(2021-11-29) Obenauer The Importance Of Personal Computing

Alexander Obenauer: The importance of personal computing. Personal computing is one of the most important things humanity has ever built.

plenty of things let you explore someone else’s thinking, but personal computers can help you explore your own thinking, giving you living spaces to externalize, review, expand, and refine your thoughts on the things that matter most to you. (tools for thought)

Getting personal computing right is one of the most important things in our field.

How we represent things completely changes how we interact with them, and not just on external surfaces: how we represent things changes how we interact with things in our heads!

Personal computing is increasingly where we externalize our thinking, where we model it, where we develop it, and where we share it with others; getting the fundamentals right for the software we use increasingly means getting the fundamentals right for the ways we think.

Better representations lead to better thinking.

How our computers represent the things we think about, how they let us model our thinking, is one of the most important – yet wildly under-explored – things to consider in consumer technology.