There was a time (sigh) when everything that's happening now was science fiction. I dreamed of having a computer that could even store a video let alone strea

There was a time (sigh) when everything that's happening now was science fiction. I dreamed of having a computer that could even store a video let alone stream one off the internet. It must be a bit like living through the invention of the aeroplane - from crazy glider enthusiasts running down the sides of hills to London-Sydney in only 19 hours with a couple of hundred other people. Reading old versions of Byte Magazine reminds me of the tremendous excitement I felt about the amazing things that were happening and going to happen. It's difficult now to feel like that as almost every one of those things has come true and at the same time it all turned to **t. https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/198811_Byte_Magazine_Vol_13-12_Parallel_Processing_-_NeXT_-_Project_Management/ https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/198811_By... There were bad times when IBM dominated and then bad times when Microsoft seemed to be in a position to crush every idea and bend everything to itself. One of the better times was when Google and others essentially sidestepped Microsoft making it irrelevant. That was a time of some hope. We're back in an era of dominant players with impossible advantages who are extending that dominance and strongly impacting the world outside computing. Old dragons were defeated and bigger ones have risen to replace them. What do we really have to look forward to? A new technology that cannot really be exploited by undergraduates in their garage to defeat monsters because they're paying them for it? Trying to do each other out of a job by more frenzied use of AI? Huge corporations locking themselves into positions of such power that politicians don't have the security to challenge them? Space travel, communications etc being gated by trillionaires? The Microsoft strategy but progressively levered till it is applied to everything? But here we are on a YC related website. We've created this world.