At first I thought that so much of the new computer company has little to do with computers, and I suppose that's technically true, but what it has a lot to do with is people, and that's really what the computer is about. So in a roundabout way, it's all about the computer because it's all about people.
The things I've been thinking about over the last couple of days are the ways to make the company viable, and the crux of that is finding ways to put them into the hands of the people who can use them most. It's an odd machine, because the two groups of people who come to mind are people who want a reliable tool and people who want to tweak endlessly. I thought this was a dichotomy, and maybe a sign that I was on the wrong track, but then I realized that this perfectly describe *me*. While I may be a human dichotomy, this realization alleviated any fears I had that the machine I have in mind is too unfocused to meet the needs of at least one group of people, and I think that maybe it could reach both; but how to communicate that?
I do have a fair amount of connections in the hacker/maker/hobbyists communities and when I've talked about the *implementation* of such a machine this is where most of the interest lies. I can think of ways to engage these communities and find individuals who might be interested in such a machine, and in many ways it's the perfect group to share a new computer with. They are open-minded, creative, have the background to understand what is novel and exciting about the design and are in general more tolerant of the inevitable "growing pains" that are part of a new thing.
The other group might be a little harder for me to reach. My experience over the last month or so of working daily with the SwyftCard-equipped Apple //e has really driven-home for me how a simple, reliable machine can make working with a computer a joy again. While it might appear crude superficially, and there is a learning curve to making use of it when you're coming from contemporary machines the beauty of it becomes quickly apparent after spending only a few days with it, and after a week I didn't want to ever give it up.
I believe the computer I'm designing can achieve both of these things, but what I'm struggling with is how to demonstrate this to these two very different groups of people. There I go making that same mistake again; it's not necessarily two different groups (remember, I'm both), but it's two distinct ...perspectives?
When I'm using the //e as a tool, I want to turn it on and work. I don't care about how flexible or dynamic or simple or whatever about the hardware, the firmware, or even the software, I just want to sit down and start typing. In this "mode" (for lack of a better term) I don't mind learning something new if it will be directly applicable to what I'm working on, but I don't want that to take so long that I loose my groove, and I especially don't want to get side-traced or distracted in the process. While the SwyftCard can do a bunch of things that I've not yet committed to muscle memory, when I decide I need something new I grab the manual (a PDF, but ideally it would be a printed hard-copy) and look it up. This makes the manual, and it's indexing critical to preserving my flow, because if I had to use some web site or search engine or otherwise engage with my "regular" computer, all that dramatically increases the chances that I'll get off-task and loose the momentum I need to do the work I set out to do in the first place.
That first-hand experience, more than anything else leading-up to it (researching the SwyftCard, reading the documentation, reviews, discussing it with others online, etc.) is what really drove home the power of using it. I spend decades not deciding to assemble a machine to use it because none of that stuff provided enough motivation to spend the time and money necessary to make it happen, and it took a complete collapse of the world around the computers I depend on to push me over that line.
I don't want it to take that long or cost that much for people to buy one of my computers.
So maybe the takeaway from all this is that I probably won't have to worry as much about reaching the hackers, since they (like I) are likely to do the work to get what they want out of something like this because we are excited and motivated to study something indirectly. No doubt we want to get it into our hot little hands and take it apart but I think we can also get over that acquisition hump by learning about something before we have direct experience with it. To put it another way, what makes the machine I'm designing exciting to the hackers can be communicated more easily (or at least it's easier for me to understand how to communicate it).
But what makes this machine compelling to the other side of me, the side that wants a computer that is a tool I can trust is the experience of it. To reach people looking for this, I'm just now realizing, is using the machine to do some real work. In my case it took a lot of motivation to commit to this and I'm a little intimidated by recognizing that fact. However, this realization is already sparking new ideas about how to provide and facilitate that experience and just imagining those things is nothing short of titillating.
This learning process, the one I just experienced is one of the greatest things about writing this blog. It's a form of writing that for me sits in a sweet spot between my internal dialog and publishing polished work. The process of it, the experience allows me to work a problem in a way that the other two methods don't, and as shown above it makes it possible for me to solve problems that would otherwise be intractable. If I can make a tool that helps others experience such joy, I'll have achieved success.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026