The Day Steve Invented the PH – the Personal Health Machine
The alternate history of healthcare
I’ve been an avid reader of SciFi since 6th grade after discovering Heinlein’s “Have spacesuit will travel”.
I recently hosted Dr. Nisim Peretz and Dr. Nir Waiskopf at Itay&Beyond on my podcast Life Sciences Today.
Nisim and Nir are building what sounds like science fiction: a brain on a chip.
It’s a drug discovery platform for autism spectrum disorders and neurological pathologies that simulates the brain’s reponse to drug candidates.
Listen to the episode Itay&Beyond – Brain on a Chip – Life Sciences Today Podcast Episode 7.
You can subscribe to Life Sciences Today on your favorite podcast channel.
Nir and Nisim planted an idea in my head for an alt-history, SciFi piece on what would the world look like if healthcare had followed the path of personal computing.
1980.
In a dusty Palo Alto garage, not far from where the Apple I was once assembled, Steve—a dropout, dreamer, and occasional fruitarian—built something the world had never seen.
Not a computer. Not a game console. Not a glorified typewriter.
Steve built the PH—the Personal Health Machine.
Where others chased spreadsheets and compilers, Steve chased something else: the human body.
“Why digitize paper,” he asked, “when you can digitize the pulse?”
When your customer’s pain is billing, you build software that maximizes billing—like Epic Systems. You become the system of record for transactions, not outcomes.
But what if the pain was actual pain?
The Problem Wasn’t Productivity. It Was Pain.
Steve’s moment came in 1979, when his college roommate collapsed unexpectedly in their garage. The ER returned no diagnosis. “Just stress,” said the doctor. But Steve wouldn’t accept that.
He scavenged oscilloscope parts and a $4 RadioShack multimeter to build a crude biosensor. He called it the PulseBox. It tracked heart variability, temperature, and breath rate.
He showed it to Lisa, whose mother had chronic fatigue. Lisa cried when she saw her mother’s cortisol spike under fluorescent lights.
“It’s not in her head,” she whispered. “It’s right there.”
That night, Steve scribbled on a napkin:
“The PC makes documents. The PH will make decisions.”
Consumer-First Healthcare
By 1981, the PulseBox became the PH 1.0.
It didn’t connect to a hospital or print diagnostics. But it gave you ownership of your health data: sleep rhythm, glycemic dips, stress curves.
Steve went up and down Sandhill Road in Palo-Alto and pitched the VCs on PulseBox. They all turned him down. “You don’t have a business model," they said.
Steve decided not to raise VC money. He crowdfunded 500 units. People drove across the country to pick them up.
He called his company “Epoch”.
One trucker named Mel used it to track his migraines. He learned they spiked 45 minutes after gas station coffee. “Your box fixed my head,” he wrote on a postcard.
Instead of Epic’s billing-first logic, the Epoch PH introduced health-first intuition.
You didn’t ask your insurer for permission.
You just paid for your health machine—and it worked for you.
Moore’s Law, Rewritten
Chip designers took notice of the Epoch PH.
PH users demanded lower latency, better signal resolution, and higher sample rates.
A rogue team at Intel modified the 8086 to favor analog signal fidelity over floating-point ops. They called it BioBranch, left Intel and started BioIntel.
In 1984, BioIntel launched the B-256—a chip optimized for biosensor processing. It parsed 256 real-time channels of breath, blood, and skin data.
Nvidia abandoned graphics for gamers and created NURA—a neural architecture for multi-sensory input: EEG, EMG, ECG, and EDA.
Instead of pushing pixels, semiconductors pushed biology.
Nvidia and BioIntel cut design partner deals with Epoch.
The PC made chips fast and cheap.
The Epoch PH personal health machine made them personal.
Healthcare Becomes Participatory, Not Predatory
Lisa’s mom recovered from two decades of chronic pain.
She shared her protocol—based on blue light exposure and cortisol—on PHNet, a community bulletin board.
It got 12,000 upvotes.
A firmware update followed, adding circadian feedback tracking.
Small clinics across New England reported a 30% drop in fibromyalgia diagnoses. Communities launched PH co-ops to pool insights and trends.
Hospitals hesitated. But when 300,000 PH users offered real-time dashboards to local health departments—better than CDC data—they joined.
Medicine became participatory. Health became distributed.
Regulatory Earthquakes
In 1986, the FDA tried to ban personal biosensors.
Epoch Corp. sued the Federal Government.
The Epoch Trial followed. A teenager named Ray took the stand. He showed the jury how he predicted his autoimmune flare-ups two days in advance using his PH.
“You don’t need to ban my PH,” he said.
“You need one.”
The jury ruled 10–2 in favor of health sovereignty.
Congress passed the Health Sovereignty Act the next day. NIH was ordered to launch OpenPH, a shared protocol for all biosensor systems.
That year, the National Institutes of Personal Health was born—with a $40B budget.
The Day It Went Global
In 1994, Nairobi’s HealthHack Collective reverse-engineered the Epoch PH and released the PH-Kit open-source.
In one year, 1.2 million kits were deployed across Kenya, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. WHO studies showed 4x increases in early detection of malaria and cholera.
In India, PHs integrated Ayurvedic diagnostics. In Brazil, they tracked sleep and dengue vectors simultaneously.
Every village had a cloudlet—a local server for federated, anonymized health insights. No cloud. No centralized control.
By 1998, 2 billion people owned a PH.
What We Gained—and What We Missed
Yes, the Internet still arrived.
But the killer app wasn’t email. It was recovery readiness.
Social media didn’t glorify filters. It showed glow graphs—patterns of vitality, rest, and joy.
One startup—GlowChain—lets users trade vitality credits for meal delivery, therapy, or help with kids.
Workplaces offered Vitality Days based on collective biometrics. Burnout was visible—and reversible.
Epic Systems never scaled their EHR system.
Instead, the Epoch Stack powered a health commons. Your data was yours. Always.
From the Archives: PH-101 User Manual, 1991 (Excerpt)
Congratulations on your new PH-101.
Your Personal Health Machine is designed to learn from your body, not just monitor it. In this box, you hold more than a device—you hold a dialogue.
Each morning, your PH greets you with your baseline vitals, cognitive clarity index, hydration curve, and emotional readiness score. If something’s off, your PH will gently ask questions—not alarm you.
Your PH is not a doctor. It’s your partner.
Press the 'Reflect' button to log yesterday’s recovery.
Tap 'Listen' if you need real-time breath guidance.
And if all else fails, place your palm on the sensor and breathe. Your PH will take it from there.
The iPhad Keynote – Yerba Buena Center, 2010
The room was dark. A single spotlight framed the stage.
Steve stepped into it wearing his trademark black turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers. The crowd at the Yerba Buena Center leaned in, half expecting a tablet.
He paused, smiled, and said:
“Today, we’re not reinventing the computer. We’re reinventing recovery.”
Behind him, a sleek slate appeared on screen. Thin as a magazine, it pulsed gently with a pale blue light.
“This,” he said, “is the iPhad. The Intelligent Personal Health Advisor.”
Gasps.
He continued: “It doesn't just count your steps. It knows why you didn't take them.”
The iPhad tracked neurochemical drift in real time, adjusted lighting and sound based on emotional state, and could generate personalized recovery protocols from spoken input.
“It's not about health metrics,” Steve said. “It's about readiness. Your readiness to show up—at work, for your kids, for yourself.”
He lifted it. The blue light pulsed faster.
“I held a computer in my hands in 1984,” he said. “But this—this is the first time I’ve held something that understands me.”
The applause lasted six minutes.
Lisa, 2025
Lisa, now in her 60s, stood on her porch sipping green tea. Her Epoch PH sat beside her, humming softly.
She glanced at its surface. A soft chime played.
“Today looks good,” it said. “Your nervous system is calm. Ready for a walk?”
She smiled.
She tapped the ‘Reflect’ button.
“Yesterday you connected with your granddaughter. Your joy index peaked. You slept deeply.”
The PH paused.
“Maybe let’s skip the news today.”
Lisa laughed. “Good idea.”
In this world, that small exchange wasn’t science fiction.
It was daily life.
The Microsoft Detour: Wellness OS
While Steve was busy changing lives, Redmond took a different path.
In 1993, Microsoft launched Wellness OS—a sprawling operating system aimed at hospitals, HR departments, and corporate wellness programs. It had calorie counters, step trackers, and a deeply unpopular feature called MoodBoard that tried to auto-label employee emotions via webcam.
Executives loved it. Employees didn’t.
The interface resembled Windows NT but came with enterprise-grade surveillance: your hydration was tracked, your tone analyzed during meetings, and your bathroom breaks quietly timestamped.
Their flagship device, the LifeMate, looked sleek but required users to sign quarterly "Health Productivity Compliance Agreements."
One internal memo leaked in 1996 read:
"If we can detect fatigue two hours before burnout, we can redirect task flow and avoid PTO claims."
By 1999, Wellness OS was quietly shelved. Users called it Clippy with a stethoscope. The PH movement laughed.
The public moved on.
In 2001, a Microsoft spokesperson said: “We underestimated how much people value privacy in their bodies.”
It was the last time Microsoft touched health.
Internal Email: Bill Gates, March 1995 (Leaked)
From: Bill G.
To: Executive Leadership Team
Subject: Re: PH Device and Consumer Health Trends
"I've seen the PH. Impressive engineering. But the idea that people will 'own their health' is naive. Most users want something simple. They want structure, not sovereignty.
We will not chase 'feelings tech.' We build platforms, not soft mirrors.
That said, keep an eye on their adoption curves. If it hits 10 million units, we revisit."
Postscript added by a junior analyst:
"They hit 10 million three months later."
Pandemics Rewritten: AIDS and COVID in the PH World
The PH didn’t eliminate pandemics—but it changed how we responded.
In the early 1980s, the AIDS crisis met silence, stigma, and institutional inertia.
But in this world, PH users were already tracking immune variability, lymphatic stress signals, and inflammatory markers.
Gay communities in San Francisco used PH logs to document early signs—fevers, night sweats, T-cell anomalies. These grassroots health collectives published the first open-access Immunity Journals, forcing the CDC to act.
In 1983, a PH firmware update allowed users to opt into anonymized virology scanning. By 1985, epidemiological models built on PH data outpaced NIH estimates by months. Contact networks weren’t speculative—they were cooperative.
When COVID emerged in late 2019, it didn’t catch the world flat-footed.
PH devices had already flagged global upticks in lung impedance and oxygen variability. Entire neighborhoods pre-isolated before testing even existed.
Instead of lockdown panic, we saw targeted calm.
PH dashboards auto-synced with public health nodes, anonymizing exposure chains while preserving civil liberties. Citizens received personal immunity advisories, not mandates. Compliance rose—not from fear, but from trust.
The virus still hurts. But it didn’t blindside us.
Postscript: 2025 – The Compounding Effect of Sovereignty
In our timeline, the U.S. Consumer Price Index rose 5x over the past 50 years. Healthcare spending? It ballooned 42x—eight times faster than the cost of living.
But in the PH world, institutional healthcare costs didn’t increase. They collapsed.
By 2025, the cost of delivering effective care fell by nearly 100x—not unlike the GPU revolution, where price-performance ratios improved by over 1000x in two decades.
Why?
Because care was decentralized.
Because data belongs to people, not providers.
Because the PH turned the healthcare system into an immune system: responsive, distributed, adaptive.
GPUs changed the world because gamers wanted speed.
The PH changed the world because ordinary people wanted to feel okay. And for the first time, they didn’t have to beg for it.
Imagine if Intel and NVIDIA had behaved like Epic—closed, bureaucratic, locked into reimbursement logic. Would we have AI today?
No. We’d have mainframes in marble lobbies and 10-page intake forms.
Instead, we got speed. We got freedom of choice. We got AI.
And in the PH timeline, we got all that—for our bodies, too.
Conclusion
When your customer’s pain is actual pain—not billing, not paperwork—you don’t build a billing engine.
You build a Personal Health Machine.
And then—if you’re really lucky—you live long enough to meet the version of yourself it helped you become.
And that changes everything.
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