Every time I consider the simplicity of computing in the early 90s (when I was a kid) I have a pang of nostalgia.

We've made some wonderful things together as an industry but the author reminded me of something poignant in his last paragraph.

When I was younger I used to strive to keep my computer running as long as possible. I relished the idea that in the future, it would never need to turn off. Now I live a life where I seem to be hoping to do the exact opposite.

> Every time I consider the simplicity of computing in the early 90s (when I was a kid) I have a pang of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a very subjective thing. Today, people fondly reminisce their first BASIC application or developing their first program that created a network socket. In the future, the old hats may look back longingly over setting up their first multi-server cluster or modifying an app to take advantage of parallelism or a GPU. Nostalgia isn't going anywhere.

Personally I think nostalgia is a proxy for a generalized desire for simplicity. Most people don't long for the days of swapping out 10 different floppy disks to install an operating system, or of messing around with IRQ/DMA and UART settings to get a modem configured. It's the simple things (like BASIC) that are remembered and missed.

Maybe something like a cheap Chromebook that boots into something like BASIC where it's easy to write simple PRINT and GOTO based programs, draw stuff on the screen, and beep and boop the sound card.

It's having access to simple and easily composable basic elements, like Legos, that made computing so accessible back in the day. Computer gaming was my big motivation.

So, this simple platform also needs a decent collection of fun and hackable games, and other useful applications.