Despite training in a variety of other areas (for example, Masters and Doctorate degrees in sociology), I’ve spent my life in tech.
Epoch 1: Computer. I started learning to code in 1983. Epoch 1. Basic. Programs saved on floppy disks and cassette tapes. Computer magazines with code listings that you keyboarded in by hands. Making silly little programs like “club members” and “favorite recipes” that you never really used, but you thought it was great to have the capability. Computing was for hobbyists.
Epoch 2: Network. In 1986, I got connected for the first time electronically. At the time, the real excitement was with dial-up to private bulletin board systems. I set up one of the earliest regional networks in this part of the United States. We called it the Great Salt Lake Network. I ran RBBS-PC and used a variety of Fido tossers. We have some WWIV boards and some STadel boards on the network, too. I did have a connection to Usenet and Internet email via UUCP feed from the University of Utah, and later from SandV in Chicago, but the real action seemed to be on Fidonets. I made my own 6809 systems and etched my own boards and wrote my own ROMs. Lots of solder. Computing was for geeks.
Epoch 3: Internet + Linux. Then, toward the end of the 80s, DNS really started to see a ton of adoption. More and more “smart hosts” were on DNS and faster dial-up meant that TCP/IP from residential nodes was really beginning to become a thing. I enrolled early at the University of Utah as a computer science major in 1990, and got access to dial-up TCP/IP via SLIP and for the first time had an email address at a smart host in the DNS universe—no more bang paths! It was here that I got serious about the backbone of tech. I became a hardcore C programmer and got very familiar with Sun3 and Sun4 hardware, SunOS, and soon, Linux on x86. I would go on to write a pile of Linux books and to become an early evangelist and contributor to variety of userspace projects. Computing was for the technology vanguard.
Epoch 4: Dotcom and post-dotcom. By the 2000s, I was no longer a computer science guy, and no longer exclusively a *nix/Linux/POSIX guy. I believe it was Sun who said “the network is the computer” and that was indeed the order of the day. I took up digital photography. I created many websites, including this blog. I ported Citadel/STadel to TCP/IP (one of many who did this). The tsunami was subsiding; computing wasn’t “everything” any longer, it had become mundane. I moved on to study other things. Went to grad school. Started a PhD. In 2009, I did the unthinkable and switched away from Unix/Linux to Mac OS (yes, I know that some would say that this isn’t a switch, but I’m planting that flag). Mobile arose. I bought the first iPad and took it to the hospital for my daughter’s birth. It paled in comparison to the Newton 2100 from the previous epoch, but it was consumer friendly. Computing was for everyone.
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I’ve been in Epoch 4 for something like 25 years. It has been a long, stable period of laptoping, OSing, digital photoing, websiting, code just as a hobby. But on the professional front, my entire career has been about being a “technology guy.” To this day, and even while running a marketing department. It’s been scripts and API integrations and a kind of “deep grok of tech” that only a few people who grew up when I did, and who had the experiences that I had, also have. Similar to Jung or Chomsky, if you will. Deep structure. The guy who always can use the tech, and who can help everyone else use it.
But times are changing.
I’ve had OpenClaw up for several weeks now, and I use Claude Code heavily at work. We are burning lots of tokens in my life right now. And if you want my opinion as someone who’s been in tech since the early ’80s, and I mean deeply in tech, to the tune of two startups, my own hardware, my own OSes, active on LKML guy, it seems obvious to me that:
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Software is dead
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User interfaces were a transitional concept
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NLP puts an end to “computing” as a commonplace activity, replaced with “talking” and “doing”
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Computing will now be for the high priests
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And increasingly (1) difficult to access and (2) expensive
Epoch 5 is here, I think.
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I’ve been running RX480s and RX580s around the house for a few years now. They’re sort of dirt cheap but “will do whatever you want them to do,” i.e. whether you want to play with 3D or play Elden Ring. I wasn’t on the cutting edge of AI research and still am not. But I’m ending up an early adopter in the AI agent space, and at the current rate of token burn, to make that plausible it’s time to run my own models locally.
Happily I have many cores, hundreds of gigs of RAM, and hundreds of terabytes of online storage. I have a growing stack of self-contained microservers running in a closet, all Lenovo M93p-Tiny boxes, which are pretty much ideal for this. Openclaw, OwnCloud, Proxmox, etc.
Computing is getting technical again. I find myself reading a lot and experimenting a lot and having my mind blown a lot. Like then, I am spending more money than I should. Like then, people increasingly don’t know what I’m talking about.
I’ve spent the weekend migrating a lot of data. We’re moving it out of apps like Devonthink (which I’ve used for 17+ years but which is increasingly just old fashioned and unreliable in its ability not to just plain lose data) and into a store that will have binaries, plain text as kind of accompanying metadata, and a vector DB/mini LLM making it searchable and usable by my agents.
I don’t know what happens next and I don’t know how long I’ll stick to it, but for now:
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We’ll be back to 100% Linux in house very soon
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The house is full of severs again, too
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I’ll be burning my own tokens with small models onsite, and stepping up to hyperscalers only when needed
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I expect to be frustrated as both computers and mobile devices become harder and harder to get ahold of, in the form factors I prefer them in
This is the last epoch for me. Epoch 6 is retirement—and I switch to 100% wrenching on cars. I almost made that jump now, but I guess we’re in for one more epoch. One more voyage into the tsunami. One more battle with a new monster being born, to take over the world.
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These are my epochs, no one else’s. My databases. My tabular databases disappearing into the age of vectors.