RockportAI post frames ongoing AI progress in terms of early personal computing hardware, prompting Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan to call the era an Apple II moment for personal AI builders

The PC revolution gave everyone a computer.

The AI revolution gives everyone an autonomous workforce.

But autonomous agents need more than intelligence: they need memory, payments, persistence, and affordable compute.

That’s why what @0xgilbert is building with UsePod feels so important.

Not another chatbot. Infrastructure for the agent economy itself.

Compute markets. Inference liquidity. Verifiable AI. Financial rails for autonomous labor.

Most people still don’t see where this is heading.

I couldn't think of a more perfect analogy.

When I was in 7th grade, my dad got me a brand new Apple //e. I learned LOGO and BASIC. I filled up every slot (remember PR#6?) with printers, sound cards, modems, printers, and everything else I got get my hands on. I figured out how to use the cassette port, even though I didn't need it. I cut notches in floppy disks, I went on BBSes, spent hours typing in code from magazines, swapped discs with friends, and wrote tomes of fiction on Apple Writer before printing them out on my Imagewriter. When things like joysticks broke, I opened them up and figured out how to fix them myself.

I think there were moments that Dad may have been worried when he saw me sitting for hours on end playing Choplifter and Hardball. But looking back, I ended up learning computer graphics and animation, programming, hardware engineering, telecommunications, copyright law, good writing, typography, design, social media, and who knows what else.

Jobs eventually figured out that most Americans didn't want to tinker, they just wanted to have things spoon-fed to them in tidy little packages. And I did go on to own just about every Apple product after that.

But the piece of hardware I miss the most—by far—is that Apple //e.

And you can bet that when my little girl gets into 7th grade, I'll be teaching her how to use the most powerful tool for innovation and creation available to her.

No, it's not AI.

It's her brain.

The same tool that Woz and Jobs taught me to unlock.