MOBILE COMPUTING NOW AND THEN

In 1985 my first "mobile computer" weighed about as much as a well-packed toolbox, and that is more or less how I carried it. A Compaq Portable, or a clone of one (after forty years I would rather not swear to the exact model), with a palm-sized green monitor, two floppy drives and a keyboard that clipped off the front and doubled as the lid. The mobile part was mainly that you could move it at all. You carried the thing to a desk, not out into the world, and anyone travelling with it travelled with a handle in one hand and a certain resolve at their back.

Today my mobile setup looks like this: an iPad. No notebook, no second display, no case. When I head off on a camper trip, the MacBook stays home on the desk, where it is presumably less lonely than I like to imagine.

It works because the building no longer happens on the device in my hand. I issue the commands through Claude Code or Codex, which works with my Git repositories, and the rest happens elsewhere. For a Swift project a commit to the right branch is enough: Xcode Cloud builds, archives and ships the app to internal TestFlight, which pulls the latest build onto my iPad by itself. For Python I commit to a working branch and have the whole thing built and started on my VPS via Docker, from a terminal on the iPad. If it is an API or a website like puco.ch or aiia.li, I check the result comfortably in the browser. New idea, a few minutes, wherever I happen to be sitting.

And there is the small inversion that actually interests me in all this. In 1985 being mobile meant carrying the machine. Today it means leaving the machine at home. The iPad weighs under four hundred grams, the Compaq a good twenty kilos by feel, but the real difference is not the weight, it is that I no longer need the device with me at all. The heavy part has moved into the network, and what remains fits in one hand. Over the forty years, if I am honest, only one thing has grown heavier, and that is me.

I know, of course, that I could automate the last step too. A little GitHub Actions, and the VPS would fetch the new state, build and start it, entirely without me and my terminal. But one has to keep something back for tomorrow. I set the Compaq aside a long time ago and never missed it; the brief moment, though, where I kick off the build by hand and watch it run, that one I am keeping as long as I can. It is the last piece of craft in a chain that otherwise runs entirely on its own.