Whoof. Well, certainly having the whole world reduced to Windows and Linux doesn’t seem ideal. Linux is great and I wouldn’t want not to have it around, but crowding out any possibility of a different approach seems long-term counterproductive, especially given the very long, very incremental nature of Linux kernel development. Even when there’s general agreement that something is a good idea, it seems to take 5-10 years to get done. (Look at what’s happened with containers, which AFAIK still aren’t even a real thing, just a concept superimposed on a bunch of independent features.)

In the Newton era it seemed like there were tons of great ideas flying around about processors, operating systems, filesystems, languages, etc., and more importantly there was room to feasibly take advantage of them in a product. Nowadays there’s no other realistic economic choice than to do your thing on top of the best open source stuff you can find, even if it’s not quite appropriate.

So I guess my primary negative feeling is that there are big important layers that have essentially become a monoculture, or sometimes a di-culture, and people don’t even try to innovate there any more. (Edit: talking about products here, not research, which thank goodness there’s still some of.)

That said, there are obviously tons of positive things that have happened. Notably, when Newton came out there was no internet that people today would recognize (or be able to connect to). There was no cloud computing giving you unlimited CPU billed by the second. No cell phone data network. We didn’t even have color LCDs. I mean, I could go on forever about the crazy stuff that’s been invented since then. So the thing that bugs me is really the lower layers that seem to have ossified a bit too soon (IMHO).

> Nowadays there’s no other realistic economic choice than to do your thing on top of the best open source stuff you can find, even if it’s not quite appropriate

What is your take on free software / open source in this regard?

I'll lay out my own bias. I think that the biggest qualitative inventions in computing occurred largely in places that had a well funded basic research culture whose goals were vague and allowed for a lot of play without managerial meddling. These places were on the 5-10 year timeline, some of them were government funded or aided, and there are far fewer of them today. We have no equivalent of ARPA, no Bell Labs, no PARC, and, well, even though Apple is the biggest company in the world, I doubt they'd come up with Hypercard today.

Open source and free software represent disparate, poorly funded activity, which is why most of what gets produced is innovations atop some of the ideas from 40 years ago. Younger generations of developers are likely to believe that Unix/Linux is everywhere because they are technically the best systems possible, not because it Unix was a well designed system for minicomputers in the 70s that was distributed for free with source, and also what became the basis for GNU etc.

I don't see a way out of this pattern, really.

I agree that the decrease in funding for big and vague projects feels like a big societal mistake. So many hugely influential inventions like ARPAnet, the networked office (PARC), and a whole book full of stuff from Bell Labs, came from a place where there were lots of smart people working on big long-term problems in the same context. PARC made WYSIWYG editors for the bitmap displays they made for the workstations they made to connect up with the network they made — none of those would have taken off the same way individually. And VC-funded startups that focus on one small problem for a few years are never going to fill that gap.