zlacker

They were amazing, and the progress was incredible, but both of those computers - while equally exciting and delightful to people who saw the potential - were met with ‘but what can I actually use it for?’ from the vast majority of the population.

By 1990 home computer use was still a niche interest. They were still toys, mainly. DTP, word processing and spreadsheets were a thing, but most people had little use for them - I had access to a Mac IIci with an ImageWriter dot matrix around that time and I remember nervously asking a teacher whether I would be allowed to submit a printed typed essay for a homework project - the idea that you could do all schoolwork on a computer was crazy talk. By then, tools like Mathematica existed but as a curiosity not an essential tool like modern maths workbooks are.

The internet is what changed everything.

>>jamesh+(OP)
> The internet is what changed everything.

Broadband. Dial-up was still too much of an annoyance, too expensive.

Once broadband was ubiquitous in the US and Europe, that's when the real explosion of computer usage happened.

>>jamesh+(OP)
A big obstacle was that everything was on paper. We still had to do massive amounts of data entry.

For some strange reason html forms is an incredibly impotent technology. Pretty standard things are missing like radioboxes with an other text input. 5000+ years ago the form labels aligned perfectly with the value.

I can picture it already, ancient Mesopotamia, the clay tablet needs name and address fields for the user to put their name and address behind. They pull out a stamp or a roller.

Of course if you have a computer you can have stamps with localized name and address formatting complete with validation as a basic building block of the form. Then you have a single clay file with all the information neatly wrapped together. You know, a bit like that e-card no one uses only without half data mysteriously hidden from the record by some ignorant clerk saboteur.

We've also failed to hook up devices to computers. We went from the beautiful serial port to IoT hell with subscriptions for everything. One could go on all day like that, payments, arithmetic, identification, etc much work still remains. I'm unsure what kind of revolution would follow.

Talking thinking machines will no doubt change everything. That people believe it is possible is probably the biggest driver. You get more people involved, more implementations, more experiments, more papers, improved hardware, more investments.