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> To understand the mindset of this period it is important to recognize the distinction between a computer terminal and a free-standing computer. Some experts b

> To understand the mindset of this period it is important to recognize the distinction between a computer terminal and a free-standing computer. Some experts believed that individuals would have terminals at home that communicated with powerful remote computers providing utility-like services for information and interaction. These experts believed that an isolated computer at home would be too under-powered to be worthwhile. Considering how the majority of the general population's use of "computers" is really interacting with remote and cloud services (Facebook, Netflix, etc) this is a valid argument today. While today's equivalent of terminals (phones, tablets, and even PCs) have a significant amount of local computing ability, for the most part they really are just used as fancy terminals. Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important. The other quote that stuck out to me was this: > “The personal computer will fall flat on its face in business because users want to share files and want more than one user on the system,”

baddox 9y ago
I don't know about this analogy. With websites, you're running the software locally. You just happened to download the software right before running it. Your phone's web browser is hardly "just a terminal," and in fact for most websites it probably requires significantly more processing power per user on the front end to render the site than it does on the backend to serve the data. Netflix might be a slightly better analogy, since it can naively be thought of as a dumb encoder just outputting a stream of data as it receives it.
- throwanem 9y ago
  In the 99%+ case for web apps, you're running only part of the software locally, and without the remote component the local part is useless. The distinction matters, especially when it comes to tasks like home automation - Nest alone is sufficient to exemplify the intractable problems that result from failing to design systems which perform purely local tasks in such a way that they require only local resources to do so. But Nest is far from alone in having so failed.
  - baddox 9y ago
    > you're running only part of the software locally, and without the remote component the local part is useless. Of course that's true, but that's not sufficient for calling the client a terminal, unless you're going to define any client in a client-server architecture to be a terminal. Again, with most web apps or even simple web sites with static content, the processing power required to render and interact with the site is probably much greater than to serve data on the back end. Web browsers are definitely fat clients.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      > unless you're going to define any client in a client-server architecture to be a terminal Why not? As you say, the general-purpose computers we customarily use have much greater capability than the character or even graphics terminals of yore, but in the decidedly client-server architecture of most of the modern web, these general-purpose computers most certainly act as terminals nonetheless. (Some of the confusion here seems to arise from defining "terminal" at one point in terms of available compute resource, and at another point in terms of role within a distributed architecture. I'm not sure where the former makes sense - save in that it may constrain the roles in which a given device may be used, available resource seems entirely orthogonal to architecture.)
      - baddox 9y ago
        Why not? Well, simply because I'd prefer to use technical terms as they're widely used and widely understood. If someone wants to argue that the definitions themselves ought to change, then that's a semantic argument that doesn't interest me.
        throwanem 9y ago
        The point I'm making about definitions is that the one you use here seems to vary within the space of a single comment.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- camus2 9y ago
  > I don't know about this analogy. With websites, you're running the software locally. The only thing most websites run locally is ad trackers which are of no value to the viewer. It's funny how the web didn't really fulfill its promise as a distribution platform for software, when Flash was doing that 15 years ago. Now i'm not saying there is no "photoshop","illustrator","premiere" or code IDE for the web right now. I'm saying it didn't perform as good as or replaced native apps. In that sense, the web failed.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  With websites (and web apps), you're only running UI locally. All the important parts - storage, queries, data wrangling, core logic - is done server-side.
  - dan1234 9y ago
    This is the case with traditional websites, but web apps (especially Progressive Web Apps) are moving more and more of the heavy lifting back to the client.
    - simonh 9y ago
      And they key is that with the modern web architecture, having powerful local compute gives you the flexibility to put what can be usefully done on the server or on the client where it belongs. Terminal type architectures have no flexibility at all. Do round-trip times and bandwidth limitations mean this aspect of the application would be better done on the client? Tough. It has no computing power and isn't programmable so you don't even have the option. Want to manage tabs and bookmarks locally so you control that stuff instead of being beholden to the service suppliers? Tough, if the online service doesn't offer the feature to cannot have it because all the smarts is upstream.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  A web browser is similar to the old-style 3270 terminals too. All the mainframe server did was send bytes down to the terminal (well, terminal controller), the terminal itself would do all of the display formatting including field validation, then would send the user's data back up to the server. It's not quite the same since a web browser can run arbitrary code, but the browser is still used to display data to the user and return user's input to the server, while the back-end server does data storage and processing -- for example you wouldn't implement Google's search engine on client-side alone, all of the heavy lifting is done by Google's servers.
- tarsinge 9y ago
  Technically yes a lot of processing is done locally. But if you always need access to a service (i.e. a "powerful remote computer") to access your files, and if your device becomes useless without a connection to these services, then it kind of becomes a dumb terminal "philosophically"
  - zeta0134 9y ago
    I think the only thing the quote gets wrong is the relative balance of power, as the assumption was that remote mainframes would always, due to size constraints, be more powerful than the terminals used to access them. Of course, the true power imbalance is connectivity, as it has always been. Using the internet is the primary reason most people own computers, and in that sense, our web browser has become our remote terminal. The computing tasks run on most sites doesn't require much more power than you could technically run locally, but the undeniable utility of connecting with other users makes the connection so valuable that the computer is, for most users, entirely useless without the internet.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      This is very task-specific. For some reason lot of people seem to find it hard to imagine that there could be a mid-way system between the extremes of client/server - and that in fact the hybrid system is what we have today, where there's a genuine mix of local processing and storage for some tasks, with remote processing and storage for others. More, that the app economy is very much this hybrid, where users buy specific tools to do specific jobs locally, instead of running everything remotely, or independently programming applications from the ground up on their own hardware. Browsers are almost a side issue, because browsers are like a terminal, but only for a standard selection of popular applications - to some extent the lowest-common-denominator jobs that have the most utility for the widest demographics. Other jobs and applications still don't fit into the browser, and likely never will - even when there's a benefit to being able to collaborate. (E.g. I can't make music in my browser. If I want to collaborate I still have to send files over the Internet and wait for someone to edit them. Or I can use a mediocre collaboration system built into a DAW. But technically and socially, there are too many limitations to the in-browser experience to expect that live collaboration will become a thing soon.)
tantalor 9y ago
> Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important Most people do not think of gaming machines (consoles, handhelds, etc.) as computers, and usually they are not general purpose computers (for the user) in the technical sense, e.g., the PS4.
- wongarsu 9y ago
  Most people don't think of smartphones and tablets as computers either, yet in every practical sense they are. The same applies for gaming systems (in fact from a hardware standpoint the PS4 isn't very different from my desktop computer)
Finnucane 9y ago
>Considering how the majority of the general population's use of "computers" is really interacting with remote and cloud services (Facebook, Netflix, etc) this is a valid argument today. While today's equivalent of terminals (phones, tablets, and even PCs) have a significant amount of local computing ability, for the most part they really are just used as fancy terminals. Right--today the problem isn't that there isn't enough raw computer power to go around--there's not a scarcity of cpu cycles--but now the issue is whether the benfits of connectivity are worth ceding control and autonomy.
PeachPlum 9y ago
Except my 8-bit micro with 32k in the 80s was very useful. I used to run my dad's business stock control on it. I wrote software for someone to keep track of their commercial VHS lending library on another system.
simonh 9y ago
>Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important. There are a ton of things our smartphones and tablets do that rely on very high levels of local computing power. Biometric authentication such as face and fingerprint recognition is a heavily compute intensive application. It needs to be done locally in order to be secure. Face ID is just nuts. Modern smartphone photography is heavily compute-intensive, from HDR to optical zoom to image editing and markup. Just look at what Apple is doing with portrait mode and lighting effects. I love using time-lapse and slow-motion video modes. What would instagram and snapchat be without locally applied filters? Note taking, address book and time management. The notes apps on modern mobile devices are multi-media wonders with integrated text, image and handwriting recognition built-in. Calendar management, alarms and notifications all rely on local processing even if they do make use of cloud services. Without local smarts those services would lose a huge chunk of their utility. Document and media management. I read eBooks and listen to podcasts. My ebook reader has dynamic font selection, text size adjustment and will even read my books to me. Managing media on the device is essential as contemporary networks are still nowhere near good enough to stream everything all the time. My podcast app has sound modulation and processing options built in to tailor the sound to my tastes and needs, including speed up, voice level adjustment and dead-air 'vocal pause' elimination in real-time, all on-device and adjustable at my fingertips. That's serious sound studio level stuff in my pocket. Playing digital video files. Even ones downloaded or streamed. So what if we've had it since the 90s. It's still proper computation, especially with advanced modern codecs. VOIP and video calling even between continents have also become everyday and absolutely rely on powerful local number crunching. These things have become so everyday that we hardly notice most of them, but without serious on-device processing power, some of which would have been beyond $10k workstations just 15 years ago, none of this would be possible.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  You are kinda missing OP's point. It is true that today's phones are several order of magnitudes more powerful that those of 50 years ago, but OP's point is that we are kinda still in the paradigm where a lot of the computing we rely on happens on remote servers. So, while the computing power of the 80s is very well accessible to us, our needs have grown far beyond that and are only serviceable using remote servers. Take Google Search itself for example.
jamesrcole 9y ago
>> ...These experts believed that an isolated computer at home would be too under-powered to be worthwhile. > Considering how the majority of the general population's use of "computers" is really interacting with remote and cloud services (Facebook, Netflix, etc) this is a valid argument today. While today's equivalent of terminals (phones, tablets, and even PCs) have a significant amount of local computing ability, for the most part they really are just used as fancy terminals. Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important. The argument you quote was not that people would be using terminals, per se, it was that they'd have to because local computing would not be powerful enough. And in that sense their argument was not correct.
danso 9y ago
The Apple ][ reference manual, when read from today's perspective, seems almost as out of touch, but in the opposite direction. From the first lines in the Introduction: http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Apple/Apple%20II%20Reference%20Manual%20-%20Woz.pdf http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Apple/Apple%20II%20Refere... "Like the Apple itself, this book is a tool. As with all tools, you should know a little about it before you start to use it. This book will not teach you how to program. It is a book of facts, not methods. If you have just unpacked your Apple, or you do not know how to program in any of the languages available for it, then before you continue with this book, read one of the other manuals accompanying your Apple." It goes on to list the "Apple II Basic Programming Manual" and "The Applesoft Tutorial". I recently helped my mom purchase a Macbook for personal use. She's retired now but she used to work somewhat as a programmer in the COBOL-era. She was deeply annoyed at me telling her not to worry that the Macbook didn't come with a user manual, just Google for things online. I'm about 4 years into my current Macbook so I'd had forgotten what if any documentation came packed with it. I was surprised how hard it was to find a user manual on Apple's website, and even then, it was fairly skimpy, and not particularly accurate -- the book was described as being for the non-Touch Bar version of the MBP, but it still had a Touch Bar section confusingly plopped into the middle of the other MBP topics, including references to ports that don't exist on the lower-end 2-USB-port model. Even today it's pretty controversial to push coding literacy (not necessarily because coding isn't seen as valuable, but in terms of curriculum priority). Back then, to even understand the Apple ][ user manual, you were told to in its introduction to first read up on how to program in BASIC. I can imagine why a computer expert back then would be skeptical of the value of personal computing.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  Back when people bought software on physical media [pre-1999, basically], all decent software came with physical documentation. Games might come with a center-stapled 32 page manual; Turbo Pascal for Windows came with a multi-book reference set. For more than a decade, IBM PCs and their successors came with gray cloth-covered three-ring binders full of manuals and references. It was a different era.
  - GuiA 9y ago
kutkloon7 9y ago
I think it is also very much a chicken-and-egg problem. Without software for personal computers, there is no need for personal computers. When there are no people with personal computers, it is not interesting to write software for personal computers. Then again, why would someone want a personal computer in that time? The things computers are used for now are broadly: 1. Multimedia 2. Communication 3. Administration 4. Computing (for example in science or finance) The only purpose where you actually need a computer is for computing. This is not something that you typically do at home. It was simply not conventional to use a computer for other purposes at the time. There were no fancy HD screens and the like, and no ubiquitous internet access.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Supposedly what sold the AppleII was Visicalc. Because now accountants didn't have to argue with the sysadmin about compute time. Yes it was slower than the beast in the basement. Yes it was more limited. But it allowed accounting to present management as requested without having to stall for time on the beast.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
This is a great insight. Today's "apps" are more similar to terminal based services on a mainframe than they are to the 'applications' that were running on individual computers. When you look at the architecture of the infrastructure for a Google or a Facebook you see what are essentially data center sized computers that you can walk through. We have a smart terminal called "web browser" that accesses them :-). And things like ChromeOS and Chromebooks take that to its logical conclusion. Oddly enough I got an early sense of this using a Heathkit H89 which was a terminal with an embedded CP/M computer. Where there was a CP/M program providing the user interface while talking over a slow serial link to a data server. Others got to experience things like the Minitel. Crude by today's standards but heading down the road we currently drive on :-). The corporate challenges of having everything in the mainframe (competing with others for resources, paying a 'tax' to IT for running the mainframe even if you weren't using it, information accessibility that you did not control, Etc.) pulled PC's into business when people could do their jobs on them and didn't need to use the mainframe. Given similar sorts of pressures on "cloud" I keep wondering if the idea of a personal data center will take hold. In that model you would still use your web accessed services but they would run on equipment at your house rather than elsewhere.
- scirocco 9y ago
  Your last sentence iis similar to edge compute. https://www.google.es/amp/s/www.cio.com/article/3176036/it-industry/edge-computing-will-blow-away-the-cloud.amp.html https://www.google.es/amp/s/www.cio.com/article/3176036/it-i...
- digi_owl 9y ago
  For some with massive NAS setups etc this may already hold true. The problem is connectivity. Unless you stick within the 100 meter radius of wifi, you have to deal with you ISP. And few home connections offer much outbound bandwidth. Never mind the issues of firewalls and NATs. And speaking of minitels, i can't help think that the switch from circuit switched to packet switched was the big enabler of the resurgence of the "leased terminal". Before you had to have a complete wire circuit from terminal to computer. But these days all that is needed is that the packets reach their destination. This in turn allows a single "terminal" to connect to multiple computers using a single physical circuit.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hamilyon2 9y ago
I used google maps to navigate offline while traveling. It made me once again realize how powerful is the device in my pocket. Offline documents and web pages also work just fine.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I would go with Here or Sygic for offline navigation.
Jagerbizzle 9y ago
> Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important While it isn't as mainstream as gaming, music production also requires a lot of local computing power. Even with ridiculous bandwidth, having a high fidelity sample streamed elsewhere, processed, and streamed back to you would be extremely slow. Not to mention, as a keyboard player or drummer, the latency would be atrocious if you tried to play a synth that was being computed in the cloud.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  To be a bit of an ass, music production, at least in the sense of recording an actual musician performing in sync with previous recordings of same, is a damn close cousin to a game. But then more and more music production is someone dropping loops and samples into a time chart and iterating until satisfied. Hell, there are now software that allow a computer to basically take over vocals even.

baddox 9y ago

I don't know about this analogy. With websites, you're running the software locally. You just happened to download the software right before running it. Your phone's web browser is hardly "just a terminal," and in fact for most websites it probably requires significantly more processing power per user on the front end to render the site than it does on the backend to serve the data. Netflix might be a slightly better analogy, since it can naively be thought of as a dumb encoder just outputting a stream of data as it receives it.

throwanem 9y ago
In the 99%+ case for web apps, you're running only part of the software locally, and without the remote component the local part is useless. The distinction matters, especially when it comes to tasks like home automation - Nest alone is sufficient to exemplify the intractable problems that result from failing to design systems which perform purely local tasks in such a way that they require only local resources to do so. But Nest is far from alone in having so failed.
- baddox 9y ago
  > you're running only part of the software locally, and without the remote component the local part is useless. Of course that's true, but that's not sufficient for calling the client a terminal, unless you're going to define any client in a client-server architecture to be a terminal. Again, with most web apps or even simple web sites with static content, the processing power required to render and interact with the site is probably much greater than to serve data on the back end. Web browsers are definitely fat clients.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    > unless you're going to define any client in a client-server architecture to be a terminal Why not? As you say, the general-purpose computers we customarily use have much greater capability than the character or even graphics terminals of yore, but in the decidedly client-server architecture of most of the modern web, these general-purpose computers most certainly act as terminals nonetheless. (Some of the confusion here seems to arise from defining "terminal" at one point in terms of available compute resource, and at another point in terms of role within a distributed architecture. I'm not sure where the former makes sense - save in that it may constrain the roles in which a given device may be used, available resource seems entirely orthogonal to architecture.)
    - baddox 9y ago
      Why not? Well, simply because I'd prefer to use technical terms as they're widely used and widely understood. If someone wants to argue that the definitions themselves ought to change, then that's a semantic argument that doesn't interest me.
      - throwanem 9y ago
        The point I'm making about definitions is that the one you use here seems to vary within the space of a single comment.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
camus2 9y ago
> I don't know about this analogy. With websites, you're running the software locally. The only thing most websites run locally is ad trackers which are of no value to the viewer. It's funny how the web didn't really fulfill its promise as a distribution platform for software, when Flash was doing that 15 years ago. Now i'm not saying there is no "photoshop","illustrator","premiere" or code IDE for the web right now. I'm saying it didn't perform as good as or replaced native apps. In that sense, the web failed.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
With websites (and web apps), you're only running UI locally. All the important parts - storage, queries, data wrangling, core logic - is done server-side.
- dan1234 9y ago
  This is the case with traditional websites, but web apps (especially Progressive Web Apps) are moving more and more of the heavy lifting back to the client.
  - simonh 9y ago
    And they key is that with the modern web architecture, having powerful local compute gives you the flexibility to put what can be usefully done on the server or on the client where it belongs. Terminal type architectures have no flexibility at all. Do round-trip times and bandwidth limitations mean this aspect of the application would be better done on the client? Tough. It has no computing power and isn't programmable so you don't even have the option. Want to manage tabs and bookmarks locally so you control that stuff instead of being beholden to the service suppliers? Tough, if the online service doesn't offer the feature to cannot have it because all the smarts is upstream.
Johnny555 9y ago
A web browser is similar to the old-style 3270 terminals too. All the mainframe server did was send bytes down to the terminal (well, terminal controller), the terminal itself would do all of the display formatting including field validation, then would send the user's data back up to the server. It's not quite the same since a web browser can run arbitrary code, but the browser is still used to display data to the user and return user's input to the server, while the back-end server does data storage and processing -- for example you wouldn't implement Google's search engine on client-side alone, all of the heavy lifting is done by Google's servers.
tarsinge 9y ago
Technically yes a lot of processing is done locally. But if you always need access to a service (i.e. a "powerful remote computer") to access your files, and if your device becomes useless without a connection to these services, then it kind of becomes a dumb terminal "philosophically"
- zeta0134 9y ago
  I think the only thing the quote gets wrong is the relative balance of power, as the assumption was that remote mainframes would always, due to size constraints, be more powerful than the terminals used to access them. Of course, the true power imbalance is connectivity, as it has always been. Using the internet is the primary reason most people own computers, and in that sense, our web browser has become our remote terminal. The computing tasks run on most sites doesn't require much more power than you could technically run locally, but the undeniable utility of connecting with other users makes the connection so valuable that the computer is, for most users, entirely useless without the internet.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    This is very task-specific. For some reason lot of people seem to find it hard to imagine that there could be a mid-way system between the extremes of client/server - and that in fact the hybrid system is what we have today, where there's a genuine mix of local processing and storage for some tasks, with remote processing and storage for others. More, that the app economy is very much this hybrid, where users buy specific tools to do specific jobs locally, instead of running everything remotely, or independently programming applications from the ground up on their own hardware. Browsers are almost a side issue, because browsers are like a terminal, but only for a standard selection of popular applications - to some extent the lowest-common-denominator jobs that have the most utility for the widest demographics. Other jobs and applications still don't fit into the browser, and likely never will - even when there's a benefit to being able to collaborate. (E.g. I can't make music in my browser. If I want to collaborate I still have to send files over the Internet and wait for someone to edit them. Or I can use a mediocre collaboration system built into a DAW. But technically and socially, there are too many limitations to the in-browser experience to expect that live collaboration will become a thing soon.)

tantalor 9y ago

> Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important Most people do not think of gaming machines (consoles, handhelds, etc.) as computers, and usually they are not general purpose computers (for the user) in the technical sense, e.g., the PS4.

wongarsu 9y ago
Most people don't think of smartphones and tablets as computers either, yet in every practical sense they are. The same applies for gaming systems (in fact from a hardware standpoint the PS4 isn't very different from my desktop computer)

Finnucane 9y ago

>Considering how the majority of the general population's use of "computers" is really interacting with remote and cloud services (Facebook, Netflix, etc) this is a valid argument today. While today's equivalent of terminals (phones, tablets, and even PCs) have a significant amount of local computing ability, for the most part they really are just used as fancy terminals. Right--today the problem isn't that there isn't enough raw computer power to go around--there's not a scarcity of cpu cycles--but now the issue is whether the benfits of connectivity are worth ceding control and autonomy.

PeachPlum 9y ago

Except my 8-bit micro with 32k in the 80s was very useful. I used to run my dad's business stock control on it. I wrote software for someone to keep track of their commercial VHS lending library on another system.

simonh 9y ago

>Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important. There are a ton of things our smartphones and tablets do that rely on very high levels of local computing power. Biometric authentication such as face and fingerprint recognition is a heavily compute intensive application. It needs to be done locally in order to be secure. Face ID is just nuts. Modern smartphone photography is heavily compute-intensive, from HDR to optical zoom to image editing and markup. Just look at what Apple is doing with portrait mode and lighting effects. I love using time-lapse and slow-motion video modes. What would instagram and snapchat be without locally applied filters? Note taking, address book and time management. The notes apps on modern mobile devices are multi-media wonders with integrated text, image and handwriting recognition built-in. Calendar management, alarms and notifications all rely on local processing even if they do make use of cloud services. Without local smarts those services would lose a huge chunk of their utility. Document and media management. I read eBooks and listen to podcasts. My ebook reader has dynamic font selection, text size adjustment and will even read my books to me. Managing media on the device is essential as contemporary networks are still nowhere near good enough to stream everything all the time. My podcast app has sound modulation and processing options built in to tailor the sound to my tastes and needs, including speed up, voice level adjustment and dead-air 'vocal pause' elimination in real-time, all on-device and adjustable at my fingertips. That's serious sound studio level stuff in my pocket. Playing digital video files. Even ones downloaded or streamed. So what if we've had it since the 90s. It's still proper computation, especially with advanced modern codecs. VOIP and video calling even between continents have also become everyday and absolutely rely on powerful local number crunching. These things have become so everyday that we hardly notice most of them, but without serious on-device processing power, some of which would have been beyond $10k workstations just 15 years ago, none of this would be possible.

kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
You are kinda missing OP's point. It is true that today's phones are several order of magnitudes more powerful that those of 50 years ago, but OP's point is that we are kinda still in the paradigm where a lot of the computing we rely on happens on remote servers. So, while the computing power of the 80s is very well accessible to us, our needs have grown far beyond that and are only serviceable using remote servers. Take Google Search itself for example.

jamesrcole 9y ago

>> ...These experts believed that an isolated computer at home would be too under-powered to be worthwhile. > Considering how the majority of the general population's use of "computers" is really interacting with remote and cloud services (Facebook, Netflix, etc) this is a valid argument today. While today's equivalent of terminals (phones, tablets, and even PCs) have a significant amount of local computing ability, for the most part they really are just used as fancy terminals. Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important. The argument you quote was not that people would be using terminals, per se, it was that they'd have to because local computing would not be powerful enough. And in that sense their argument was not correct.

danso 9y ago

The Apple ][ reference manual, when read from today's perspective, seems almost as out of touch, but in the opposite direction. From the first lines in the Introduction: http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Apple/Apple%20II%20Reference%20Manual%20-%20Woz.pdf http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Apple/Apple%20II%20Refere... "Like the Apple itself, this book is a tool. As with all tools, you should know a little about it before you start to use it. This book will not teach you how to program. It is a book of facts, not methods. If you have just unpacked your Apple, or you do not know how to program in any of the languages available for it, then before you continue with this book, read one of the other manuals accompanying your Apple." It goes on to list the "Apple II Basic Programming Manual" and "The Applesoft Tutorial". I recently helped my mom purchase a Macbook for personal use. She's retired now but she used to work somewhat as a programmer in the COBOL-era. She was deeply annoyed at me telling her not to worry that the Macbook didn't come with a user manual, just Google for things online. I'm about 4 years into my current Macbook so I'd had forgotten what if any documentation came packed with it. I was surprised how hard it was to find a user manual on Apple's website, and even then, it was fairly skimpy, and not particularly accurate -- the book was described as being for the non-Touch Bar version of the MBP, but it still had a Touch Bar section confusingly plopped into the middle of the other MBP topics, including references to ports that don't exist on the lower-end 2-USB-port model. Even today it's pretty controversial to push coding literacy (not necessarily because coding isn't seen as valuable, but in terms of curriculum priority). Back then, to even understand the Apple ][ user manual, you were told to in its introduction to first read up on how to program in BASIC. I can imagine why a computer expert back then would be skeptical of the value of personal computing.

dsr_ 9y ago
Back when people bought software on physical media [pre-1999, basically], all decent software came with physical documentation. Games might come with a center-stapled 32 page manual; Turbo Pascal for Windows came with a multi-book reference set. For more than a decade, IBM PCs and their successors came with gray cloth-covered three-ring binders full of manuals and references. It was a different era.
- GuiA 9y ago

kutkloon7 9y ago

I think it is also very much a chicken-and-egg problem. Without software for personal computers, there is no need for personal computers. When there are no people with personal computers, it is not interesting to write software for personal computers. Then again, why would someone want a personal computer in that time? The things computers are used for now are broadly: 1. Multimedia 2. Communication 3. Administration 4. Computing (for example in science or finance) The only purpose where you actually need a computer is for computing. This is not something that you typically do at home. It was simply not conventional to use a computer for other purposes at the time. There were no fancy HD screens and the like, and no ubiquitous internet access.

digi_owl 9y ago
Supposedly what sold the AppleII was Visicalc. Because now accountants didn't have to argue with the sysadmin about compute time. Yes it was slower than the beast in the basement. Yes it was more limited. But it allowed accounting to present management as requested without having to stall for time on the beast.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

This is a great insight. Today's "apps" are more similar to terminal based services on a mainframe than they are to the 'applications' that were running on individual computers. When you look at the architecture of the infrastructure for a Google or a Facebook you see what are essentially data center sized computers that you can walk through. We have a smart terminal called "web browser" that accesses them :-). And things like ChromeOS and Chromebooks take that to its logical conclusion. Oddly enough I got an early sense of this using a Heathkit H89 which was a terminal with an embedded CP/M computer. Where there was a CP/M program providing the user interface while talking over a slow serial link to a data server. Others got to experience things like the Minitel. Crude by today's standards but heading down the road we currently drive on :-). The corporate challenges of having everything in the mainframe (competing with others for resources, paying a 'tax' to IT for running the mainframe even if you weren't using it, information accessibility that you did not control, Etc.) pulled PC's into business when people could do their jobs on them and didn't need to use the mainframe. Given similar sorts of pressures on "cloud" I keep wondering if the idea of a personal data center will take hold. In that model you would still use your web accessed services but they would run on equipment at your house rather than elsewhere.

scirocco 9y ago
Your last sentence iis similar to edge compute. https://www.google.es/amp/s/www.cio.com/article/3176036/it-industry/edge-computing-will-blow-away-the-cloud.amp.html https://www.google.es/amp/s/www.cio.com/article/3176036/it-i...
digi_owl 9y ago
For some with massive NAS setups etc this may already hold true. The problem is connectivity. Unless you stick within the 100 meter radius of wifi, you have to deal with you ISP. And few home connections offer much outbound bandwidth. Never mind the issues of firewalls and NATs. And speaking of minitels, i can't help think that the switch from circuit switched to packet switched was the big enabler of the resurgence of the "leased terminal". Before you had to have a complete wire circuit from terminal to computer. But these days all that is needed is that the packets reach their destination. This in turn allows a single "terminal" to connect to multiple computers using a single physical circuit.

deleted 9y ago

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hamilyon2 9y ago

I used google maps to navigate offline while traveling. It made me once again realize how powerful is the device in my pocket. Offline documents and web pages also work just fine.

digi_owl 9y ago
I would go with Here or Sygic for offline navigation.

Jagerbizzle 9y ago

> Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important While it isn't as mainstream as gaming, music production also requires a lot of local computing power. Even with ridiculous bandwidth, having a high fidelity sample streamed elsewhere, processed, and streamed back to you would be extremely slow. Not to mention, as a keyboard player or drummer, the latency would be atrocious if you tried to play a synth that was being computed in the cloud.

digi_owl 9y ago
To be a bit of an ass, music production, at least in the sense of recording an actual musician performing in sync with previous recordings of same, is a damn close cousin to a game. But then more and more music production is someone dropping loops and samples into a time chart and iterating until satisfied. Hell, there are now software that allow a computer to basically take over vocals even.