March 16 - 9 of Pentacles

The nine of pentacles, Computing from 1957-1986, the development of personal computing. A sun at the top is surrounded by concentric circles, representing the development of FORTRAN (1957), COBOL (1959), The PDP-1 and Spacewar (1962), and ARPANET (1969). A burst of light below these circles represents the mid-1970s and the birth of the software industry, which is encircled on one side with Robert Noyce inventing the microprocessor (1971) on one side and Nolan Bushnell and Al Acorn inventing Pong on the other (1972). Around an image of a personal computer in the center are additional inventions -- personal computers by Apple Tandy and Sinclair in 1977, Alair basic and the founding of Microsoft in 1975, Apple and the Cray-1 supercomputer in 1976, MS DOS and the first mouse in 1981, Mac OS in 1984, and the Commodore 64 in 1982. Below, a rising semicircle represents the invention of Hypercard by Bill Atkinson and team in 1986

A card of luxury and freedom...

Of course it's the early era of personal computing... how couldn't it be? I didn't really become a regular computer user until about a decade after the period listed here, but the feelings are familiar to me... even with simple word processing or image editing programs it felt like there was so much you could do, so much capability that the computer represented that it was up to you to fulfill, and if it was connected to a printer or the internet, then there was an even more infinite horizon...

But we can see that some of the main players in bringing computers into peoples' homes, indeed a sort of luxury good that had many uses but no specific necessary purpose to a regular household yet, are also the main figures we now associate with computing being increasingly controlled by mandatory software licensing, updates, and planned obsolescence. As it went from being a luxury to being an unfortunate requirement for many aspects of education, job hunting and work it also offered less freedom in general, sometimes under the sinister guise of user friendliness...

I love my computer... I also try to keep it not necessary for some things it offers to take care of for me. Even if I have to stare at the "bad screen" all day for my job, I don't want the "good screen" to be my only other option... that makes the relationship with it less free. Though for some platforms (ie, Netflix declaring "sleep" their main competition) that seems to be their goal...