is an ongoing research project exploring how the future of personal computing might substantially increase opportunity, agency, curiosity, and creativity.
There are many pieces to the puzzle of personal computing, and its operating systems, that need further exploration. My work focuses on the interfaces with which we think. As such, WonderOS experiments with future operator environments, of hardware both known and imagined.
More specifically, WonderOS experiments with an itemized operator environment. The item is an alternative boundary for our digital things which may let us interact with our devices more fluidly, and reflect our thinking more accurately, across our entire personal computing domain.
Items are separate from the interfaces that render them and the services that supply them, allowing operators to have the final say on how their systems work, how they interact with their things, and what services bring new items into their systems.
The entire system is composed of items, allowing it to think about well-known features in new ways. It can also be rearranged at will, in big ways and small. As a result, WonderOS has “operators” rather than “users” — in growing computer literacy, operators become able to use, modify, and evolve their systems.
This project is explorative, not prescriptive. The higher aim of this project is not the creation of some body of code or the proliferation of one set of ideas. The higher aim is to highlight the importance of asking the kinds of questions it asks, and to demonstrate that better answers await exploration; that if even these ideas represent improvement, then ones better still may lie ahead. This project is meant to help spark new and renewed thinking about personal computing’s role in our lives and in society.
As this project progresses, it will generate a handful of different outputs. Here are the ones that have come out of the work so far:
Virtual machine & interface experiments
The core WonderOS implementation is a virtual machine written in C and its own internal language, with an itemized graphics stack built on SDL.
WonderOS has gone through many iterations in prototype stage, with different experiments exploring different aspects of the system.
Its interface is explored in experiments that have been documented essays and lab notes. Its data model is based on the item store that appears in many of these experiments.
These WonderOS environments also serve as itemized testbeds for more specific or more divergent experiments. This is something an itemized environment does quite well: it makes wide experimentation easy. (Besides helping me in my explorative work, this suggests that it would help future operators of such systems evolve them for their own times and needs.)
One such experiment is OLLOS, which organizes your things on the dimension of time. It also experiments with a “spaced review” system that uses spaced repetition with items that you may want to pick back up on in the future.
Handbook
Hello, Operator! is the operator’s handbook for WonderOS. It is presented as the manual that would come with the user’s first itemized personal computing device.
This handbook is an initial exercise in exploring how computer literacy might be attained by society at large with systems of this type, and how people might learn to use the core primitives of itemized, malleable systems to evolve them for their changing times and needs.
Updates
You can sign up for my newsletter on my website, where I'll send updates as the project progresses.
Early demos and works-in-progress are published in member updates, to members of the Little Lab. Finished experiments will be shared publicly over time.
A special thanks to Neil Krishnan and Steve Krouse (Val Town), sponsor-tier supporters; and to all the members of the Little Lab for helping to make this work possible.
Header photo by Lorenzo Herrera. Be sure to check out the linked Commodore PET project.
