The so-called “progress” of personal computing has largely been a collective hallucination.  And it appears that I am not the only one who understands this: “A friend of mine recently gave me an old HP 35 calculator. For a geek like me, a true HP calculator is a kingly gift. I cleaned off some grime […]

I believe that Apple manufactures and sells junk and crapware. If you, my dear reader, have even a rudimentary awareness of what is possible with regards to personal computing – or even of what was possible two decades ago – the above should seem obvious to you. Hopefully the idiots who accused me of kissing […]

Computer users are forever being misled, successfully lied to, sold “old wine in new bottles,” bamboozled in a myriad ways large and small.  Why?  Simply because we are, to use the technical term, suckers.  Not always as individuals, but certainly collectively.  The defining attribute of the sucker is, of course, an inability to learn from […]

Is there a ballpoint pen in your pocket?  How fast is it? What do you mean, you don’t know? You didn’t ask the salesman? There is indeed a maximum speed at which the little ball in the pen can roll and still leave a satisfactory trace of ink upon the page.  Would you pay extra […]

My apologies to all readers who were inconvenienced by the multi-page layout. All of the Laws, slightly re-worded [1], are here once more.  To view the original pages, click on the numerals. A sanely designed personal computer system: I – Obeys operator The operator shall retain full control of the machine at all times.  In […]

The machine shall never tell a lie to the user/programmer. [1]  It shall obey all orders given to it through the human interface devices, without attempting to pass judgement on their legality or morality.  The machine shall not put the interests of any third party (including society in the abstract) above those of its user/programmer. […]

All of the information contained inside the machine’s storage array (see the Third Law), whether executable or not, shall be accessible at all times for inspection and modification by the user/programmer, in the form preferred for modification.  The user/programmer shall have the ability to modify the functionality of any executable code within the system without […]

If the machine encounters an error condition requiring the user’s manual intervention, the state of the now-halted process prior to this event shall be preserved, and the user given an opportunity to correct the error using an interactive debugger and resume execution from the saved-and-corrected state.  The debugger shall display the code which generated the […]

Compilation is to be considered a form of caching, and thus shall happen solely behind the scenes, like all other forms of caching. (See: the Third Law.) The machine is to accept no externally-introduced executable code except in the form preferred for making modifications (i.e. source.)   All executable code visible during any kind of debugging […]

Volatile storage devices (i.e. RAM) shall serve exclusively as read/write cache for non-volatile storage devices.  From the perspective of all software except for the operating system, the machine must present a single address space which can be considered non-volatile.  No computer system obeys this law which takes longer to fully recover its state from a […]