> The story about evolution is totally wrong. What really happened is that, time after time, each generation of computers developed until it was very capable and sophisticated, and then it was totally replaced by a new generation of relatively simple, stupid ones. Then those were improved, usually completely ignoring all the lessons learned in the previous generation, until the new generation gets replaced in turn by something smaller, cheaper, and far more stupid.

Beautifully said. But for the last couple decades not even that is true. It's just been more and more of the same OSes, doing basically the same things. What it means to develop a native app is pretty fundamentally unchanged since Windows 3.11 or ISX days.

Software has changed, but only neo-mainframes. All the groupware and multi-tenant and scale-out software systems the author decries as lost? Rebuilt as online systems, powered by communicative capitalism and vast data-keeps ("the cloud").

> We run the much-upgraded descendants of the simplest, stupidest, and most boring computer that anyone could get to market. They were the easiest to build and to get working.

Unsaid here is I think where we really got on the fixed path, is what begat honogenization. Everyone else seemed to have been competing to build better hardware+software+peripheral systems against everyone else (with some close alliances here and there).

1989 changed everything. The EISA bus was the reformation of a thousand different competing computing industries into a vaster cohesive competitive ecosystem, via the Gang of Nine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Arc... . This commodified what used to be closed systems. Everyone either adapted to the homogenized common systems, or, one by one, the DECs and Suns and every other computer maker folded or got sold off.

The business model, to me, defines what happened. Giving up on being proprietary, giving up on controlling "your" ecosystem was the hinge point. Computing was boutique and special systems, competing on unique and distinct features and capabilities. With the rise of interchangable computing parts it transitioned to a more collaborative & much more competitive system. Distinction carried the risk of being too far afield, of your stuff not being compatible with the others. You had to play in the big tent. Versus all the other upstarts playing against you. Meanwhile the legacy featureful unique & distinct business-model players never could get enough market share to survive, could certainly never compete downmarket, and slowly has positions eroded up and up market until those last upmarket places collapsed too.

The love of lisp here has many of the same pitfalls. Sure it's an elegant modifiable system, one that can be shaped like a bonsai tree into distinct and beautiful forms. And I hope we see the rise, I hope very much, that we make software soft again, that big overarching ideas of cohesive computing where OS and apps and user's will blend together in dynamic fashion rise again. But the peril is disjointedness. The peril is a lack of cohesion, where different users have vastly different bespoke systems and commonality is lost.

I'm tempted to stop here while I've said little that feels controversial. Putting in anything people dont want to hear risks the greater message, which is that the new ways could arise via many many means. But, I do think: the brightest most malleable most user controlled system we have is the web. Userscripts are very powerful, and they grant us power over disjointed chaotic industrial systems, which have no desire to let the user shape anything. I believe that, with a little effort, with tools already available like web components, we can build very sympathetic forms of computing. HTML like LISP can make visible and make manifest all the components pieces of computing, can be an S-expr like system, as we see with modern front-end-derived router technology for example. The whole web might not be terraformed in our lifetimee, we might not dislodge the contemporary industrial web practices to make all the web excellent, but I think many stable wonderful media forms that spread and interoperate can take root here, I think they already resemble the alive system of the gods the author so nicely speaks to. I too speak, for malleable systems everywhere (not mine but https://malleable.systems ), and for the web as one conduit to bring us closer to the gods.