“Computing” is so ubiquitous and personal today that we couldn’t imagine it. Well, for a lot of people, it is not a computing, it is a storage and viewing only. :)
I’ve been daily on internet since 1992 and I see what it does to me… and to all of us.
We don’t remember, we search for something all the time, people are anxious, we forget things, we hoard data, very young people all around the world get high speed access to adult stuff, most of people have similar stuff at home because of instagram, people are cynical, ironic, cannot discuss, do rage bait, news written to raise negative emotions because they make you click and share, hybrid wars enabled by social networks…
For sure, we could discuss here ad nauseam, but it is not the point.
Idealistic view is “people will start revolution”. No, they won’t. They are numbed down.
There is research already that use of LLM causes numbness.
I would say that almost in everything.
But 80 pct (<= Pareto) people use it as “a better Google” anyway…
You can make your devices personal - and offline (eg offline wikipedia that saturates your informational needs in 99 pct) - if you want to get out of mess described above. You can use offline software for everything. You can use open source and free software.
But don’t expect any revolution.
Most of us are too shy or too numb…and keyboard warriors.. fortunately, or unfortunately. It is point of view :)
I think it's not been easier for people to own their own PCs in a meaningful sense in my lifetime, but the tech companies will fight that tooth and nail however they can. The level of control over people's lives that has become the norm is just too useful, too profitable, for companies to give up on. Wanting this means opposing their interests on the level of both personal choices and policy, and this idealism will go nowhere if not coupled with a willingness to actually have that fight
1.0 and 2.0 are, sociologically and culturally, two completely different paradigms when considering how people use their devices. In the early days, even for the first decade or so of the internet, the computing world was largely homogeneous, most people had almost identical hardware, software and use cases for their home PCs. There was not a lot of variation. In 2026 the entire world is fractured in terms of the hardware, software and applied use of their myriad of devices. Impossible to label any of it as PC2.0 when virtually no two PCs are the same or used for the same purposes. So it would be more like several billion unique PC revolutions.
In the earliest days of the PC revolution, people had different, incompatible hardware and software (with the exception of the widespread MS BASIC) even if they sometimes used the same CPUs and audio/video chips. TRS-80, CoCo, MSX, C64, Amiga, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, Oric, Amstrad CPC, X68000, PC-98, IBM-PC, Apple II, Mac Classic, Macintosh II, Apple II GS, SGI, Sun etc. In fact, hardware and software are a lot more homogenous now than in the beginning: 2 dominant CPU architectures (x86/64 and ARM) and 3 dominant OSs (Windows, MacOS, Linux).
“Computing” is so ubiquitous and personal today that we couldn’t imagine it. Well, for a lot of people, it is not a computing, it is a storage and viewing only. :)
I’ve been daily on internet since 1992 and I see what it does to me… and to all of us.
We don’t remember, we search for something all the time, people are anxious, we forget things, we hoard data, very young people all around the world get high speed access to adult stuff, most of people have similar stuff at home because of instagram, people are cynical, ironic, cannot discuss, do rage bait, news written to raise negative emotions because they make you click and share, hybrid wars enabled by social networks…
For sure, we could discuss here ad nauseam, but it is not the point.
Idealistic view is “people will start revolution”. No, they won’t. They are numbed down.
There is research already that use of LLM causes numbness.
I would say that almost in everything.
But 80 pct (<= Pareto) people use it as “a better Google” anyway…
You can make your devices personal - and offline (eg offline wikipedia that saturates your informational needs in 99 pct) - if you want to get out of mess described above. You can use offline software for everything. You can use open source and free software.
But don’t expect any revolution.
Most of us are too shy or too numb…and keyboard warriors.. fortunately, or unfortunately. It is point of view :)
I think it's not been easier for people to own their own PCs in a meaningful sense in my lifetime, but the tech companies will fight that tooth and nail however they can. The level of control over people's lives that has become the norm is just too useful, too profitable, for companies to give up on. Wanting this means opposing their interests on the level of both personal choices and policy, and this idealism will go nowhere if not coupled with a willingness to actually have that fight
There is a personal computing revolution already happening...Its called you wont have one if you can even afford one.
1.0 and 2.0 are, sociologically and culturally, two completely different paradigms when considering how people use their devices. In the early days, even for the first decade or so of the internet, the computing world was largely homogeneous, most people had almost identical hardware, software and use cases for their home PCs. There was not a lot of variation. In 2026 the entire world is fractured in terms of the hardware, software and applied use of their myriad of devices. Impossible to label any of it as PC2.0 when virtually no two PCs are the same or used for the same purposes. So it would be more like several billion unique PC revolutions.
In the earliest days of the PC revolution, people had different, incompatible hardware and software (with the exception of the widespread MS BASIC) even if they sometimes used the same CPUs and audio/video chips. TRS-80, CoCo, MSX, C64, Amiga, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, Oric, Amstrad CPC, X68000, PC-98, IBM-PC, Apple II, Mac Classic, Macintosh II, Apple II GS, SGI, Sun etc. In fact, hardware and software are a lot more homogenous now than in the beginning: 2 dominant CPU architectures (x86/64 and ARM) and 3 dominant OSs (Windows, MacOS, Linux).
True, but 'earliest days' and 'PC 1.0' aren't the same topic. Earliest days are mid 70's to 80's and the PC era is more like 90's and 00's
Is it?