From the Editor’s Desk: What We’ve Lost ⭐

Sometimes I have to remind myself how lucky I am. Keeping this just to personal technology, I am a member of the first generation of humans to grow up with arcade videogames, home videogames, and home computers. Our expectations grew exponentially with these innovations, just as they did for subsequent generations with the Internet, the mobile revolution, and now AI. Things constantly change, but sometimes they change a lot.

As a teenager and young man I became fascinated by how companies like Atari, Commodore, Apple, Microsoft, Digital Research, and so many others changed the world with the products they created and the industry they invented. I wanted to master the hardware and software, to learn how to write software code, and to use them all to make things. The possibilities seemed so endless and I was obsessed. Obsessed with the future and how wonderful it all was.

But there was also a sense of loss. By the mid-1980s, books were already being written about the early histories of Apple, Microsoft, and the others. Personal technology was evolving, of course, and getting better, but the origins of this industry were already in the rearview mirror. I could learn and improve along with the technology, but I wasn't part of it all, I wasn't there at the beginning. I had missed it.

But in evolving and improving, this industry gave me another opportunity, a way for me to be there in the thick of things when it all first happened. The rise of the Internet, the modern Internet in the form of the web, coincided with me deciding to go back to school to study software development, and choosing to do so in Arizona, where I would meet the person who pushed me into what's still my career over 30 years later.

The sheer coincidence of it all cannot be overstated. As noted up top, I'm lucky. I stumbled into this career blindly and with no plan, and I'm part—a small part, on the periphery—of the history that unfolded and continues to unfold in this crazy industry. In some ways, I've seen it all. And yet I can be surprised and delighted when some truly impressive innovation proves yet again that change can be good, can lift up us all, can move humanity forward. Not always. But sometimes, and less now than ever.

What wasn't clear over the intervening years is what we'd lost, though I had seen hints of this over time. But it was only recently, in researching topics related to the dawn of personal computing that will result in future Tech Nostalgia posts and, perhaps, even a focus month or two, that the problem suddenly presented itself clearly.

This industry, now run by some of the worst human beings on earth, was started by dreamers.

Some were engineers who worked at companies like Intel and Motorola and created the first microprocessors that went on to power the first microcomputers, as they were called. Some were hobbyists who saw these chips and invented the microcomputer boards and then systems that defined that first era.

Some...