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It never occurred to me as I was watching Star Trek as a kid, but the computer on the show wasn’t an IBM computer or a Weyland-Yutani computer or an Apple computer. It was just “the computer.”
I think the idea that we didn’t need for-profit corporations to make all that amazing technology was a subtle but meaningful bit of world-building.
@bdesham There was also room in their culture, depending on the resources required, for people to opt out of the "economy" and do things they loved doing.
FOSS and small-scale hardware hacking could become something *anybody* could do instead of just something for folks with copious spare time or a job that pays them to do FOSS.