[TUHS] The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Jon Steinhart]

Rich Salz writes:
> > What % of people running Chromebooks, Android or IOS
> > do any real programming on it? Even for laptops and
> > desktops that % is quite low. Most people run just a
> > few apps.
> >
>
> So what.  How many people fix their own cars, TVs, etc.

Probably not a lot, but having just finished diagnosing a failing
sensor in one of my heat pumps I'm one of them :-)

In my opinion, the biggest threat comes from folks like Apple who
are minimizing their use of off-the-shelf mass-market components.
Those won't be available if demand fades.  Just like with soldered-in
memory chips, we're lucky that we can still buy disk drives that work
with any system.

While I personally want to be able to decide how to handle stuff that
I own (another fading concept), my big concern is the long term effects
of making it harder for people to experiment and innovate.  Lack of
general purpose components or needing keys and licenses to tinker means
less tinkering which likely translates to less innovation which likely
translates to less long-term prosperity.

Jon