Cyberdeck practice defined | Mashable

Cyberdecks have time. But they are not as original as many of their Gen Z creators would think.

This creates weird, personal DIY computers, often with tiny keyboards, that are constantly appearing in new forms on Instagram and TikTok. They include cyberdecks stuffed inside Altoids cans, reading cyberdecks like books, and suitcase cyberdecks for music production.

The most important are the so-called girly cyberdecks, mostly made by women who are deliberately loud, like the gold clamshell model with a mouse covered in a gold ring from TikTok user Ube Boobey. The 22-year-old based in London has amassed more than 5 million views since posting his first cyberdeck, in March.

“I have no previous experience with technology,” commented Boobey, whose real name is Annike Tan, in her first post. “That’s not a cyberdeck, it’s a bunch of stuff in a clutch bag,” quipped one commenter. “Yes, you’re right,” Tan replied, deadpan.

However, a load of parts worked – so much so that Tan found what most startup founders would kill for, It has strings magazine, just a month later. This wasn’t just a retro trend; these lovely computer buildings captured the spirit, tiredness and technological innovation, the need to rebel against the prevailing spirit of Silicon Valley.

Just like they did 50 years ago, in fact.

Everything old is new again: The origin of the cyberdeck

The name cyberdeck traces back to sci-fi author William Gibson’s 1984 novel. The Neuromancerwhere it was technically called a “cyberspace deck.” (Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in an earlier story from 1982, but dropped it here.) In the first chapter, our protagonist is “punished on a cyberspace desktop that exposes his disembodied consciousness to the coherent vision that was the matrix.”

The only part of that definition that really applies is “custom.” Another Gibson novel, Idoro (1996), comes close to the ideal of the modern cyberdecker with its description of “sandbenders” – novice computers built by an Oregon community, with materials such as coral, turquoise, and aluminum chassis made from old melting cans found on the beach.

For the historical origins of cyberdecks, however, you have to go further south than Oregon Beach. You have to go back to the old Silicon Valley, the place where companies like Hewlett-Packard made the first dumb computers for corporate use.

The Homebrew Computer Club was founded in March 1975 by engineer Gordon French and activist Fred Moore, both of whom believed that “personal” computers, rather than boxy IBM-style mainframes, were the future. The people they attracted (using flyers, if there was no social media) were hippie hangouts. One was John Draper, who made a name for himself by creating a “blue box” that allowed anyone to make free long-distance calls, earning the ire of AT&T. The other two were kids who made a quick profit selling Draper’s dubious green boxes at UC Berkeley: Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.

Those who attended the event were encouraged to bring their own personal computers. They use digital tape drives that can hold 500 kilobytes of inaudible data. They clapped as the kit-built machines were made to play music.

“I expect that home computers will be used in unusual ways,” Moore wrote in the first paper, “many of which no one has thought of.”

Wozniak took that promise and ran with it. In 1976 he showed off a machine he had designed while working at Hewlett-Packard, which was so homegrown that his bosses at HP refused to build it. It didn’t even have a house, so the first users had to carry their wooden boxes or suitcases. The parts were $500, but they made copies to sell to other members at cost. His friend Jobs was enthusiastic, he wanted the couple to start a company and offered the name of the device, based on the happy summer of picking fruit in Oregon. It was called the Apple Computer A, later renamed the Apple I.

This is where the modern day personal computer began. You could argue that Steve Jobs perverted the Wozniak-style cyberdeck machine when he made two of them millionaires, but you should also note that he repeated the same lesson when he returned to Apple in 1997. PCs had become mysterious “beige boxes” in the 1990s, so Jobs brought us a candy-colored Macdecker that could really help unconventional designers like Jony Ive.

We are now, once again, in a world where all computer-based devices are starting to look boringly similar. Apple doesn’t make beige boxes, but they do make aluminum boxes that, if you’re lucky, come in a choice of colors. Silicon Valley, with its emphasis on AI that consumers increasingly distrust, is beginning to look as out of touch as it did in the 1970s. What better time for a homebrew-style revolution?

The cyberdeck makers of the 21st century, of course, are drawn from a much more diverse population than the same white, male members of the Homebrew Computer Club. Wozniak wouldn’t have thought to stuff her parts into a clutch bag and see what happened. But just as in the 1970s before it, the cyberdeck movement would create computers that were used in unconventional ways. Most of it no one has thought of.