alt Hacker NewsThe Utopia of the Family Computer
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The fixed computer is also a huge factor to facilitate supervised computer use (and make it a shared experience!) with kids at home.
As much as I agree with the point of the article, I keep getting tripped up that every second sentence is "It didn't X, it Y'ed".
I think it's repeated to form a stylistic device in the second paragraph, but then the shape is interspersed so much in the rest of the text that it reads like a clumsy first write.
Regulating our digital experiences through the built environment is underrated. I like the idea of a dedicated internet corner at home: somehow both nostalgic and futuristic.
Also related and enjoyable: cafes with no/limited WiFi hours and riding the subway with no signal.
Call me old-fashioned, but I have a family computer. I got rid of my laptop, and got a desktop instead. It stays in the living room, in a desk drawer. The monitor is a portable monitor, and it gets put away when the computer is not in use. My kids aren't old enough to use it yet, but it will be the family computer eventually.
Poignantly in this instance, Utopia is from "ou-topos" (coined by Sir Thomas More in the early modern period). It literally means "no place".
I was a kid when we had a family computer in the living room.
We mostly played games on it. It's really not fun playing games in the living room while everyone is around you doing other stuff.
It's like being the only one watching TV on the sofa while others are reading or working.
Requisite youtube video: The Internet Used to Be a Place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYlcUbLAFmw
Turkish word for computer is "bilgi-sayar"(info-counter) mag on the image.
> It’s not nostalgia. It’s something else: the distance left by an idea that no longer holds.
sniff sniff... sniiiiiffffff...
Yes, I can definitely smell AI.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbw5KX9TaXY
I never experienced having just one computer for family use, but when internet finally came there was just one line for it and we had to limit our time and carefully coordinate when we got on. But for me that was also a time when computers were used for things other than online-stuff: programming, playing single-player games, drawing, or writing.
There was also a sense that the internet was a place: not a specific place in the house, but "out there", while your own computer was "in here" where your stuff lived. The UI affordances of the time reflected this. The first two icons on the desktop in Windows 95 were called "My Computer" and "Network Neighborhood", allowing you to access your own computer, and other computers nearby with shared files. When old browsers connected to the internet, the "throbber" in the upper right corner would animate. This was distinct from the animated hourglass cursor that indicated your computer was doing some sort of processing, and was specifically designed to indicate that stuff from "out there" was currently being transferred to your machine. Because "out there" was unknown, it was dangerous. It was 42nd Street at night in 90s NYC, and you didn't know who you were going to bump into or what you might find.
And then Steve Ballmer or somebody at Microsoft decided, you know what would be great? What if the browser was the OS, and everything on your machine were accessed just like it was online? One familiar interface for everything! That's why I still don't forgive Microsoft for its Windows 98 UI changes and browser integration. Not just monopoly and anticompetitive reasons, but because they blurred what I thought at the time to be an an extremely important distinction. To me it was a lot like what they were trying to do with making Windows 11 an "agentic OS": inviting danger to ordinary users and making it seem safe. (Geez, now I'm doing the thing.)
Today of course it doesn't matter. Today everything is online all the time. If an application runs on your computer or phone, it's usually still to interact with some online service, but to more closely monitor and constrain how this is done.
The prose is fucking garbage. At least reprompt your LLM. Photo at the end is terrific, though. Pure nostalgia fever.
Sorry but is this just completely AI generated? Or does the author really love "not X but Y" devices?
I hated every moment of the family computer era.
Hated the dialup, hated having to steal other users AOL passwords because my large family couldn't afford internet.
Hated, later, having to keylog the local libraries ISDN line because the provider offered a free national dial in number for "traveling".
The whole world of information available to become less ignorant and I can only use it for an hour a day.
As a below poverty line child with heart defects who was prohibited from sports and a whole slew of other things, what we have now is fucked up because we've allowed every interaction to become a dopamine casino and we've skinners boxed ourselves straight to hell.
This kind of nostalgia bait is actively harmful, there are clear patterns businesses based in america use and all that shit should be banned.
Forcing everyone to use a real Id is an evil, making skinners box patterns illegal is much easier.
I loved Juno email, I loved that rich people paid for the ads I easily ignored because I had a velcro TMNT wallet from a community free store but not a single dollar inside of it.
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This is a lovely bit of writing, and really points to the value of constraints. Some of my favorite childhood memories were being at friends' houses, huddled over the computer, playing Space Quest or Zork. At one of my friends' houses, we were aware that Leisure Suit Larry was installed, and curious, but never played it because of the central location of the machine.
I think the shift we've seen TV is something similar. When I was a kid, TV was viewed as an antisocial medium ("the boob tube"), but I have really fond memories of sitting with my family watching Quantum Leap or Growing Pains. Now that everyone has their own screen to watch TV, it seems the studios don't even bother trying to make shows that appeal to an entire family.
We focus so much on the media (tv/internet/video games/books) when ascribing value, but, as this article indicates, the physical nature of the delivery (shared living room appliance vs portable individual screen) makes a huge difference.