Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

It wasn't until the 1950s that trends changed and popular office machines started having green and grey hues, like this early 1950s NCR 11-EN. One big exception was the Comptometer, which kept its brown tones until the 50s when it too shifted to the green/grey aesthetic.

The Burroughs Class 3 I showed earlier in the thread is an example of rebranding a machine originally made by the Pike company. But when 90% of a market looks a certain way, competitors (like this Monroe Model G from 1918) mimic the design. So even in 1946 RC Allen followed suit.

At one point Burroughs controlled about 90% of the adding machine market. It accomplished this like companies today: it bought up its competitors and rebranded their products. That meant painting them black, and instead of felt, they just painted the spot under the keys green.

The Burroughs Class 1 was the first adding machine Burroughs sold starting at the end of the 19th century. It was the Cadillac of adding machines and featured a shiny black case, beveled glass on the sides to show off the mechanism, and actual green felt under the keyboard.

This machine looks and functions largely the same as Burroughs adding machines 30-40 years older. Have you noticed how many machines I've featured (like this Burroughs Class 3) have a black case, and a keyboard with white and black keys on a green background? My theory for why:

This is an RC Allen Model 75 adding/listing machine from around 1946. RC Allen was founded in 1932 in Grand Rapids Michigan and was a distributor of Facit calculators from Sweden. The brand still exists today as a manufacturer of precision aircraft instruments.

I wrote about this a few months back, and likened Apple's approach to a nursing home. Some people need the extra care a nursing home provides, so it's great they are an option, but most adults don't choose to live in one. https://puri.sm/posts/the-future-of-computers-the-neighborhood-and-the-nursing-home/

If an iPhone is your home, installing an app is inviting someone in. Apple demands they approve all your visitors, doesn't trust you to do it yourself. They say it's to stop criminals but it's really to stop competitors, charge tolls from the rest. https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/3/22761724/apple-craig-federighi-ios-sideloading-web-summit-2021-european-commission-digital-markets-act

When I read Snow Crash for the first time, the most dystopian thing to me weren't the burbclaves, but that all the useful information on the future Internet was behind a paywall. It's odd that this is the part of the metaverse people want to build.

The things you rent, end up owning you.

So Big Tech companies can't manage to make a simple protocol like messaging interoperable (FB owns 3, Google 6), but we are supposed to believe something complicated like the Metaverse will be different?

@yaelwrites I figure each person has their own limits and philosophy for what they want in their feed, and while federation means you can better match a moderator to your style, it's still going to be less perfect than if you (and perhaps your peers) had more direct control over curating your feed.

I tend to give people operating in good faith the benefit of the doubt (people have bad days etc), but I'm more likely to block folks obviously operating in bad faith.

@yaelwrites I think because the incentives on this platform are somewhat different (at least so far) there's at least a potential for things to be better.

My personal goal is to empower users with more moderation-like powers to control their own feed because I'm not convinced centralized moderation is scalable or even necessarily ethical to impose on administrators. It's not implemented yet, but the vision itself is here: https://source.puri.sm/liberty/host/smilodon/-/issues/6

@yaelwrites I think one measure of a good social network is a place where a person feels they can most be themselves.

Pick a random consumer device lying around your house and imagine someone coming across it after 70 years of neglect. Part of the device no longer works. Would they be able to fix it? https://puri.sm/posts/beyond-right-to-repair/

@yaelwrites Lock picking is fun. You might enjoy the Lockpicking Lawyer's Youtube channel as he talks through what he's feeling as he picks each lock, which gives you a good idea as to the technique.

Ok I think we are ready for tomorrow.