What would the world be like if, instead of PCs, computing for the masses had arrived in the form of Unix-powered terminals similar to France's Minitel, administered not by the Baby Bells but by the US Postal Service with iron-clad First and Fourth Amendment protections after the US government took the rights to Unix from AT&T under eminent domain, put Unix into the public domain, and put the whole Bell Labs crew on the government payroll?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jun/28/minitel-france-says-farewell
Imagine if every American got their own #Unix shell account from the Post Office, and young students looked forward to the day in third grade when the local neighborhood sysadmin would come in and teach them the basics.
@starbreaker I'd like to see each resident in the US over 13 issued an email account by the US Government, used for all correspondence by all governments from fed to local.
totally centralized, open to abuse, but no more so than everyone on Gmail.
even if it were a closed email system only for intercitizen contact and government contact, I'd love to see that
I'd still love to see a US where every resident over a certain age has a shell account on a local Unix installation and knows how to use it.
Imagine a nation of potential Unix hackers.
> might be fun, might be a disaster
this feels like a sum up of all the human endeavors, particularly AI
actually, if I thought there was a god, this seems like what they'd think about this whole "humanity" experiment
@AdamThePhantump @sydneyfalk @pnathan It could be a neighborhood public Unix installation.
I'd advise against automatic sign-ups, at least at first. Let interested people email you and request their preferred username, instead.
@starbreaker @sydneyfalk yeah I see lots of abuse potential. :-S
@starbreaker @sydneyfalk
Yes, that'd be pretty awesome!
Maybe I should set a unix install up for the Puget Sound. "pugetsound.online". spread it through the different local meetups etc. :)
just gotta have the cgi page to gift you an account, set up a _public_html and tie it to email .
might be fun, might be a disaster.