Pylimitics

The early days of personal computing were not that long ago. Part of those days was a tidal wave of innovation and creativity. There were whole categories of applications that I’m not sure even exist any more. For one thing, there were viable alternatives to the Excel spreadsheet de-facto monopoly, and at least several incorporated quite different approaches to the same goals.

Creative tools were more diverse then too, and the best one, at least in my experience, was Hypercard from Apple. It was almost the world-wide web, but it was too early for the networking part to be part of it. You could connect your computer to other ones, but that usually involved land-line telephones, modems, and too much complication.

The meat grinder of capitalism seems to have relegated most of that innovation and creativity to history. Now we exist in a world of less technical diversity, and we’re the poorer for it.