The case for more choices in desktop computing.

Differences matter. Not just in the abstract, philosophical sense — as with Yin and Yang, the dry and wet sides of the mountain — but practically. We need to hear more than echoes of ourselves to stay sane, to know where we end and the world begins.

Computing forgot this somewhere along the way.

In the 80s, and to some degree the 90s, the home computer revolution was a genuine experiment. Dozens of platforms competed, each with its own vision of what personal computing should feel like — the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga, the Acorn Archimedes, the MSX, the Sinclair Spectrum. You could argue about them. They were genuinely different from each other in ways that mattered.

This was the pre-agrarian period of home computing. There was real variety to be foraged in the forest of early manufacturers. Then a few platforms got big, displaced the others, and the monoculture arrived: the beige PC, endlessly cloned, endlessly iterated, quietly colonising everything.

In nature, monocultures are fragile. A single fungus is currently on the verge of eradicating the domestic banana — the Cavendish variety that replaced the richer-tasting Gros Michel after that blight in the 1950s. We optimised for scale and lost diversity. Computing did the same thing.

What’s left

Not everything is lost. There are still outliers worth acknowledging.

Apple remains the longest-lived alternative to the beige consensus — but the gap has narrowed. In the pursuit of mainstream market share, the Mac has gradually come to resemble the thing it once defined itself against. The hardware is beautiful. The thinking is increasingly familiar.

Linux, the BSDs, and other open-source operating systems provide real diversity at the software layer, and their influence has spread further than their user numbers suggest: Windows now runs a Linux subsystem, and macOS has been built on a Mach/FreeBSD foundation since the NeXT acquisition. The mainstream absorbed their ideas while the platforms themselves stayed niche.

Single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi come closest to the spirit of what this post is really about. Cheap, open, genuinely hackable — you can buy a Pi 4, add an enclosure and a keyboard, and have a functioning desktop that works nothing like a PC. It’s more geared toward tinkerers than turn-key users, but the instinct is right.

The gap

What’s still missing is a complete alternative. Not an OS running on PC hardware, not a Linux distro with a custom skin — but a different machine with a different lineage and a different way of thinking about what a desktop computer is.

The PC is a distant descendant of the Intel 8088-powered IBM PC from 1981. The Mac traces its OS back to NeXT and its hardware, increasingly, back to the same Intel and now ARM supply chain everyone else uses. The family trees have merged.

What if the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga, or the Acorn RISC PC had survived? (The RISC PC argument is almost unfair — its ARM processor did survive, just redistributed across a billion mobile phones rather than preserved in a single lineage.) The ST was once the machine of choice for musicians. The Amiga had video capabilities years ahead of anything else. The Archimedes had an architecture that, had things gone differently, might have shaped desktop computing the way it shaped everything else.

For the ST specifically: what would a 2025 descendant look like? Would it keep the wedge-shaped keyboard-computer form factor, or adopt modern modularity? Are the MIDI ports still there, or has USB absorbed that function? Could TOS and GEM be evolved into something that meets modern expectations, or would it run a stripped-down Unix with the old design language preserved on top?

I don’t have the answers. But I think the questions are worth asking, because the exercise itself is useful. Designing a 4th alternative — something with no obligation to be compatible with the existing ecosystem, no pressure to be mainstream, no well-defined niche to fit into — is how you rediscover what choices actually look like.

We don’t need it to win. We just need it to exist, and to be genuinely different. We need that hipster computer, if only to remember that the way things are is not the only way they could have been.