You know? In another galaxy, a long time ago there was some young guy who did freelance sysadmin and education for private people and small businesses, while assembling personal computers maindays in some omputer store. Let's call that time 1995, where one early evening young Largo was asked by the very established owner of some electronic parts import-export business with whom he was on good terms if he liked what he does, and if he wanted to do it any longer?

Whereupon young Largo LOL'd almost hysterically and said: 'What? NO!" This is so fucked up it isn't funny anymore!'

He was very surprised and asked why, young Largo couldn't say exactly why and needed some minutes to collect his thougts and then began:

'This may come as a surprise to you, with me being an atheist, but what we have now reminds me of the story in the old testament of the bible about the building of the Tower of Babylon.'

That indeed raised some eyebrows!

Young Largo rambled on about the siloing of data in different non-interoperable applications for reasons of customer tie in, which is against the interests of said customer. About the bloat in software which requires ever more potent hardware in regular intervals with every new software version, while the old ones would be perfectly servicable if they only could read the data from the newer versions, which of course is a No-Go because it is against the interest of the software producers.

He rambled on about lack of stability and unintuiveness of UX while compairing that with kitchen- and general household appliances, which would be considered useless and broken if they required the effort PC's did then.

He fantasized on about something which combined the ease of use of Hypercard and Visual Basic in some hypothetic platform with the versatility and networkability of some Unix, extendable with modules available in countless variations like in DOS/WIN in a way every other 'module' would benefit from, because of extended capabilities and 'teaching' them new data formats, creating a bespoke environment exactly fitting your needs, while being able to run on ridiculously cheap and small hardware, nonetheless capable of reading everything you could reasonably throw at them.

Young Largo rambled on about the impossibility of this happening in our current society and economy with patents, intellectual property, and so on, that this was easy to see and extrapolate into not getting any better EVER!

Because even then bloat was a thing.

What young Largo didn't really knew at the time were Plan9, OS-9, QNX and TRON but he had dabbled in 386/FreeBSD, early Linuxes, knew some FORTHs and some Assemblers and paid a shitload of money for his ISDN to get onto the internet with his hot rod Pentium.

Young Largo concluded then that this all was nothing else but the biggest bullshit job creation program since the building of the egyptian pyramids, and at the end of the day almost as useless as them for society, with a few exceptions of research and simulation, CAD/CAM and such, but not applicable to the general public.

When asked 'But what for!?' he answered: 'How should i know? TO THE STARS!'

There could be a prequel to this, where an even younger Largo said in school that he wanted every computer being able to speak with each other, one big universal library, when being asked in class what the biggest thing he wished for would be.'

That was pre- or proto-internet

Anyways, in a purely technical way all of this is possible, and even has been realized in parts, or as complete proof of concept, except the ability of handling proprietary data formats by already entrenched market players behind their moats.*

So one part of the army of bullshit jobbers is pecking like vultures at the long rotten carcasses which were thrown out of some research labs eons ago for antimonopolistic reasons, producing nothing but bloated zombies in different paint schemes. Another part specializes in exploiting the bullshit jobbers with proprietary software and services which don't really run according to their needs, but clogging their toilets, while the part who feels like it is the airforce tries to simulate being intelligent while unable to reliably reproduce or even explain their cheap stunts, the part being the navy looming beneath the waves and snorting..err snorkeling every and any shit, while the real spaceforce which does solid engineering could have been up in the sky in O'-Neil cylinders since decades, if the rest of the retarded shitheads wouldn't have dragged them down so much.

Instead of the universal library with nice haptics i got craptastic movieplayers in different sizes, which i use like giant microfiche readers. So be it!

Aye häff SPOQQN!

I hear ya, that's about the time I was coming up too. While your colorful vernacular isn't exactly how I might have put it, I think that it illustrates the frustration felt by many, ever since the beginning of personal computing.

I also wish that HyperCard had been a bigger influence on the early web. It was written in human terms for techno-novices trying to get real work done. As HyperTalk evolved into AppleScript, it lost its original elegance and is now just another cryptic toy language that is difficult or impossible to write without a manual.

IMHO to fix all of this, we need to bring back ideas like research budgets of perhaps 5-25% and every company over say 50 employees or $5 million/yr gross having some form of 20% time for in-house projects. That can't happen as long as everyone is competing with each other just to survive though. And not when the leading internet companies plow most profits into share price and dividends instead of free and open source community tools.

I wish we had more stories of individuals and groups that made enough money to retire, but instead of just reinvesting into the status quo, went on to fund real innovation through philanthropy or alternative business structures like co ops.