Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: John Ames Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Personal computer (was Re: AI-Based Coding Taking Over) Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2025 09:21:16 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 47 Message-ID: <20251027092116.00003792@gmail.com> References: <10ctrdc$16st9$1@dont-email.me> <10d24n9$2bb83$2@dont-email.me> <10d2dos$2dnk0$3@dont-email.me> <0g8hslxmvj.ln2@Telcontar.valinor> <10detk2$2b3jr$1@dont-email.me> <10dhm2v$33b7e$1@dont-email.me> <10dkuvq$3uqs3$4@dont-email.me> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:21:25 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="cdf5e0e5462486ed1f61e9acc6f9977b"; logging-data="993633"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/nYkl6N/As1YwTbjYayBPiSQGdb9H086U=" Cancel-Lock: sha1:eXibuabedBDLYWX8AoEsdPV/FEU= X-Newsreader: Claws Mail 4.3.0 (GTK 3.24.42; x86_64-w64-mingw32) Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:76747 On 27 Oct 2025 14:26:10 GMT rbowman wrote: > > I found the 5150 to be a massive yawn. It wasn't until the Amiga > > came along that I got excited enough to buy a new machine. > > In that era people would ask me 'You work with computers.' What kind > should I buy?' I didn't have a good answer. I made my living with > computers but I wasn't sure what Joe Sixpack would do with one. > > Some nerds did find uses but there were many TRS-80s, PETs, PC Jrs, > TI 99s, and so forth gathering dust because people were buying them > in sort of a madness of crowds. Yes and no. There was a fad element (there always is, it's wired into human instinct,) but the '80s - early '90s were also a magical-ish time where *A.* a lot of people already had hobbies, and found innovative ways to use these newfangled machines for them, *B.* a lot of other people found new hobbies in the process of exploring what the geegaw they bought on a whim could actually *do,* and *C.* personal computers were only hampered by weak hardware and sloppy OS design, rather than being deliberately trapped in a walled garden by the manufacturer.* * (For the most part. Not to say that some parties didn't try, most notably TI and Atari, but the latter at least was comprehensively documented by hobbyists in spite of that, and they never had any mechanism to *enforce* it aside from lock-in-through-obscurity.) I recall my mother, f'rexample, branching out into MIDI arrangement not because she'd had any plans to do so, but because my dad brought home a cast-off Mac from his workplace and we'd coincidentally just bought a digital piano to replace our bulky old upright. Nothing world-changing, but a good example of what people learned by just playing around. It's a shame to see what's become of the industry - for a minute there, we really did get a little taste of what computer-as-assistive-tool-for- the-individual-mind could do for people... (Frankly, I'm of the opinion that "Joe Sixpack" is a myth, a kind of median figure arrived at by shaving all the corners off of real people so that they can be more-or-less jammed into a preconceived round hole; unfortunately, it's a myth with a great deal of utility to the Powers That Be, who have expended a tremendous amount of social-engineering effort in the last 20 years trying to convince people that the Median Human is "normal" and what they should want to be. It's encouraging to see the recent boom in craft hobbies and makerspace groups indicating that they haven't been quite as successful as I worried they had.)