The era of personal computing is over

"I'm interested," Teague says. "Make it a thread in OT," Teague says. Oy. Once invited into someone's house for a play-date comes the obligation to behave like a good guest. I don't do well under pressure.

Anyway. As the title says, the era of personal computing is over. Well. Almost over. Well. Ending. A bit. Ish.

Let's draw a line totally arbitrarily and declare that the era of personal computing began in 1977, with the invention of the Apple II. A saner person would probably plant the flag in 1984 at the advent of the Macintosh, but what the hell, let's be bold.

The killer app for the Apple II was really word processing. That wasn't the only thing you could do with one, but it was really the only practical thing. You could sit and stare at 40 columns of eye-scrapingly green type, then if you were very lucky (and a bit affluent) you could print what you'd written on a dot-matrix printer that sounded not entirely unlike a velociraptor with a tooth abscess. That's the practical thing that personal computers were good for in 1977.

They were also good for a small set of entirely impractical things. You could buy database programs for them, which you were then supposed to use to replace your drawer full of 3x5 cards with recipes written on them, or to record the serial numbers of all your possessions just in case you were ever robbed and needed to provide the police with a manifest of your house. Once you notice that the computer was in the den or the upstairs spare bedroom and conspicuously not the kitchen, or that if you were robbed the very first thing they'd have nicked would've been your insanely expensive personal computer, you can see why these ideas never took off.

If you wanted, you could buy computer magazines, take them home, flip to the back, and then spend two laborious hours carefully typing the BASIC program you found there into your computer only to discover that you'd made a typo that you absolutely cannot find.

Or you could also play games on your computer, if you were the sort of person who enjoyed Lemonade Stand or Oregon Trail or Zork. I lost a whole summer to Zork, thank you very much, and returned to junior high all pasty and pale for my trouble. "West of House" my ass. Fuckers.

Oh, the fun we had.

Anyway, eventually along came the Mac, and that's when computers started to become useful for things other than not storing your recipes, not getting programs to run and not making out with girls. With the Mac, and later the LaserWriter, then the Mac II and so on, computers became surprisingly capable tools for creativity. They were limited at first — in the earliest days, your creativity was limited to writing things in fonts that looked vaguely calligraphic — but they got better.

Oh. And I think some businesses used them too. Mostly for filling out forms, as best I can gather. And later, for inventing new kinds of forms and then requiring that they be filled out and then losing them because the computer malfunctioned.

But really, even in the early 1990s, the air-quotes "personal computer" was a fairly pointless thing. Some people chose to own computers for business reasons, some people considered computer-tinkering to be their hobby, but really there just wasn't much of a reason for the average individual to own a computer, or even to aspire someday to own one.

Then the Internet happened, and shit suddenly got real.

For (by that point) about fifteen years, personal computers had existed as tools for making things. They started out rudimentary — think fire-hardened pointy sticks and chips of flint — and eventually became slightly less rudimentary — hammers and chisels. But whether primitive or state-of-the-then-art they were really exclusively for making things; that's what they were good for.

With the Internet, computers were suddenly tools for consuming things. By the time the World Wide Web came along, it was possible to sit at a computer for an entire hour and do nothing but read and look at pictures. And then you had to go do something else because you'd finished reading everything on the Internet at that time. But the point is, there was stuff out there, and you could get to it through a computer.

There's a painting by Whistler. It's called "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket." It's a very dark painting, being of a firework at night. There's a story behind it, a pretty amusing one involving a famous art critic of the day. I'd learned about it in an art history class in high school. But I'd never seen the painting. Because it's very dark, you see. And the reproduction in the textbook was practically solid black. The teacher had a slide of it, but it was also practically indistinguishable. I could have gone to a library and found a book with a better picture, but I never bothered, because that was a pain.

One day in college I was hanging out in the computer lab between classes — because I'd spent my formative summers failing to beat Zork and thus didn't know how to talk to girls — and idly surfing this "World Wide Web" thing I'd heard about. (We didn't call it "surfing" in those days; back then, "surfing" still meant "channel surfing," which was sitting in front of the TV with the remote in your hand, flicking from channel to channel.) Purely by accident, I happened upon a photograph of that painting, "The Falling Rocket." It was incredibly low-resolution by our standards, maybe 200 pixels across or something. But for the first time, I could see it. Because it wasn't all gunked up with printing ink, or projected by a dim bulb in a half-lit classroom. There it was, right there in front of me, on a computer screen.

This was big.

Over the next decade, the computer screen became a window into the sum total of all human knowledge and culture. And I mean the sum total, warts and all. Great novels, great art, textbooks, encyclopedias, music, movies, porn, all of it. Our whole planetary culture, or at least as much of it as we'd been able to digitize, was out there just on the other side of the glass.

And suddenly the whole idea of a "personal computer" made sense. Fuck the recipes. Fuck Zork. (Fuck Zork anyway, because really, shit, man. A maze of twisty little passages all alike? Fuck.) The personal computer was your window into the sum total of all knowledge and culture.

And it was right around that time — say, ten or fifteen years ago — when we all started to realize that the window was really small. And it was covered in shit. And it had bars over it.

See, computers are pretty good tools for making things. They're not perfect, to be sure, and they sure have evolved a lot from those early days of the Apple II. But when you think about the fact that you can use your laptop to do everything from write a novel to compose a song to make a feature film to sequence the DNA of some frog nobody's ever heard of, they're kind of awesome, as tools go.

But computers are shit for looking at things. Seriously, they're just appallingly bad. If you go look at a painting in a museum, all you have to do is walk up to it and stand there. You can get as close as you want — well, within reason — or you can stand back and view it from a distance. You can look at it from this side or that side just by moving your head, or maybe your feet if it's one of those really big paintings. To read a book, all you have to know how to do is turn pages. And, well, read I suppose, but let's take that one as a given. To listen to recorded music, your mandatory skill set basically starts and stops with knowing how to identify and press the "play" button.

But computers? Man, computers have to be understood. They have to be learned. There's a whole galaxy of basic skills you need just to use a computer. We even had a name for it once: "computer literacy," they called it. It was taught in schools! To kids! "This is a keyboard," they would say. "This is a mouse." Shit you guys all take for granted was once homework material. There were tests. And you had to study to pass them.

It's understandable that we have to teach kids to read. But can you imagine sending kids to a whole semester of classes to teach them how to use a book? Or how to watch a movie? I don't mean like film-school watch-a-movie; I mean just how to watch a movie. "Okay, class, this week we're going to cover how to walk down an aisle and sit in a seat. I know that sounds intimidating, but if you study hard and do all the exercises, I'm sure you can master it." It's ridiculous!

We took the sum total of all human knowledge and culture and locked it up in a warehouse with tiny, grime-encrusted windows with bars on them. And in order to peek through the bars, we made people pass a test.

It's insane, is what it is.

But things are changing. For the first time, things are really actually starting to change. People have talked about changing things for years, but it's all been locked up in research labs and doctoral theses. Today — I mean literally today, this very day — things are actually starting to change out here in the real world.

And it's 'cause of the iPad.

Now, I don't like to sound all worked-up. But it's hard to avoid it in this case. The iPad is the first high-profile, widespread device that's specifically designed to be invisible. When you're using it, you're directly interacting with whatever's on the screen. The device itself is supposed to just vanish, leaving you standing there with a Web page hanging in the air in front of you. Or a movie. Or a book. Or whatever.

The nerds call it "transparent computing." I call it a healthy shot of Windex on the shit-caked window into our culture we call the personal computer.

There are folks out there who declare that the iPad is a bad thing. A three-eyed goat born under a full moon is taken as no surer sign of the apocalypse. Yes, Cory Doctorow, I'm looking at you. The iPad is all sealed up, these people say. You can't get inside it and tinker around. You can't break it, and fix it, and learn about it. You can't install some random, obsolete freeware you downloaded off an FTP site on it. And these things are supposed to be, somehow, bad.

But guys. Seriously. That stuff is the shit on the window. Those are the things that prevent people from being able to consume, experience and participate in our culture. Guys like Cory Doctorow think these obstacles are like those little pleasure nubs on exotic condoms, designed to give bursts of delight to the unsuspecting newbie. They don't get that they're actually severe-tire-damage spikes lining the onramp to the information superhighway.

(There's another blast from the past. Oh, how the mighty metaphors have fallen.)

Are computers going to go away? Of course not. To be pedantic, there are now more computers in the world than there are red blood cells in the average person's body. There are computers everywhere. Your Blu-Ray player has a fucking sophisticated computer inside it, just so you can see every pore on George Clooney's beautiful, beautiful face. Computers are ubiquitous these days.

To be less pedantic and more in the spirit of the question, computer workstations aren't going to go away either. We use them all the time to make stuff! They're essential to our society now, and nothing is going to displace them any time soon.

But the idea of the "personal computer" has reached its zenith and has begun to wane. People should have access to everything the Internet contains — all the art, all the literature, all the entertainment, all the porn, all the opinion, all the porn, all the discussion, all the porn. All of it, the whole shebang. It should be there, at everybody's fingertips. But a personal computer makes a lousy window into that repository. And I think we've finally begun to recognize that. And more importantly, I think we've finally begun, as a culture, to make a concerted effort to do things differently.

I don't think the iPad is anywhere close to the be-all, end-all. But it's a good start. And more important than any of the iPad's actual merits or shortcomings, it's significant as being the first large-scale push toward something better than a shitty, grime-encrusted, barred window into the Internet. It's a sign that smart people are thinking about this stuff, and that's good.

But we should also bear in mind that thirty years from now, there's gonna be something in our everyday lives — some device, or system, or something — that makes the iPad look as primitive and as pointless as an Apple II.

I don't know about you guys, but that thought both thrills and terrifies me.