained determined not to give up the heritage of innovation that had gotten them this far.
Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More
Today, Apple is one of the largest, most profitable companies on Earth, but in the early 2000s, the company was fighting for its life. Microsoft's Windows operating system was ascendant, and
Why Microsoft needed to make Windows run Linux software
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Microsoft, I forgive you!
Microsoft is different now. The evil masterminds are all retired. No more Ballmer jumping around screaming for developers, developers, developers. No more Gates plotting monopoly schemes for world …
Column: Apple takes its eye off the ball: Why Apple fans are really coming to hate Apple software
There always have been two great virtues in Apple's policy of keeping the development of hardware and core software in-house: their seamless integration with each other and their quality.
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.
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.
Apple and the Ghosts of Companies Past
Apple is not doomed, but for the first time in a long time its long-term fortunes are cloudy; the time to make change is now.
Agents vs Operating Systems : The War That Could Kill Apps
» 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.
» 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.
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The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps are trying to reinvent our workday
Microsoft, more than any other institution on earth, has shaped how we work and how we think about it. If you spend your days in an office (and often if
It's Time To Leave Microsoft
Contrary to what you might believe from the title, this article isn't published to try to convince you to leave Microsoft (although, if you are still on the fence, please continue reading the section below); instead of providing you with a paralyzing amount of dystopian information that is already available
Hyperspace: The Agentic OS Apple Should Have Built On December 19th, 2024, we announced the world’s first Agentic Browser. What followed was a movement — a new category was born which led to many early products in this space and recently the hundreds of people lining up outside https://t.co/lws2rMNmel
Hyperspace: The Agentic OS Apple Should Have Built On December 19th, 2024, we announced the world’s first Agentic Browser. What followed was a movement — a new category was born which led to many early products in this space and recently the hundreds of people lining up outside the The Agentic Browser Summit in San Francisco underscored that. Silicon Valley instinctively gets it, from students to tech executives, people can feel a revolutionary new change in computing is in the air. Past year taught us why such a product was inevitable, a hard engineering effort, and also the last mover in the entire software world this decade if and when done right. All paths are headed in the same direction: one tool which orchestrates them all. At Hyperspace we showed that path with essays and products we launched in earlier months: from a spatial UI of orchestrating agents, to showcasing transparent activity in how the AI system operates which leads to user trust, to presenting the software end-game, which massively improves human productivity. We also built the world’s largest AI network, drawing participation from people in almost 6000 cities around the world contributing their machines as nodes in the network. Think Uber, but for AI. That is, planetary-scale. And now we are stretching this industry ambition further with our end-to-end vision of the Agentic Supercomputer, the first breakthrough new AI OS, and an effort which spans from AI research to distributed systems to inventing a new UI to inventing a new business model to complement it. All of this together helps us in serving our mission, of delivering “Everyone’s Personal Supercomputer”. While others have built AI-native browsers, no one though has built something agentic from the ground up — with AI as the foundation, not a feature. How do you fundamentally improve the lives’ of billions around the world ? We believe that requires building a native environment for agents to be viewed, created, deployed, executed, discovered and priced in. That is a world where we move on from static apps, to dynamic agents. But, as my 2 year old niece likes to ask: “but why ?” The issue is that the world of software today is fragmented, and everyone is sprinkling on AI as a feature and charging a subscription fees for it. From browser makers, to IDEs, to design and other productivity tools. This leads to a fragmented UX, where people have to learn to use AI in each app, their memory and other context is not shared between all these apps, and they also have to pay separately for compute for each such AI-enhanced app. Each app maker has to figure out basics such as compute, and leads to the issues we saw with Cursor pricing recently. This is not the future. What if AI was the foundation instead of a feature ? What if Apple had built a fundamentally new AI OS from the ground up and what would it have looked like ? At Hyperspace, that is what we did. On July 15th we introduced three breakthrough key pillars of our AI OS: 1. Agentic Browser 2. Agentic Memory 3. Agentic Payments And we didn’t stop there. We also introduced a breakthrough new user interface called the Spatial AI which is inspired both from the spreadsheet and the HyperCard - each card is an agent, with it’s own inputs and outputs, endlessly extensible and pluggable with others, just like cells of a spreadsheet. Update one cell and all the dependents update, like a spreadsheet formula. It goes beyond a static linear workflow to being able to operate in all directions. This revolutionary new interface helps manage all of the below: 1. Multiple websites being browsed in parallel 2. Multiple desktop apps being browsed in parallel 3. Multiple server tools being used in parallel 4. Multiple smartphone apps streamed to your device or opened via an emulator All the software which you need comes together in this one seamless, agent-native interface. This interface provides you access to the largest network of models, vectors, agents and compute on the planet. The Browser. The IDE. The Notepad… they are not separate products: they are all in one, the Agentic Browser. As Steve Jobs famously said at the iPhone announcement, “are you getting it ?” And beneath this UI lies a new intelligence routing layer — leveraging both swarms of specialized models to the Hyperspace Matrix model that recalls thousands of tools in real-time, not by context window hacks, but through retrieval, ranking, and reuse. To many, this will feel like AGI. Not one big system by one big company, but an intelligent network. Now lets talk about privacy… Are you comfortable with one company owning all your memory forever ? I am not. So we have invented Agentic Memory as a new open protocol which provides full power over memory to you, the user. Your memory is yours, encrypted, on your device, and portable if and how you want. Anyone can build on it without our permission, but not without your permission. This protocol, and the decentralized vector database spread out across the world, would enable apps and agents to share context and memory. Think copy-paste, but for the AI world. It doesn’t just remember — it knows what matters. VectorRank helps your AI weigh your life’s most relevant moments over time, just like the way our minds elevate memories. Now each time you use an agent, your experience with other agents will also continuously improve: you don’t have to keep repeating the same things about yourself, while fully preserving your privacy. Agentic Memory is accessible within the Agentic Browser to manage. And there is one more thing… AI as the foundation requires compute to be available at the base layer, but this base layer spans models running on your own device, to cloud APIs, to also running across the peer-to-peer distributed network. Agentic Payments provides a singular interface to all of that compute, running a spot auction clearing marketplace every second to determine the fair price of compute. This results in price transparency, and you as the user paying the lowest possible cost. If you want predictability, you can reserve compute in advance. This end-to-end system provides the most streamlined world for agents to operate in. In order to enable this world and the world of agents being able to pay each other in sub-cent increments millions of times a second, we had to also invent a fundamentally new agentic micropayments blockchain. All of this together would enable a world where you as a user, or the agent itself, can efficiently call and utilize other agents built by others and also pay for content which is unique and useful. This enables a move away from the current AI exploitative economy for bloggers and other content creators, to a web with a fundamental new business model. Earlier we didn’t have the right infrastructure to enable such a world. Now, all the dots connect. The Hyperspace AI OS would give the power of a supercomputer in everyone’s hands. This isn’t a browser, or an IDE or limited to any device or cloud. It’s an entire AI operating system — with a breakthrough new spatial UI, local and distributed compute, agentic memory, agentic payments, and orchestration built into the foundation. As a user, we move the choice back in your hands with an experience you will love and find delightful. You get to choose the level of privacy, cost, and utility you want. And while Apple should have done it, we could not wait, and we feel this just required a new level of passion and DNA which we bring here. We are just getting started. Thank you, Varun Mathur Cofounder and CEO, Hyperspace cc @naval @pmarca @vkhosla @karpathy @sama
