“The Lost Apps of the 80s” never went away

A response to “The Lost Apps of the 80s”, originally published on Secure Scuttlebutt at %rweoPItwNqwpL6yM7NNph6nljjTUAWXdUkvosSJJ/o8=.sha256

Sometimes Dave Winer says smart things, though there are often strange gaps (maybe he is like Kevin Kelly, who says smart things because he has surrounded himself with smart people but generally can’t reconstruct the reasoning behind those things).

In this case, the difference between the 80s and today with regard to writing tools is sort of clear: in the 80s, most available tools for home computers either were small-computing products or (as in the case of Lotus) began as small-computing products and grew due to popularity. Small computing products are quirky because they are created by a single person or a handful of people to solve their own problems in a way that corresponds to their own workflow; as they grow, they tend to become highly customizable application platforms with reasonable defaults because expansion occurs through supporting new users with new workflows.

The browser text field, like most webtech, comes out of someone saying “this theoretical feature is something we ought to have in order to compete; let us consider abstractly what we, as developers who touch only a tiny minority of use cases, would expect the minimal feature set could be in order to satisfy all users”. In other words, a big tech mentality from the start. You get a…