[m463]

Computers used to have unlimited promise and potential.

then at some point, the balance started tipping.

Things I specifically remember:

- half life required you to register online to install your single-player game from CD

- turbotax would only install on one computer.

- software started rooting around on your system and uploading the findings

- the iphone didn't let you install your own software

- microsoft. enough said.

[noosphr]

The personal computer is empowering, the thing client connecting to a mainframe isn't.

AI local rigs feel like the pc did in 1980.

[matheusmoreira]

At some point, we were the owners of the machine. More importantly, this was normal. We could do whatever we wanted, and the corporations just had to accept it. World changing technology. Limitless potential.

Now it's the opposite. The computers belong to the corporations. They're just generously allowing us to use them, and only in ways that they profit off of. Computers, arguably humanity's most important invention, reduced to interactive television, a mere vehicle for corporate advertsing and surveillance capitalism.

It's truly disgusting. Makes me sad like nothing else.

[ryandrake]

Computers were great when the user was in control and got to decide what gets run and what doesn’t get run. When the user was in the driver’s seat. When software developers asked “what does the user want to do with their computer?” and not “what do we want the user to do?” Now instead of driving the car, users are just passengers going wherever software companies are taking them.

[helloplanets]

Computers started as massively costly, corporation / government only mainframes, that much is clear. They've been productivity machines from the get go, they've been machines made for war.

What computers "are" has been ebbing and flowing decade after decade. They've been repurposed to something that they initially weren't. It was originally niche, and not at all the norm.

Then, there was a brief period when counter culture was pop culture. That was reflected in everything in the 90's, from music to computers.

[le-mark]

> Computers used to have unlimited promise and potential.

Imo 90s sci-fi had a lot of this techno optimism, even if the settings were often dystopian. Cyberpunk was pretty wild and who knows a lot of that could still come to pass.