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> Was it VC that killed computing?

That certainly played a role. But as your first citation already suggests, another major factor is that personal computers have steadily evolved into incredibly complicated systems, the details of which are way beyond what can be harnessed by anyone with the means and willingness to learn...

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there's also a tension between making things simple and making things customisable. The reality is that for most a computer is not a hobby but a tool. They use it to do something and do not want to babysit it. The simpler, the better. Ideally no interaction required beside the interaction you want.

It's similar to cars. Nobody can fix todays cars besides professionals and I bet most have really no idea what's going. But most also don't care because they do not view cars as a hobby but as a tool that just has to work (it usually just works). If they are not required to fix them themselves they won't engage with it at all.

Except todays applications are way less reliable than what we used two decades ago. It's not that we don't _nee to fix them anymore, quite the opposite. Instead we just learned to ignore those screwups, manually refreshing a page when it fails.

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