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To this day, I wonder how we came to own this gospel of personal computing, but we did. In mythological and biological terms, we explained the deep raison d’être of PCs. And in practical terms, we described the five categories of activities they enabled or enhanced. All this while competitors spent most of their airtime discussing bits and bytes, fun topics for geeks but neither interesting nor meaningful to normal humans, who were more concerned by what the PC did for them.

(This is partly unfair. In the best-case geeks who speak the esoteric language of bits and bytes are indispensable early adopters; they are the “bleeding edge”, they show the way to The Rest of Us. Luckily, we spoke from both sides of our Apple France mouth, catering to the interests of technically inclined trailblazers, while also doing our best to make sense for people more interested in simply using VisiCalc, AppleWriter or PFS:Graph.)

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Original: https://toots.dgplug.org/@jason/110971867384842849

Turn the clock three decades forward, and the computer became personal: a machine you could lift with your hands, your credit card, and your mind.
We had no need for the people in white coats, the techno-priests who attended the big mainframes. Personal computers were indefatigably patient idiots with the potential for infinite storage and symbol manipulation.
Personal computers made us whole; they supplemented our central nervous system and allowed us to catch up with our invention: symbols. Put in a more poetic and mythological way, they returned to us what the gods had stolen from us. Hence the Promethean attribute.

This was summarized in that easily digestible and repeatable taxonomy of personal computer roles: Think, Organize, Communicate, Learn and Play.

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Original: https://toots.dgplug.org/@jason/110971865690193951

But our minds were limited. Our central nervous system left us behind; it stopped evolving while we raced ahead with ever more complex uses of symbols. We had trouble remembering long symbol strings — storing the content of sacred texts in a single brain was an extraordinary skill of exceptional individuals. And we had difficulties performing even simple arithmetic operations in our heads and extracting cube roots. The invention of writing and, later, of the printing press went towards supplementing and expanding the power of our brains. But while that was good for storing, reproducing, and sharing symbol strings; it still fell short when combining, manipulating strings, and calculating.
The infinitely flexible symbol manipulation machine arose when the modern computer was born in the forties.
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Original: https://toots.dgplug.org/@jason/110971860881653698

Next: Heuristic. As the etymology indicates, heuristic *(eureka)* refers to “good finding”. My computer is a rewarding instrument of exploration, of valuable discoveries.

The Promethean attribute deserves more elaboration. It refers to our deeply entrenched need to feel we’re masters of our inventions.
Once upon a time we invented symbols such as the letters of the alphabet and Arabic numerals. These symbols gave us boundless power. With symbols we could write Elizabethan poetry, describe Wall Street greed, and produce equations explaining general relativity.

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Original: https://toots.dgplug.org/@jason/110971855748938002

Back in France we met Jacques Séguéla and his merry band of thinkers and writers. On our behalf they performed qualitative market research for what PC meant in the minds and, more importantly, guts of normal people.

The outcome of such research was couched in seemingly esoteric language. Séguéla’s team told us the PC was endowed with three important attributes:
Solipsistic, Heuristic and Promethean.

Let’s unfold these adjectives to see how they resonate.

Solipsistic refers to a one-on-one, immediate relationship, without mediation, with the computer, as opposed to dealing with an organization. As a gifted but troubled programmer once told me, he liked his computer because it didn’t judge him, it obeyed him (most of the time) and, by allowing him to perform difficult, valuable tasks, it gave him a much-needed sense of self-worth. My machine, without intercessors, teachers, judges, or intruders.

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Original: https://toots.dgplug.org/@jason/110971848078209887