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> Another failure was not grasping the services-based model They've experienced the first services-based model by the IBM et al. in the 60s and ran away from t
by high_5 5y ago
> Another failure was not grasping the services-based model
They've experienced the first services-based model by the IBM et al. in the 60s and ran away from that by looking into alternative computing. That's where the personal computing came in. Unix was tangential to the problem not until free software (GNU) adopted it as it was the lingua franca of the research community and it seemed to walk a fine line between mainframe corporations and PC tinkerers. For more on this topic look into Fred Turner's book 'From Counterculture to Cyberculture'.
- dredmorbius 5y agoTrue and a fair point. I was referring more to the fact that software sales and licensing (a delightfully dystopian version of which dominates the essay) is the business model that's projected forward. Instead, we live in something of a bizarro-world of the IBM / EDS / Tymshare model, in which we-the-users don't pay for compute resources, but our eyeballs and manipulativeness is what's sold to advertisers / propagandists. In a similar way, reading Arthur C. Clarke's descriptions of future digital technology --- his "minisec" from Imperial Earth (1975) foreshadows the iPhone wonderfully --- describes the hardware but not the business and financial model supporting it. The notion that a decades-old hand-me-down device from the protagonist's clone-twin-father would still be useful is also ... charmingly quaint.