>What drew me to old computers, and what still draws me to them after all these years, is the sense that people who used them new had a different faith in them: of computers as a tool for thought, as something that people could use to accomplish something new. The idea of computers as “the bicycle for the mind” felt like a lost future
Didn't we accomplish all that and some? Isn't a modern smartphone the best "bicycle of the mind" we could 've imagined in 1990s?
Sure there are disadvantages. I would love a large(cheap) eink display as much as the next guy. I'm also a big fan of retro computing. I still have my commodore 64, a 386sx,a slot1 windows 98 pc and more. I like all of them, but I would never give up my modern Ryzen PC with a nVidia 2070(yes,not newest, but pretty powerful), nvme drives and fast ram for something with less capability.
We have all this and at the same time we have single board computers and 8 bit microcontrollers where they are appropriate.
If not for the current "price gouger paradise" conditions I would say we have it the best it ever was computing wise.
The only things I miss from the past are two aspects of software development. First, it was much easier to understand "everything" about a computer back then when few tens of kB was a large program. Second, it seems programs were written to work well on current not future hardware.
Also, before Windows showed up there was an almost a decade long time period when a typical pc did everything a typical user wanted. There was little point to upgrade the hardware back then. Remember new computers sold towards the end of that time had a special button to slow them down! (hilariously named turbo). Only once graphical interfaces became a thing faster and faster PCs started selling. There is a certain comfort for a programmer to be able to make software for one machine for a decade. You can really get to know it well... Now? You can't even get one Android API to know well before they change it 180 degrees. This even starts to extend to programming languages. Despite android running a java virtual machine, java(and C) is no longer sufficient to use all features of the platform. Now, we have to switch to Kotlin to use certain concurrency features etc. I think the pace of change in this has direct impact on overall software quality we have now