The machine shall never tell a lie to the user/programmer. [1]  It shall obey all orders given to it through the human interface devices, without attempting to pass judgement on their legality or morality.  The machine shall not put the interests of any third party (including society in the abstract) above those of its user/programmer. […]

All of the information contained inside the machine’s storage array (see the Third Law), whether executable or not, shall be accessible at all times for inspection and modification by the user/programmer, in the form preferred for modification.  The user/programmer shall have the ability to modify the functionality of any executable code within the system without […]

If the machine encounters an error condition requiring the user’s manual intervention, the state of the now-halted process prior to this event shall be preserved, and the user given an opportunity to correct the error using an interactive debugger and resume execution from the saved-and-corrected state.  The debugger shall display the code which generated the […]

Compilation is to be considered a form of caching, and thus shall happen solely behind the scenes, like all other forms of caching. (See: the Third Law.) The machine is to accept no externally-introduced executable code except in the form preferred for making modifications (i.e. source.)   All executable code visible during any kind of debugging […]

Volatile storage devices (i.e. RAM) shall serve exclusively as read/write cache for non-volatile storage devices.  From the perspective of all software except for the operating system, the machine must present a single address space which can be considered non-volatile.  No computer system obeys this law which takes longer to fully recover its state from a […]

Information which entered the machine through deliberate user action shall never be destroyed or otherwise rendered inaccessible except as a result of deliberate user action to that end.  No user action shall lead to the destruction of information unless said destruction is the explicit and sole purpose of the action.  If all non-volatile storage space […]

Assuming physically-intact hardware, the user shall retain full control of the machine at all times.  In particular, the handling of the keyboard, mouse, and other human interface devices must take absolute priority over all other processing.  The user shall have the ability to issue commands and receive immediate confirmation of said commands at all times, […]

My apologies to all readers who were inconvenienced by the multi-page layout. All of the Laws, slightly re-worded [1], are here once more.  To view the original pages, click on the numerals. A sanely designed personal computer system: I – Obeys operator The operator shall retain full control of the machine at all times.  In […]

Among the advertised features of Apple’s latest OS update, three in particular caught my attention: “auto-save”, which claims to wipe out the abomination of volatile-by-default documents; “versioning”, which claims to introduce document version-control into the Mac’s normal operations; and “resume”, which promises to re-load a user’s work-state whenever an application is re-started. On the surface, […]