I just setup my first set of family computers. It's so we all have a common space to compute, so the children are supervised as they explore the web. So we can help with homework and answer...
I just setup my first set of family computers.
It's so we all have a common space to compute, so the children are supervised as they explore the web. So we can help with homework and answer questions. So they can learn about how to use computers, and not computer-shaped appliances. So we can allplay games together. It's much more social than everyone on their phones/tablets/laptops/consoles elsewhere in the house.
And in the end, it's better. Anything you can do a phone or laptop is better done on a desktop (or docked laptop). Exponentially more screen space. Faster keyboards, more precise tools.
And most of my kid's friends will mostly only ever use tablets, phones, and maybe a Nintendo Switch. They never really compute together outside of parental unlocks. It's so sad.
All of this is true: I feel like we are watching the last death throes of the enthusiast pc space and with it probably most modularity repairability etc. The sector will continue to shrink, the...
All of this is true: I feel like we are watching the last death throes of the enthusiast pc space and with it probably most modularity repairability etc. The sector will continue to shrink, the voting by wallet for appliances will continue, real computers in homes will disappear and unlocked hardware will probably only be for professionals paying a small fortune for eval boards.
I hope I am wrong. For instance, https://frame.work has been going for years and I still can't bring myself to make them the preferred supplier for my small eng team because there is absolutely no way I can afford to participate in pre order batches if I need a computer. So instead I am buying non-upgradeable crap from Lenovo (think pads). I'm not convinced they will hit scale. If they can't do it with a very compelling product, who will? I work on a charger (for EV) with a locked down proprietary protocol and no availability of schematics for third party repair. Does anyone care? No. The power supplies aren't socketed and when they fail that's it for the boards as far as the customer is concerned. We could change this but it would add significantly to the BOM of the product and no one wants to pay for it. I realised I am now massively off topic but this shit depresses me so much.
Framework also has some other issues to grapple with before they can realistically achieve mass appeal. Reportedly their firmware is rocky (even if they update it frequently) and compared to...
Framework also has some other issues to grapple with before they can realistically achieve mass appeal. Reportedly their firmware is rocky (even if they update it frequently) and compared to mainstream brands they’re not particularly competitive on battery life or case rigidity. These things don’t matter for everybody but for many people they do.
I want to see them do well but they’ve got a climb ahead of them.
The family computer has been to the local repair shop a few times and on one visit came back “formatted,” an old-fashioned word meaning “wiped and reinstalled with a pirated Windows.”
Before Windows 7, it was basically a requirement to wipe every 6 months or so, even if it was not infected with anything. If the computer needed serviced, it definitely was infected and cleaning...
Before Windows 7, it was basically a requirement to wipe every 6 months or so, even if it was not infected with anything.
If the computer needed serviced, it definitely was infected and cleaning tools are not 100% effective and can further reduce stability.
And it was much easier to just pirate it than to jump through the hoops of actual activation for the 10th time.
Yeah “windows creep” was a big problem for all users, but it was particularly bad for anybody installing/uninstalling frequently. Back in the mid-late 2000s younger sibling of mine had a Pentium 4...
Yeah “windows creep” was a big problem for all users, but it was particularly bad for anybody installing/uninstalling frequently.
Back in the mid-late 2000s younger sibling of mine had a Pentium 4 Optiplex we’d gotten somewhere that had a truly awful Radeon 9250 GPU (which didn’t even support the full OpenGL spec, first and only time I’ve seen that) with a 40GB HD that was on the smaller side even then. That lack of space collided with their interest in games, and so they were constantly rotating out the currently installed games to be able to play new releases and whatever friends were playing at the moment.
If its XP install didn’t get wiped periodically it’s get progressively slower and unstable until it was eventually unusable. The best I could do to stave it off was to replace the default shell with a more lightweight substitute that was less RAM hungry.
It’s still something of a problem even now I’d say. There’s a visible difference in performance between a fresh 11 install and one that’s been used for a couple of years. It’s just not as egregious as it once was.
This was what got me into Linux right before this timeframe. The programs may have been buggy messes at times, but the actual overall system stability was much better. The great irony here is that...
This was what got me into Linux right before this timeframe. The programs may have been buggy messes at times, but the actual overall system stability was much better.
The great irony here is that now I would actually consider Ubuntu (specifically) to be less stable than windows. The sun rises, the sun sets. At least there are better distros out there.
The funny thing is that we tried Linux on that machine, and while it made a valiant attempt to run well that GPU’s spotty OpenGL support became a problem and we didn’t have the spare cash to buy a...
The funny thing is that we tried Linux on that machine, and while it made a valiant attempt to run well that GPU’s spotty OpenGL support became a problem and we didn’t have the spare cash to buy a different GPU.
Heh, I’ve been hanging out with the wrong kind of nerds lately. I haven’t heard about OpenGL in a bit and wondered what the Open Gaming License has to do with anything.
Heh, I’ve been hanging out with the wrong kind of nerds lately. I haven’t heard about OpenGL in a bit and wondered what the Open Gaming License has to do with anything.
My family had one of these in the corner of the living room for the latter half of the 90s. Its original purpose was as a replacement for my mother’s electric typewriter which she had been using...
My family had one of these in the corner of the living room for the latter half of the 90s. Its original purpose was as a replacement for my mother’s electric typewriter which she had been using prior to her papers on, but that quickly became a secondary role after she’d discovered the internet and us kids had gotten a taste for games (educational, shareware, internet Java applet and Shockwave games). We also used it to build silly pages full of gifs hosted on GeoCities and AngelFire, and it served as a stereo too since it was the first CD player we owned.
I was never able to get enough computer time in as long as that was the only computer in the house, mainly because my mom was usually using it. When it finally broke around 2000 (HD died, I think), we had to get a new family computer and once the original was repaired it was given to me as a hand-me-down which was revolutionary. With as much time as I wanted I was tinkering on it constantly and that’s where I started learning computer use beyond surface casual user stuff.
We kind of have the family computers in my own house. My kids play games or watch Netflix in the den after school while I clean the kitchen and prepare dinner. They have access to my htpc there...
We kind of have the family computers in my own house.
My kids play games or watch Netflix in the den after school while I clean the kitchen and prepare dinner. They have access to my htpc there for games and TV and have to use a keyboard/touchpad combo to navigate and select what program they want to use or what they want to watch on Netflix.
Next to it is an older gaming laptop that serves the exact same function. They use controllers for their games, but I appreciate the fact that they have to interact with an actual PC to do what they want to do. Once Windows 10 goes Bye-Bye they'll also be using Linux, since neither machine supports Windows 11.
Our family computer was always in the middle of the living room, starting with a Commodore around 1986. It was mostly me and my brother using it. Then he moved on and it was mostly me. Then AOL...
Our family computer was always in the middle of the living room, starting with a Commodore around 1986. It was mostly me and my brother using it. Then he moved on and it was mostly me. Then AOL happened and my mom flirted with infidelity while my dad installed spyware to find out what she was up to. I didn't get to use it as much and it was weird, because I was savvy enough to see the software and I stumbled upon his treasure trove of evidence he was compiling against my mom. I was never sure if I should tell her or not. I eventually told her, and to this day she doesn't even remember the conversation. Even then her reaction was minimal, so I guess I agonized over nothing.
That was when I went off to college, the computer stayed home, and sometime later it was unceremoniously replaced with a bench.
But that computer is why I'm a software engineer, and until AI steals my job, it's about the best job I could've asked for. PC games were buggier and easier to hack. I remember playing Ultima 7 and endlessly save scumming and trying things in different orders to see how game handled it (what happens in this scene if I kill this person first?). The same game has a secret mode that lets you edit just about anything in the game, and it taught me a lot about game design. For example, there were little markers around the game that you could only make visible with the editor, and I eventually realized they were triggers for game logic. Suddenly a lot of games I'd played made a little more sense. When you walked near one, something happened.
I found QuickBASIC and it's index full of nonsense and I was INTO it. I made programs and they were terrible but it was all I wanted to do, and TBH it didn't ever stop. Without a family computer I really wouldn't have had the time (endless hours) to build the interest the way that I did.
It just occurred to me that, amusingly, the family computer may have come full circle for me. It started as a device used by my parents but which I gradually used more and more as they got laptops...
It just occurred to me that, amusingly, the family computer may have come full circle for me. It started as a device used by my parents but which I gradually used more and more as they got laptops for their jobs, up until I was the only one using it. (We actually had two, one in the basement and an older one upstairs that didn't have working audio which eventually died after a storm.) Then I got a laptop and they fell out of use.
Now, my desktop computer (which is admittedly out of date and was rarely used since my laptop was/is more convenient) will likely become the "family computer" used by my mom. She's retired and her work-issued laptop is now acting up (won't recognize our new WiFi for some reason, and I think it's also Windows 7, so uh... Yeah), so once we get the desk all neatly arranged, I expect she'll use that one.
This would be a great thread for @kuromantis chime in on. Not in Brazil, but I came face to face with the current reality of computing when we promoted a young lady in her mid-20s to a supervisory...
This would be a great thread for @kuromantis chime in on.
The Cetic household ICT survey (TIC Domicílios) gives a clear picture of that shift: in 2023, 99% of Brazilians accessed the internet via mobile phone, while only 41.5% did so via a computer.
Not in Brazil, but I came face to face with the current reality of computing when we promoted a young lady in her mid-20s to a supervisory position last year, which meant that one of her additional responsibilities would be using an office desktop to input, save, and print inventory counts. Months after she had been trained, she would still occasionally say that she was unsure how to get to the relevant spreadsheet, and ultimately I realized that she had barely any familiarity with any flavor of Windows prior to her promotion. I would end up showing her a number of basic web-browsing things like alt-tabbing and how to resize windows, as well as how to sort files in a folder, right-clicking for a context menu in just about every program... stuff like that.
Her family never had a desktop or laptop at home, but they were totally comfortable navigating the internet using their cellphones. The exposure to desktop computing you would assume she would at least have gotten in school evidently did not make a difference.
That reminds me of how computers had Solitaire and Minesweeper specifically to help users become familiar with how to use a mouse. Pretty sure my mom said her company actually mandated people to...
That reminds me of how computers had Solitaire and Minesweeper specifically to help users become familiar with how to use a mouse. Pretty sure my mom said her company actually mandated people to play those in the 90's as computers rolled out. Maybe we need to make similar games...
I mean, with the Brazilian Real valued at 0.18 USD, there are HDD computers being sold in Brazil today. There are also many more "fake-SSD" computers, with some bastard combination of SSD and HDD,...
It still has a hard disk (HDD)!
I mean, with the Brazilian Real valued at 0.18 USD, there are HDD computers being sold in Brazil today. There are also many more "fake-SSD" computers, with some bastard combination of SSD and HDD, and barely enough RAM to render Windows like a slideshow. I am writing this comment from a laptop with an HDD, and it performs tremendously well in spite of that. It has 8GB of ancient RAM, though. And it's not running Windows.
Even for me, SSDs still feel like a novelty. At the very least, it's something one needs to check when buying a new laptop. I recently bought a cheap "SSD" laptop, and I cannot tell the difference from a hard drive.
Hybrid SSD/HDD was very much a thing for awhile when SSD was new and very expensive, to try to give SSD benefits while retaining HDD size. Would you like to know more?
Hybrid SSD/HDD was very much a thing for awhile when SSD was new and very expensive, to try to give SSD benefits while retaining HDD size.
I much prefer desktops to phones, but it is mostly because I have poor eyesight. Too much of a strain to read a tiny screen, though of course, there are times I have to do so. I just don't enjoy...
I much prefer desktops to phones, but it is mostly because I have poor eyesight. Too much of a strain to read a tiny screen, though of course, there are times I have to do so. I just don't enjoy it much.
I still have four family desktops, only one of which is a modern one. The others are getting to be antiques, though still useful in their own ways, with one set up as an HTPC, another that I converted to Windows 11 via Rufus so that I could use the two or three Windows based programs I might still need, and the other is mostly a storage device. The Linux machines still feel reasonably peppy, running Mint.
This post was wonderful and full a neat nostalgia! And that line near the end (about installing a linux distro) made me chuckle quite loudly! :-) Its really cool to see that linux has become/is...
This post was wonderful and full a neat nostalgia!
...did what any sensible person would: I installed a Linux distribution...
And that line near the end (about installing a linux distro) made me chuckle quite loudly! :-)
Its really cool to see that linux has become/is becoming more of the solution for both replacing machines after Win10 dies/goes out of support...but also - and i would say more importantly - sustaining older machines far beyond their expected lifecycle! Beyond the cost savings to a family, its really nice from a green/environmental aspect. (Yes, yes, i know that some older devices are not as power efficient...but if this approach avoids/delays dumping stuff into landfills...then i think its worth it!)
The fact that it's still a proper multi-user OS for everyone makes it great for family computers. My kids log in by plugging in their floppy disk courtesy of PAM usb.
The fact that it's still a proper multi-user OS for everyone makes it great for family computers. My kids log in by plugging in their floppy disk courtesy of PAM usb.
PAM usb login via floppy disks? - That's truly awesome! And, yeah fully agreed, that for a family computer for those scenarios where the different users want their own space, customizations, etc.,...
PAM usb login via floppy disks? - That's truly awesome!
And, yeah fully agreed, that for a family computer for those scenarios where the different users want their own space, customizations, etc., 100% that linux is the perfect kind of OS!
The concept of a family computer seems to be mostly dead where I am. Most work with laptops and if they do have a home office setup it's just a monitor and dock. Kids just have a phone and...
The concept of a family computer seems to be mostly dead where I am.
Most work with laptops and if they do have a home office setup it's just a monitor and dock.
Kids just have a phone and possibly a laptop which they can use anywhere.
This story reminded me of some historical computer projects. Sometime around the start of the millenium, there were two really interesting projects being released. The first of which was Sun...
This story reminded me of some historical computer projects. Sometime around the start of the millenium, there were two really interesting projects being released. The first of which was Sun Microsystems releasing the HDL source code publicly of one of their high-end SPARC CPUs. The reasoning they were talking about was because they wanted to enable the next generation of society's relationships to computing, a concept they called commodity computing. In other words, computers were supposed to be everywhere and built into everything. While nothing uses SPARC anymore (Thanks Oracle!), that vision did come true; computers in basically everything at this point.
The other thing that this reminded me of was something that was developed around the same time called the Simputer. The simputer was a project that was designed to be a replacement for a computer for areas where computers would, at that time, not be feasible because they were too expensive for the local economy. The form the Simputer ended up taking was basically what we would describe as a smartphone today, more or less. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of the details on the device and it's development have been lost to time. Wikipedia's references seem to have all more or less disappeared. I seem to remember hearing about it as a project of the MIT Media lab (The same organization that started the infamous OLPC project), but I can't seem to find more details.
I just setup my first set of family computers.
It's so we all have a common space to compute, so the children are supervised as they explore the web. So we can help with homework and answer questions. So they can learn about how to use computers, and not computer-shaped appliances. So we can allplay games together. It's much more social than everyone on their phones/tablets/laptops/consoles elsewhere in the house.
And in the end, it's better. Anything you can do a phone or laptop is better done on a desktop (or docked laptop). Exponentially more screen space. Faster keyboards, more precise tools.
And most of my kid's friends will mostly only ever use tablets, phones, and maybe a Nintendo Switch. They never really compute together outside of parental unlocks. It's so sad.
All of this is true: I feel like we are watching the last death throes of the enthusiast pc space and with it probably most modularity repairability etc. The sector will continue to shrink, the voting by wallet for appliances will continue, real computers in homes will disappear and unlocked hardware will probably only be for professionals paying a small fortune for eval boards.
I hope I am wrong. For instance, https://frame.work has been going for years and I still can't bring myself to make them the preferred supplier for my small eng team because there is absolutely no way I can afford to participate in pre order batches if I need a computer. So instead I am buying non-upgradeable crap from Lenovo (think pads). I'm not convinced they will hit scale. If they can't do it with a very compelling product, who will? I work on a charger (for EV) with a locked down proprietary protocol and no availability of schematics for third party repair. Does anyone care? No. The power supplies aren't socketed and when they fail that's it for the boards as far as the customer is concerned. We could change this but it would add significantly to the BOM of the product and no one wants to pay for it. I realised I am now massively off topic but this shit depresses me so much.
Framework also has some other issues to grapple with before they can realistically achieve mass appeal. Reportedly their firmware is rocky (even if they update it frequently) and compared to mainstream brands they’re not particularly competitive on battery life or case rigidity. These things don’t matter for everybody but for many people they do.
I want to see them do well but they’ve got a climb ahead of them.
Confirmed, that’s what it means.
Before Windows 7, it was basically a requirement to wipe every 6 months or so, even if it was not infected with anything.
If the computer needed serviced, it definitely was infected and cleaning tools are not 100% effective and can further reduce stability.
And it was much easier to just pirate it than to jump through the hoops of actual activation for the 10th time.
Yeah “windows creep” was a big problem for all users, but it was particularly bad for anybody installing/uninstalling frequently.
Back in the mid-late 2000s younger sibling of mine had a Pentium 4 Optiplex we’d gotten somewhere that had a truly awful Radeon 9250 GPU (which didn’t even support the full OpenGL spec, first and only time I’ve seen that) with a 40GB HD that was on the smaller side even then. That lack of space collided with their interest in games, and so they were constantly rotating out the currently installed games to be able to play new releases and whatever friends were playing at the moment.
If its XP install didn’t get wiped periodically it’s get progressively slower and unstable until it was eventually unusable. The best I could do to stave it off was to replace the default shell with a more lightweight substitute that was less RAM hungry.
It’s still something of a problem even now I’d say. There’s a visible difference in performance between a fresh 11 install and one that’s been used for a couple of years. It’s just not as egregious as it once was.
This was what got me into Linux right before this timeframe. The programs may have been buggy messes at times, but the actual overall system stability was much better.
The great irony here is that now I would actually consider Ubuntu (specifically) to be less stable than windows. The sun rises, the sun sets. At least there are better distros out there.
The funny thing is that we tried Linux on that machine, and while it made a valiant attempt to run well that GPU’s spotty OpenGL support became a problem and we didn’t have the spare cash to buy a different GPU.
SSD and NVME drives plaster over a lot of sins.
Heh, I’ve been hanging out with the wrong kind of nerds lately. I haven’t heard about OpenGL in a bit and wondered what the Open Gaming License has to do with anything.
My family had one of these in the corner of the living room for the latter half of the 90s. Its original purpose was as a replacement for my mother’s electric typewriter which she had been using prior to her papers on, but that quickly became a secondary role after she’d discovered the internet and us kids had gotten a taste for games (educational, shareware, internet Java applet and Shockwave games). We also used it to build silly pages full of gifs hosted on GeoCities and AngelFire, and it served as a stereo too since it was the first CD player we owned.
I was never able to get enough computer time in as long as that was the only computer in the house, mainly because my mom was usually using it. When it finally broke around 2000 (HD died, I think), we had to get a new family computer and once the original was repaired it was given to me as a hand-me-down which was revolutionary. With as much time as I wanted I was tinkering on it constantly and that’s where I started learning computer use beyond surface casual user stuff.
We kind of have the family computers in my own house.
My kids play games or watch Netflix in the den after school while I clean the kitchen and prepare dinner. They have access to my htpc there for games and TV and have to use a keyboard/touchpad combo to navigate and select what program they want to use or what they want to watch on Netflix.
Next to it is an older gaming laptop that serves the exact same function. They use controllers for their games, but I appreciate the fact that they have to interact with an actual PC to do what they want to do. Once Windows 10 goes Bye-Bye they'll also be using Linux, since neither machine supports Windows 11.
Our family computer was always in the middle of the living room, starting with a Commodore around 1986. It was mostly me and my brother using it. Then he moved on and it was mostly me. Then AOL happened and my mom flirted with infidelity while my dad installed spyware to find out what she was up to. I didn't get to use it as much and it was weird, because I was savvy enough to see the software and I stumbled upon his treasure trove of evidence he was compiling against my mom. I was never sure if I should tell her or not. I eventually told her, and to this day she doesn't even remember the conversation. Even then her reaction was minimal, so I guess I agonized over nothing.
That was when I went off to college, the computer stayed home, and sometime later it was unceremoniously replaced with a bench.
But that computer is why I'm a software engineer, and until AI steals my job, it's about the best job I could've asked for. PC games were buggier and easier to hack. I remember playing Ultima 7 and endlessly save scumming and trying things in different orders to see how game handled it (what happens in this scene if I kill this person first?). The same game has a secret mode that lets you edit just about anything in the game, and it taught me a lot about game design. For example, there were little markers around the game that you could only make visible with the editor, and I eventually realized they were triggers for game logic. Suddenly a lot of games I'd played made a little more sense. When you walked near one, something happened.
I found QuickBASIC and it's index full of nonsense and I was INTO it. I made programs and they were terrible but it was all I wanted to do, and TBH it didn't ever stop. Without a family computer I really wouldn't have had the time (endless hours) to build the interest the way that I did.
Thank you, family computer.
It just occurred to me that, amusingly, the family computer may have come full circle for me. It started as a device used by my parents but which I gradually used more and more as they got laptops for their jobs, up until I was the only one using it. (We actually had two, one in the basement and an older one upstairs that didn't have working audio which eventually died after a storm.) Then I got a laptop and they fell out of use.
Now, my desktop computer (which is admittedly out of date and was rarely used since my laptop was/is more convenient) will likely become the "family computer" used by my mom. She's retired and her work-issued laptop is now acting up (won't recognize our new WiFi for some reason, and I think it's also Windows 7, so uh... Yeah), so once we get the desk all neatly arranged, I expect she'll use that one.
A bit funny how that worked out.
This would be a great thread for @kuromantis chime in on.
Not in Brazil, but I came face to face with the current reality of computing when we promoted a young lady in her mid-20s to a supervisory position last year, which meant that one of her additional responsibilities would be using an office desktop to input, save, and print inventory counts. Months after she had been trained, she would still occasionally say that she was unsure how to get to the relevant spreadsheet, and ultimately I realized that she had barely any familiarity with any flavor of Windows prior to her promotion. I would end up showing her a number of basic web-browsing things like alt-tabbing and how to resize windows, as well as how to sort files in a folder, right-clicking for a context menu in just about every program... stuff like that.
Her family never had a desktop or laptop at home, but they were totally comfortable navigating the internet using their cellphones. The exposure to desktop computing you would assume she would at least have gotten in school evidently did not make a difference.
That reminds me of how computers had Solitaire and Minesweeper specifically to help users become familiar with how to use a mouse. Pretty sure my mom said her company actually mandated people to play those in the 90's as computers rolled out. Maybe we need to make similar games...
I mean, with the Brazilian Real valued at 0.18 USD, there are HDD computers being sold in Brazil today. There are also many more "fake-SSD" computers, with some bastard combination of SSD and HDD, and barely enough RAM to render Windows like a slideshow. I am writing this comment from a laptop with an HDD, and it performs tremendously well in spite of that. It has 8GB of ancient RAM, though. And it's not running Windows.
Even for me, SSDs still feel like a novelty. At the very least, it's something one needs to check when buying a new laptop. I recently bought a cheap "SSD" laptop, and I cannot tell the difference from a hard drive.
Hybrid SSD/HDD was very much a thing for awhile when SSD was new and very expensive, to try to give SSD benefits while retaining HDD size.
Would you like to know more?
The concept lives on, for those of us with very silly requirements, we’re just calling it ZFS L2ARC now!
[Edit] L2ARC != ARC
I’m not so sure. All best selling desktop (!) computers on Amazon have SSDs, even those < R$ 1k.
I much prefer desktops to phones, but it is mostly because I have poor eyesight. Too much of a strain to read a tiny screen, though of course, there are times I have to do so. I just don't enjoy it much.
I still have four family desktops, only one of which is a modern one. The others are getting to be antiques, though still useful in their own ways, with one set up as an HTPC, another that I converted to Windows 11 via Rufus so that I could use the two or three Windows based programs I might still need, and the other is mostly a storage device. The Linux machines still feel reasonably peppy, running Mint.
This post was wonderful and full a neat nostalgia!
And that line near the end (about installing a linux distro) made me chuckle quite loudly! :-)
Its really cool to see that linux has become/is becoming more of the solution for both replacing machines after Win10 dies/goes out of support...but also - and i would say more importantly - sustaining older machines far beyond their expected lifecycle! Beyond the cost savings to a family, its really nice from a green/environmental aspect. (Yes, yes, i know that some older devices are not as power efficient...but if this approach avoids/delays dumping stuff into landfills...then i think its worth it!)
The fact that it's still a proper multi-user OS for everyone makes it great for family computers. My kids log in by plugging in their floppy disk courtesy of PAM usb.
PAM usb login via floppy disks? - That's truly awesome!
And, yeah fully agreed, that for a family computer for those scenarios where the different users want their own space, customizations, etc., 100% that linux is the perfect kind of OS!
The concept of a family computer seems to be mostly dead where I am.
Most work with laptops and if they do have a home office setup it's just a monitor and dock.
Kids just have a phone and possibly a laptop which they can use anywhere.
This story reminded me of some historical computer projects. Sometime around the start of the millenium, there were two really interesting projects being released. The first of which was Sun Microsystems releasing the HDL source code publicly of one of their high-end SPARC CPUs. The reasoning they were talking about was because they wanted to enable the next generation of society's relationships to computing, a concept they called commodity computing. In other words, computers were supposed to be everywhere and built into everything. While nothing uses SPARC anymore (Thanks Oracle!), that vision did come true; computers in basically everything at this point.
The other thing that this reminded me of was something that was developed around the same time called the Simputer. The simputer was a project that was designed to be a replacement for a computer for areas where computers would, at that time, not be feasible because they were too expensive for the local economy. The form the Simputer ended up taking was basically what we would describe as a smartphone today, more or less. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of the details on the device and it's development have been lost to time. Wikipedia's references seem to have all more or less disappeared. I seem to remember hearing about it as a project of the MIT Media lab (The same organization that started the infamous OLPC project), but I can't seem to find more details.