Radio Psychedelica

I feel that a lot of software these days operates under the idea that 'you can have any colour you want, as long as its brown'.*
But would Henry Ford be proud ?

I remember when software was limited by the hardware itself. Even doing things like readable fonts was hard. So why does software now seem mostly limited by the programmers themselves?
Maybe you only can build as big as you can dream, but--holy smokes!--we need some better dreamers.
Looking at what the previous generations accomplished with the equivalent of sharpened sticks and chipped rocks, can you even begin to imagine what they could have made with access to the tools we have today? Today, for almost every situation, software is only limited by its designers.

Can you look at the world we have built, and feel that its improved by hammering every user into the same die, insisting on one mode of use, one code of concept, one expectation of utility?

We are not all running on the same hardware.
We are not all using software for the same reasons, the same purposes or to the same ends.

Its been thirty-six years of software, folks. But somehow we became 1984 after all.



*yeah, I know Ford said 'black'. But he wasn't really addressing this issue at all.