In some respects, the 1990s and 2000s were a massive regression over the 70s and 80s. For some of us, at least.
In the 80s, computer users were not segregated as producers and consumers as strongly as it happened with the consolidation of closed systems. They came with schematics, they openly explained every internal function and design.
Under the guise of simplification and layers of abstraction, most of the users and even developers have been progressively denied control over their computing devices. Smalltalk and LISP based systems proposed a leaky abstraction model were every user could delve as deep as he wanted into the system, which enforces a degree of openness that is very inconvenient for monetisation of the system itself. Which is why they were suppressed (by simply allocating resources on producer-consumer models, easy to sell and most importantly easier to monetise as the provider becomes the master).
Note that this culture is extremely hard to eradicate as people stick to what they know and a total shift is unlikely to meet with collaboration from the companies that profit from said control.
See, in 1970s this was the stuff of top-notch research labs and expensive computing centers. Same applies to multi-core multi-megaflops CPUs, advanced multi-user OSes that run multiple VMs while networking with computers on the other side of the globe. It was there in 1970s, too. Only today it's something that can run on your laptop, or a smaller device like the Intel Edison, for a few hundred dollars.
Can you notice the difference?
Another area where a massive copy-catting of 1960s and 1970s is happening today is space launch tech. And again, where 1960s had to spend a significant portion of national budgets, today's private firms do pretty well with a fraction of a valuation of a picture-sharing service, and turning a profit in the process.
The goals did not change all that much, but the means are now much more accessible.
But by the mid 1980's lots of stuff most people don't have today could run on home computers in the few-hundred-dollars range. I'm still missing stuff I had on my Amiga 500.
Sure, there's lots and lots of stuff I can do on my current computers I wouldn't have a chance in hell of doing on my A500.
Yet I'm finding myself seriously considering running UAE (Amiga emulator) or AROS (Amiga OS "reimplementation") in a VM to run Amiga mail apps (why could I handle thousands of messages from BBS's on my A500 with 1MB RAM, while Thunderbird chokes on my (smaller) inbox?) and my favourite editor (FrexxEd).
I keep cringing when I see hacky re-implementations of stuff that was done so nicely on the Amiga. E.g. want transparent compression in your applications? Implement support for XPK and your users can just drop in libraries implementing whatever formats they want. Rather than the Linux way of everyone implementing a varying, small, incomplete subset of the available formats, making you resort to a set of binaries all with inconsistent command line options.
Similarly, how every app that needs image loading support ends up with a small subset of common formats, rather than the AmigaOS approach of supporting datatypes, allowing users to drop in a library for whatever format they want, and instantly having support for loading the new format in every application.
As a result, apps that haven't seen updates in a couple of decades, still supports the latest formats.
When I read Xerox PARC papers it always amazes me at was already possible, during the days I had a ZX Spectrum to play with.
The hypertext and embedding capabilities of their GUIs, the use of system programming languages with automatic memory management, among many other inventions.
Sadly, for many reasons the historians can talk about, the industry ended up going the AT&T way instead of Xerox PARC way.
I like to dig computer history, and when I look everything that was accomplished at Xerox and other places and what we got. The industry really moves at snail pace in some areas.
At Xerox the GUI systems were developed in Lisp, Smalltalk and Mesa/Cedar, the later being a systems programming language with automatic memory management.
Those systems had networking, GUIs, multiuser capabilities. Object embedding capabilities, the precursors of IDE and REPL environments.
Today we are still trying to re-invent those systems. How further would have we managed to be today, if those systems had been picked up as starting point.
