The age of personal computing

Humble beginnings

Computers have always had an almost magical quality for me. The first computer in our home was an old decommissioned Siemens PCD-2P laptop my father had brought home from work when I was probably around 4 or 5 years old. It was running MS-DOS and had a white and blue LCD Display. I guess I was still a bit too young to really immerse myself in the arcane world of the pre-gui era command line but I remember playing the game Gorillas on it, where two players took turns trying to hit each other by throwing bananas in an arc. It was really fun! We also got a hand-me-down external monitor a bit later and could enjoy CGA graphics in all its glory (which was not very glorious at all). I have vague memories of watching my sister, who is five years older than me, play Monkey Island with very pinkish graphics.

The next computer we had was an Atari ST 520 and I have fond memories of playing TOKI and winter games on it. A few years later we also got an Amiga 500, which meant we could play James Pond in all it's glory! I also loved watching my sister play Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight which was not very age appropriate but since my parents didn't really know about it, I was happy to see the knights perish in graphic detail.

But all of these machines were actually my sister's and I was merely riding shotgun and apart from playing games I didn't do any tinkering. Also, we usually were lagging a few years behind technologically speaking, because the machines were all hand-me-downs. My first own computer was also an old decommissioned one, a PC running Windows 3.11 at a time when Windows 95 was all the rage. I did enjoy using it though, and remember neatly organizing the application windows on the desktop, which would even persist a reboot. We did have a PC running Windows 98 eventually but it was in my parents' bedroom and I could only use it for Microsoft Encarta and Adobe Photoshop SE.

Learn to fly

My real computer journey began when my sister and I finally got a brand new state of the art PC for Christmas one year: An HP Pavillon with an Athlon XP 2200+ CPU! It wasn't a very powerful machine but it was running Windows XP and it even had a CD writer and a DVD reader! And the best part was that I got to put it in my room! This was when I really got computer pilled and started exploring, tinkering and of course also playing even more games. We didn't get internet access until a few years later so I got hooked on monthly PC magazines that came with a CD with various software on it. I loved tweaking system settings and I even replaced the system sounds with audio snippets from Austin Powers Goldmember. I started ricing my system long before the term was coined using a program called StyleXP.

One day, after my sister and I had a fight and she took the computer to her room, my mother decided that it was finally time I'd get a PC just for myself. She took me to a nearby electronics store and we picked out an Acer Aspire machine that was slightly better than the one we had back at home. It wasn't very powerful either but most games I wanted to play ran fine and the CRT screens back then were very forgiving even at lower resolutions. When I look back now I can't believe that we just picked out something without doing any research at all. This was the machine I'd eventually play Half Life 2, GTA Vice City and many, many great games on.

So I can say I've always been deeply immersed in personal computing, even going further than most to tweak everything to my liking. I never did get into programming though (not until ~3 years ago that is) which meant that I was at the mercy of others to get software that I could use. So the personal part of Personal Computing has always had a limit. Fast Forward to 2025 and things couldn't be more different.

Welcome to the true era of personal computing

To me, the real era of Personal Computing is only getting started. Creating tools that solve your exact problems is easier than ever, thanks in large part to the mind blowing advancements in artificial intelligence. For specific use cases, it is now easier (and sometimes faster) to have your coding agent (opencode for me btw) create the tool than it is to find something suitable in an app store. Single purpose software for the audience of 1. What would have sounded ludicrous just a couple of years ago is now the new reality. When OpenAI announced gpt-5 on August 7th, 2025, they showed off the ability to create user interfaces on the fly for various purposes. This is similar to Anthropic's Claude Artifacts that have been available for quite some time but I have a feeling that OpenAI really wants to double down on the idea of generative UI for their large user base.

Personally, I am more interested in building my own persistent tools although for many situations, throwaway interfaces/tools will indeed come in handy. I'm not sure yet what this means for the future of software and especially software as a service, only that it's going to have an impact. Steve Job's famous quote probably still holds true for part of the demographic: "People don't know what they want until you show it to them". Taste and finding good and novel solutions to real life problems will still be key I guess, but the fact that basically everyone now has access to tools that allow us create tailored software solutions will change the game forever. I know that it already has for me in a major way. For experienced developers, it might feel different, since they've always been able to just create their own custom software if they just put in some time. For me though, it feels like the true beginning of Personal Computing.