iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Alexander Obenauer

Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 01/09/2026

Oh this looks amazing. Instant impulse purchase

Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 01/09/2026

A century before we would move from fixed-program computers to reprogrammable ones, Ada Lovelace realized that the Analytical Engine was capable of universal computation. Reading her Notes is thrilling for her awestruck articulation of these ideas. Available now; link in reply.

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Reposted by Alexander Obenauer

Axel Möllerberg @axeberg.dev · 24/08/2026

Oh joy, this gem by @alexanderobenauer.com finally landed in my mailbox today. 😍

A photograph of the paperback cover of Bootstrapping Computing - How computing works, from bits to browsers by Alexander D. Obenauer.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 19/08/2026

Over the last several months, we've been working on a new, physical version of Ada Lovelace’s notes. This project was a lot of work, and a lot of fun.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 18/08/2026

Friends! Our next release: Ada Lovelace's Notes on the Analytical Engine, in a unique construction, with a new typesetting, and a facsimile of Note G's fold-out. Available in September. Sign up for an email notification at the link. More details below! buddybindery.com/products/ada...

buddybindery.com

Ada Lovelace's Notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine

This book is a new typesetting and construction of Ada Lovelace’s extensive notes on, along with her translation of, L. F. Menabrea’s Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq. ...

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 31/07/2026

Hopefully grandpa doesn't mind this expense. Had to be done.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 26/07/2026

Happy new ISBN day! Always a happy day when a project reaches this point.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 20/07/2026

Something I haven't gotten to say in a while... new lab note today! It's on a kind of user interface that pops up only occasionally: the extemporaneous UI that allows users to 'wave their wand' & get the interface they need through direct interaction. Read on: alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/041/

alexanderobenauer.com

LN 041: Extemporaneous UIs

Tear-off menus, quantized semantic zoom, and spatial computational canvases show us one approach to frictionless malleable interfaces.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 10/07/2026

Submissions are open until August 31! Answering some frequently asked questions: - Submissions should be complete, but do not have to be final drafts. - Submissions do not have to be about one particular topic. We're looking for expertise from many domains beyond CS. [...]

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 17/06/2026

We have extended the submission deadline to Monday, August 31! We wanted to make sure folks have enough time to explore their wildest ideas. Take some time this summer to write a chapter submission for Augment!

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 16/06/2026

Beware the plan! It doesn't know what you know.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 03/06/2026

We also have a "proposals" form if you'd like to get feedback on your idea before a full submission. Some wonderful submissions have already filtered in that way! And we have a "nominations" form if you'd like to submit a prompt for someone - a good prompt can be a wonderful gift.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 03/06/2026

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Pete Millspaugh @petemillspaugh.com · 18/05/2026

excited about this! more good writing on the internet should make its way to print (especially if Sarah and Alex are the ones printing!)

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Reposted by Alexander Obenauer

Ben Fry @benfry.com · 15/05/2026

Very excited to be a part of this, and to be writing about the things we want to see and experience and build, rather than responding to the avalanche of badness that's happening around us.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 15/05/2026

Today, I'm excited to announce our next title! "Augment" is a forthcoming book featuring a collection of essays on the future of personal computing — specifically, on the kind we’d like to see more of in the future, and the ideas that might help us get there.

Augment is a forthcoming collection of essays on the future of personal computing: specifically, on the kind we as a species need in order to move beyond our stuck present, and on the ideas that will help us get there. This book is meant to serve as guidance and inspiration as we build a next generation of hardware, software, and systems.

We hope you’ll share this page with those you think might write great essays for Augment, and even consider writing one yourself. Submissions are due by July 31.

The technology field is today in a precarious state. A tsunamic tide of commercial thinking has managed the wholesale capture of practitioners, institutions, and dialogue. This capture has drained all imagination from our surround, and so actual invention has slid likewise near to zero. Along the way, the systems meant first to extend human reach have instead become dull and clanking manacles.

Yet the same quality that makes technology easy to hijack — that massless, abstract ductility — leaves it as easy to re-form. The opportunity is still with us, undimmed, to build anew the beautiful thing, the powerful thing, the luminous thing, the human thing. This then is the invitation: to trawl a net through waters that, far enough down, remain idea-rich and that, with care, might still teem.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 12/05/2026

This Friday, I'm excited to share details on an upcoming title we're working on at Buddy Bindery & Press, plus how you can help us make it great. Stay tuned for more.

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Reposted by Alexander Obenauer

Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 08/04/2026

If you read Bootstrapping Computing, what questions did you walk away from it with? Did you look anything up while reading it? Anything in it you could do without, or that served only to confuse?

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Reposted by Alexander Obenauer

Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 11/04/2026

We had to say goodbye to my grandpa this week. (He had a big influence on me. Least importantly, but most tangibly, if it weren't for him I might not be in software.) My sister wrote a beautiful article about him, it's a lovely exploration of a person: britobenauer.substack.com/p/my-grandpa...

britobenauer.substack.com

my grandpa's charm

unlike any other

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 11/04/2026

britobenauer.substack.com

my grandpa's charm

unlike any other

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 09/04/2026

I had no preparation for the phase of life during which loved ones are passing away regularly. I'm not sure what that preparation might have been, but I still feel utterly unequipped.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 08/04/2026

If you read Bootstrapping Computing, what questions did you walk away from it with? Did you look anything up while reading it? Anything in it you could do without, or that served only to confuse?

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 20/03/2026

Some personal news: Sarah and I (and Cheesesteak) moved to Boston earlier this year. We've fallen more in love with the city since Sarah started grad school here a couple years back. Looking for a space for Buddy Bindery & Press; and looking forward to meeting who's around!

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 21/01/2026

Here it is, your moment of zen.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 19/01/2026

This week: Making books and watching the snow.

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Katie Langerman @katielangerman.com · 09/01/2026

Great read from @alexanderobenauer.com 🙌 "...plenty of things let you explore someone else's thinking, but personal computers can help you explore your own thinking, giving you living spaces to externalize, review, expand, and refine your thoughts on the things that matter most to you."

The cover of Bootstrapping Computing (paperback edition) by Alexander Obenauer

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 25/12/2025

This Christmas is a weird one. We're staying home with our cat who is in the final stages of an illness he's had for some years. Keeping him comfortable. It's also our first in NH. I love the amount of snow we get up here.

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Reposted by Alexander Obenauer

Amy Hoy @amyhoy.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

oooh this book looks good

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 03/12/2025

We engage in an evolutionary construction that continues a tradition started by our physical world long before we were here, and carried on into computing from its earliest days. It's also a process that mirrors how creative, explorative work is done.

LAYERING UP THE ITEMIZED USER ENVIRONMENT
December 3

In this lab report, we consider one way to look at the architecture for the itemized user environment: a layering that has been happening since the dawn of time.

Some harbor an inclination toward a “grand design” in the construction of a new operating system’s user environment; a sort of “turtles all the way down” architecture that features one substance, or one core primitive, which defines the mechanics of an entire computing system deep under the hood and up into userland.

I’m more inclined toward the “layers” which we’ve been stacking up since we first made the jump from hard-coded circuits to programmable, general ones (and on which we have built many new layers — machine code, assembly, low- and high-level programming languages, and so on).

Each layer adheres to the contract of the one below, and offers a new way to think about things to the layers which will be built above. This is how we’ve bootstrapped into all of modern computing starting from simple logic gates, in a slow, evolutionary construction.

This isn’t just the way modern computing came to be; it’s the way our physical world came to be, too! This “layering” is how our world has evolved into the one we know. But it comes with some important consequences.

Our evolutionary construction, the layering, neatly reflects how we do this kind of creative, exploratory work, and how the mind engages with ideas. Ted Nelson, in Literary Machines:

Complicated ideas evolve slowly. People who do not work endlessly with ideas may not easily imagine how many are the steps that intensive work with ideas entails; how many are the guesses, postulations, reconsiderations, shifts of thought, confusions, resyntheses, reintegrations; how much is the rework of dearly-held insights in clouds of confusion. The swirl of needed changes never seems to end. […]

This could not have been done with schedules and deadlines. When a project requires both exhaustive exploration and unusual inspiration, it is going to take however long it takes.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 03/12/2025

@thebonesofjrjones.bsky.social Thanks for helping keep me sane this year! Radio Waves is somethin’ else.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 02/12/2025

"I mistook a clear view for a short distance." Too real! I've experienced this time and again. But I'm reticent to encode a reminder to avoid this mistake in the future; my life has been filled with wonderful projects that I would not have embarked on had I not been so naive.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 02/12/2025

I greatly appreciate everyone who has purchased this or our clothbound — besides supporting our new bindery & press, you’re also supporting my research. As a thanks, here are some member essays I've made public recently:

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 01/12/2025

I'm also making this member update public today. It's about the itemized OS' persistent data storage layer & internal data model, which has grown organically over the years to support my experiments. You can read it here: lab.alexanderobenauer.com/updates/the-...

lab.alexanderobenauer.com

Building an Item Store for the itemized environment - Little Lab

In this lab report, we look at the Item Store, a database of chronological facts that serves as the itemized environment's persistent storage.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 01/12/2025

Today is the day! The paperback of Bootstrapping Computing is available & shipping. Preorders will go out shortly. Order today for delivery by Christmas in the U.S. You can buy it on our new site, powered by Stripe's payment links (👋 good riddance, shopify)

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 21/11/2025

We had a lot of fun thinking about this cover, but one of my favorite things when working with artists is to just let them go wild with something they want to create. That's what we did here, and Owen knocked it out of the park. Love his choices of color, scene, etc.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 20/11/2025

Some news to share today: Earlier this year, we started our publishing company and released our first title, Bootstrapping Computing. The full-color paperback is available for preorder now, and will be released on December 1.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 12/11/2025

11 years ago, we launched a product that let you use random, unique email addresses for each sender (now common!) We signed up for tons of big co's newsletters to see who we'd catch selling your email address. Only one truly big co did it, and they did it nonstop: NYT.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 11/11/2025

This week: Making books and tending the fire.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 23/10/2025

Part 2 is out now. It’s about why the work we do in pursuit of composable systems and malleable software matters a great deal. Link in reply & background in thread!

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 23/10/2025

It can be hard to discern and communicate why you're so drawn to some work. You're circling around something, but you're not sure what. By your nature, you hold some principle that is in conflict with reality; you can see yourself circling around it.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 21/10/2025

If you have access to a dark sky, tonight’s a great night to spend outside! Orionid meteor shower, and Comet Lemmon, all under a new moon.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 21/10/2025

"A knife can cut an avocado, and much more." These kinds of sentences show up in the most fundamental papers that I return to year after year. They sound silly out of place, but in my favorite works, they're used to build up to essential guiding ideas and insights!

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 20/10/2025

Part 2 of my 2024 essay, hitting the 'net this week; On the moral imperative for composable systems & malleable software.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 20/10/2025

An AI coding approach I've liked using, which I first used on this project: Vibe code the first version. Investigate the code for its shape, complexities, needs, failure points. Then scrap all that and engineer a new version.

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 15/10/2025

This article is now public! Link in reply. I recreated Jef Raskin's 1987 'Canon Cat' user environment and observed myself as I lived in it for a week. Implementation details, surprises, and more in the essay. (Why touch grass when you can read 3.2k words on user environments?)

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