<story><title>The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)</title><url>https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/3/250710-the-decline-of-computers-as-a-general-purpose-technology/fulltext</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ethbr1</author><text>I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of &lt;i&gt;software&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Specifically, corporate IT&amp;#x27;s failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming).&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s still a ton of general &lt;i&gt;value&lt;/i&gt; that could be delivered by general purpose processors&amp;#x2F;computers.&lt;p&gt;But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque reality where the only programs they have access to don&amp;#x27;t do what they want, and so their work becomes &amp;quot;working around the bad program.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I helped a lady on Friday at a midsized bank whose job it was to take a set of dates in an Excel file, search each one individually into an internal search tool, then Ctrl+f the result report and verify that every code listed in the original document exists in the report.&lt;p&gt;For 100+ entries.&lt;p&gt;Every month.&lt;p&gt;In 2023.&lt;p&gt;What the fuck are we doing as a society, that this lady, with a machine that could compute the above in a fraction of a second, has to spend a decent chunk of her work time doing this?&lt;p&gt;Example specifically chosen because I&amp;#x27;ve seen innumerable similar &amp;quot;internal development will never work on this, because it&amp;#x27;s too small of an impact&amp;quot; issues at every company.&lt;p&gt;Computers should work for us. &lt;i&gt;All&lt;/i&gt; of us. Not the other way around.</text></comment>
<story><title>The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)</title><url>https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/3/250710-the-decline-of-computers-as-a-general-purpose-technology/fulltext</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>karmakaze</author><text>I largely don&amp;#x27;t blame the specialized processors, they exist to fill a need. The transition to mobile&amp;#x2F;tablet has been very much a producer-consumer relationship. In the old days, normal users would one day &amp;quot;View source&amp;quot; and dabble in HTML and making their own web pages and journey into making their own programs. There&amp;#x27;s no parallel to this on mobile today. Perhaps the next generation that grew up on Roblox and using yet to successful end-user visual development tools will.&lt;p&gt;Is there a web-app like MS Access or Visual Basic today, maybe Airtable, others?</text></comment>