Plebware Lives

The Plebware Brand

We worked hard to create the Plebware brand — a name we first coined in 2006. It was born out of both necessity and ingenuity, following the quiet loss of our earlier name, BioWare, to a now-famous gaming company. With no legal budget and little startup capital, we conceded the name and began the creative process anew. Out of that setback came a far stronger idea — Plebware — a brand with a real human heart.

From the start, Plebware was envisioned as more than a company name; it was a philosophy of technology. The web domain came online in 2010, marking the first public milestone of an idea that had been evolving for years behind the scenes.

Before Plebware, there was 0tronix Developments CK (2003/007501/23) — founded in 2003 and officially closed in 2010 due to non-profitability. But the spirit of innovation never faded. Instead, it evolved.

Where 0tronix dealt with hardware and software, Plebware introduced the third element — the human operator. We saw that in the great Computing Triangle — hardware, software, and user — the operator had always been treated as an afterthought. So we named that element Plebware: the humanware, the everyperson behind the keyboard.

The word “Pleb” was used affectionately — a nod to the idea that technology belongs to everyone, not just engineers or executives. Thus, Plebware became shorthand for “technology made human.”

A Brand, a Philosophy, and a Language

The term caught on quickly within our circle, inspiring the creation of a unique lexicon — our PlebDictionary™. By 2011, it contained around a dozen playful yet purposeful words. By 2020, when we revisited and expanded our notes, the dictionary had grown large enough to warrant its own printed edition. It even gave birth to a self-referential word: PlebDictionary itself.

Our language evolved as our network did — with concepts like PlebMachine™, PlebDesign, PlebVersion, PlebBucks, and others forming part of an open-source mindset centred around accessibility, creativity, and collaboration.

The Public Face of Plebware

Though never a corporate giant, Plebware has had a living presence across digital spaces. Here is a video from YouTube dating to 2013

Facebook features a Johannesburg-based Plebware page describing itself as a self-help and computer literacy portal — part tech lab, part learning community.

The Plebware Group continues to gather creative professionals, developers, and writers around the ideals of shared knowledge and open culture.

A short video, The PlebMachine™, showcases one of our early experimental hardware-software concepts. (Watch It Below)

Mentions of Plebware’s ecosystem — PlebDictionary, PlebVersion, PlebDesign, and PlebBucks — appear across various tech reference indexes, confirming the project’s historical footprint.

These glimpses across the web prove that the Plebware vision didn’t vanish into the noise of the internet. Instead, it quietly persisted — teaching, inspiring, and reminding people that technology is human, first and always.

The Computing Triangle Lives On

Looking back, Plebware’s enduring relevance lies not in products, but in perspective. We believed — and still believe — that computing isn’t just about circuits and code. It’s about the pleb: the everyday user whose creativity gives technology its meaning.

In that sense, the Computing Triangle is whole again — Hardware, Software, and Plebware.

And as long as people remain at the heart of technology, Plebware Lives.