In my lifetime I have seen the growth of personal computers and soon their death.
The Golden Era
I was there. I am officially a historian. Ask me anything you want to know about the early days of the internet and the spread of personal computing.
I was there for 56K modem and AOL. My parents installed a second phone line so we could be on the internet. I registered the AIM name MANSLATER because I thought that was how you spelled manslaughter.
I also played video games on consoles and PC using discs. I quickly learned that you can’t play a PC game on a Mac computer.
I built my own computer during my sophomore year of college. I learned about motherboards, CPUs, and RAM and showed my parents how much cheaper it was for me to build my own. I learned about monitors and accessories and felt ownership over my rig.
In college I had access to fast internet and was in a whole other world. I could play online games with dormmates. Streaming video wasn’t really a thing yet. You would download small video files (Quicktime or RealPlayer) and watch them at 240p. You had access to all the music you wanted, but the legality of that was very questionable.
Everything was yours.
You didn’t have a subscription or pay another company for access. You stored things physically or digitally on your own machine.
You burned CDs to share videos/music with friends.
The Cloud
After college when I joined the workforce I learned about Dropbox. You could now store files “in the cloud.” You could save things and access them from other machines. You didn’t just email yourself files anymore.
It felt cool. It was like a backup and an easy way to share things. Not everything you had on your computer would be in Dropbox. Just key documents and photos… to start.
Around this same time YouTube was created. It was just an innocent place where people shared their simple videos.
Video games were still shipped on discs almost completely. Only Xbox Live games were downloadable. You could play flash games on your computer though.
Services
Enter SAAS. Software as a Service. No longer do we need to buy software. We simply pay a monthly subscription fee and get access to everything the software has to offer.
You don’t buy Photoshop and get to use it for as long as you want. Instead you pay $x/mo and get all the updates for “free.”
Netflix no longer mails you a DVD. Instead you can watch it online and get to see the videos you want from your computer.
You didn’t buy CDs or even iTunes singles. Spotify let you have access to “every” song, and you just had to give them a few dollars a month.
We also start to get a sense of a new service. Amazon creates AWS, and we see how companies are willing to pay other companies for access to their hardware and tools. A small company doesn’t need a data center, so they save money, and Amazon gets to have their resources be more efficient.
Hardware
AWS opens the door for things like Stadia and GeForce NOW. It’s the simple idea that you don’t need to have powerful machines to play beautiful games. You are now paying a company to use their machines. You just need a “dumb” computer to access their tools.
The idea seems great. You don’t have to spend thousands on a top-tier PC to play the games you want. Instead, you pay only $10-20/month (or free with ADs). The problem is that this is the end game. Companies don’t want you to have your own hardware where you have a choice on when to upgrade. They want you to have to pay a monthly subscription.
The Problem
Humanity is upset that things are no longer built to last. We live in a capitalistic society where companies need to keep making products that you buy so they can make more money.
PlayStation announced it is stopping the production of physical games. Nintendo has already started having game cartridges that are just license keys.
Best Buy no longer sells physical media, and 4K UHD discs are now treated like limited editions. You need to pay more for the right to actually own the product.
We are entering a situation where companies don’t even need to provide you with a physical product. They can simply charge you a monthly subscription, and if there is no other consumer option available, you have no other option.
The ease of having everything streaming or available on demand will soon become the only option, and you will have no say in alternatives. You can’t borrow a friend’s game or movie.
The Future
If buying is not owning, then piracy is not stealing.
This is an extreme stance, but it’s starting to have some merit. You shouldn’t obtain things without paying, but if there is no way to actually obtain them legally, then what? We just allow things to disappear?
We are running out of ways to own our own things. It started with planned obsolescence, and costs have risen dramatically. If you want the latest and greatest, you pay for it. Then, a few years later, you pay again.
Every step has been sold to us as convenience. Cloud storage is convenient. Streaming is convenient. Subscriptions are convenient. AI running on someone else’s hardware is convenient.
None of those things are inherently bad. I use almost all of them.
But I can’t help feeling like I lived through the golden age of personal computing. The brief moment when your computer was truly your computer. You chose the hardware. You owned the software. Your files lived on your machine. When you bought something, it was actually yours.
I miss that.
Because once ownership disappears, convenience stops being a choice. It becomes the only option.
And I doubt that’s progress.
