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 crying a little 😿

@roxmsauce How come?

@starbreaker BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE SO BEAUTIFUL

@roxmsauce We could still do it, by which I mean providing neighborhood Unix installations where people can log in and do things.

Paul Ford had something like that going a couple of years ago at https://tilde.club (story at https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf).

There's also https://sdf.org.

But these days it seems like anybody who wants to can get a cheap used amd64 computer and figure out how to install Linux/BSD, and have their own Unix, so community Unix servers seem almost pointless.

@starbreaker @roxmsauce i started https://squiggle.city/ on the tilde.club model, and there's a small but thriving community at http://tilde.town where i hang out pretty regular.

my feel is that the point of community unix servers is the _community_ part. there's a special magic to shared spaces like that.