Comment by utopiah
5 hours ago
I called it "software".
It's so strange to me that since the 1960s with BASIC then later on dozens of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programmin... including Logo by Feurzeig/Papert/Solomon there is effort to precisely help beginners program software.
The effort was not to onboard future professional software developers but rather to make the personal in personal computer, or PC, meaningful. It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that.
We keep on re-discovering the foundations.
With the current situation on the hardware market, it makes me sad the we discover it only now. If things continue the way they are, there will be no Personal Computer any longer.
Ah well don't despair there are already alternatives e.g. https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform
> It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that.
I'm pretty sure this exists. It's called OSS or, more ubiquitously, Linux.
The problem is, of course, no one wants to publish software for your PC/handmade OS. Which makes it a huge problem. You can't write every piece of your OS, without wasting huge amount of time. Nor do people generally want this.
OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us (or others if you don't contribute).
Your software can be made by you, for you. It can be open source/free software if you want. Others can contribute to it, if you want but it can be open source without accepting external contributions also.
My point was to highlight that having software made by you for your machine is not new. Arguably the way to do so changed but I would say the principle remains.
> OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us
If by "us" you mean big bucks corporations, then yes: ~80% is big corporations [0]. Unfortunately, it does not look like it's a personal OS.
And we badly need the personal platform with the personal OS.
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/za564c/is_i...
2 replies →
> Your software can be made by you, for you.
Yeah, but it's probably derived from OSS software anyway either via license or LLM. That said, you can customize your Linux/BSD/Haiku/TempleOS as much as you want.
But consider the following: even in the better case of an OS making 1% of OS userbase (vs. 0.0000001%) no one wants to support it.
Want to play Diablo? Better to sit down and waste your time.