My very first computer was a 486dx2 with 66 Mhz and 4MB RAM. It had this strange initiation ritual. When you started it up, it showed a helpful window: here is how this works. A basic orientation. A small guide for the beginner.
It vanished after 10 starts. After that it was sink or swim.
It ran on MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. As soon as I knew the commands, I mostly used DOS. There was barely enough room for the game itself, let alone a graphical interface running in the background while I played the most advanced thing I knew at the time: some version of Monkey Island.
#The First Computers Were Not Friendly
Before computers became personal, playful, portable, or conversational, they were instruments of calculation under pressure.
Some of the earliest electronic and electromechanical computing work was tied to war: ballistics tables, codebreaking, physics, logistics, and weapons research. At Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project relied on human “computers,” IBM punched-card machines, desk calculators, differential analyzers, and other calculation systems to support atomic bomb research. The Harvard Mark I also performed calculations connected to wartime scientific work.
ENIAC, often remembered as one of the first general-purpose electronic digital computers, was completed too late to design the first atomic bombs. Its first major classified calculation was connected to thermonuclear weapon research after World War II. That detail matters. Computing history is dramatic enough without bending it into myth.
The point is not that one machine “invented the bomb.”
The point is that early modern computing was born in rooms full of mathematical challenges.
These machines were not approachable. They were not consumer products. They did not welcome beginners with friendly icons. They were operated by specialists, programmed through switches, cables, cards, tables, procedures, and institutional knowledge.
A computer was not something you owned.
It was something a lab, military office, university, or corporation controlled.
The first big shift was not making computers friendly.
It was proving they could change what humans were capable of calculating.
#Every Era Changed the Relationship
The history of computing is not just a story of faster chips.
It is a sequence of moments where the relationship between humans and machines changed.
At first, computers were calculation engines.
Then they became office tools.
Then personal machines.
Then game machines.
Then connection through the internet.
Then pocket companions.
In all those eras, specialists stood between the machine and everyone else. They translated unseen machine talk into user interfaces ordinary people could understand.
With the beginning of LLMs, this began to change.
While a lot of people use AI as a better Google, it can be so much more.
Instead of learning the commands needed to operate the machine, the new interface learns my language and translates it into its own language.
My language becomes the user interface.
#Science Fiction warned us for a Reason
Computing history has always had a shadow version in fiction.
Cyberpunk showed neon cities where technology is powerful, beautiful, and owned by someone else. Hackers gave us the fantasy of young rebels skating through impossible interfaces with handles, style, and too many leather jackets. 1984 gave us the darker warning: screens that do not just show the world, but watch it.
Different stories. Same anxiety.
What happens when machines mediate everything?
Who controls the system?
Who gets watched?
Who gets locked out?
Who gets to be anonymous, pseudonymous, or simply left alone?
That matters now more than ever.
The future is not about hiding from the next breakthrough, no matter how terrifying it might feel. It is about learning, adapting, and growing.
I want to take you with me on that journey: learning, adapting, and growing with the machine instead of just consuming the next breakthrough.
#Sources
Here some of my sources for this post:
- Computer History Museum — early computing, ENIAC, personal computing, and interface history: computerhistory.org/computerhistory.org
- University of Pennsylvania Engineering — ENIAC history and archival material: seas.upenn.edu/eniac
- Los Alamos National Laboratory — Manhattan Project and wartime calculation context: lanl.gov/history
- IBM History — punched-card systems, business machines, and PC history: ibm.com/history
- Stanford AI Lab / Stanford Cart references: ai.stanford.edu/ai.stanford.edu
- Cornell historical references on Frank Rosenblatt and the perceptron: news.cornell.edu/news.cornell.edu
- Xerox PARC and graphical interface history: parc.com/www.parc.com
- Apple Newsroom and historical archives for Macintosh and iPhone milestones: apple.com/newsroom
- Microsoft history and Windows milestones: news.microsoft.com/news.microsoft.com
- OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications: owasp.org/www project top 10 for large langua…
- NIST AI Risk Management Framework: nist.gov/ai risk management framework