Computation Easel

I’ve been working on ideas for computers from an alternate present — one that I think we still have time to get in contact with. In the alternate history that produces that alternated present, the idealists and utopians kept control of their creations, spreading them into creative hands rather than investors seeking a business market, and choking the designs down to useful appliances that are not, themselves, a creative medium.

Just big enough that it fits on a workbench or kitchen table. It prioritizes connectivity to switches and analog controls/sensors.

That’s not, of course, to say that computers of our real world, even siloed appliances like the tablet I’m writing this on, aren’t good creative tools. Quite the opposite: the drawing above I did on my iPad with a Pencil stylus, and it was a lot of fun — and I realized recently that I hadn’t rebooted it in months and months while I was using it all day every day. But it’s hard for me to use my iPad as art. Not only can I not use an iPad to program something else per the Apple-designed limitations that allow it run under heavy use for months, but I furthermore can’t use an iPad to program an iPad, itself.

The Easel in the sketch above is the opposite. Inspired by Alan Kay’s Alto and SmallTalk, its primary user interface is, itself, a programming environment. It has buttons and sliders and text boxes, but it doesn’t focus on the tools most useful to secretaries and accountants, instead assuming that you’re using it to make Computer Music with its PlugData programming environment. And who knows what else.

Unlike the computers that were built increasingly toward business use cases in the 1970s and 80, it features front-facing, built-in analog and digital I/O ports, empowering and encouraging the user to experiment with it, to build their own peripherals and interfaces.

You might be interested to support my speculative, creative work by backing me up on Patreon for my creative and educational work!

I’m intending to build a prototype Easel to include in my electronic instruments. Its heart will be a Raspberry Pi 4b, with the I/O breakout including buffers to protect the computer from errant voltage and current during experimentation, DACs to produce audio and control voltages, and ADCs to allow input, as well as access to buffered pins.

How much will the final machine resemble this sketch? I certainly hope it will be more mature a design than this, making effective compromises with unanticipated realities. I also hope that it willencourage others with its design to build for themselves and their friends computers that exist to express their curiosity and creativity, rather than the interests of the center of the bell curve of 1980s dollars.

Modular systems are a function of industrial society. But do people of The Fifth World still know how to agree to standards? With their acute interest in efficiency, I think they might have carried that lesson forward!

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