Oxide dreams

My neigh­bors at Oxide Com­puter just raised a bunch of money. Here is a com­pany that did the coolest thing, which is also, in the 2020s, the strangest: they built a com­puter!

The premise is: the ergonomics of the cloud — elastic resources divvied up in flex­ible ways between applications, easy to mar­shal and manage — anchored by a par­tic­ular com­puter in a par­tic­ular place. One you can, like, visit. I’ll confess, I dream of a little con­sor­tium of nerds pooling our money to buy an Oxide rack, all of us run­ning our blogs and apps and exper­i­ments in its cozy confines. The num­bers don’t remotely pencil out — the racks are VERY expensive — but it’s fun to imagine.