Did anyone feel, as I did back when the idea of the "smart phone" was first starting to pervade the culture of consumer electronics, a lot of excitement that turned out to be completely betrayed by the actual products that emerged?

I first really got into personal #computing in the late 1980s, after some earlier exposures to the possibilities of personal computers through school (and a bit of tantalizing glimpses of my RL father's professional work as a biologist and FORTRAN programmer.) From my folks I got a couple Commodores at home to play with, then a Mac laptop later, and in my first couple college years I encountered the #Internet and the world of Mac shareware and things seemed really promising for a while.

They would grow progressively less promising as the 1990s decayed towards 1999, the world's last good year. The failure of #BeOS was a major blow, as was the return of #SteveJobs and the consequent transmogrification of #Apple from a quirky and innovative company into a slick corporate machine for repackaging existing technology. There would be no more weird but exciting sallies from Apple—no OpenDoc, no Dylan, no Hypercard, just...consumer appliances lavished with lots of Steve Jobs hype, and burdened with Steve Jobs's seething hostility for independent development. He didn't want any creativity getting in the way of presenting Apple's userbase (groomed to feel special and superior, remember "Think Different"?) with a gleaming monolithic façade of Steve Jobs-approved UX.

So increasingly, my residual enthusiasm for amateur computing was confined to narrower and more marginal domains.