I’m not nostalgic for computing of the past. The computers I grew up with were fun but they were also bad. A load of things I want to do simply wouldn’t fit in their memory (or on their disks / tapes), would take infeasible amounts of compute time, or both.

But I am somewhat sad that, when those limitations were removed, lack of attention to detail by developers replaced them. Something like the Psion Series 3, Smalltalk on the Alto, or the original Mac were close to the best UIs that it was possible to build in the available hardware.

I don’t want a new machine that’s like the Series 3. It was a great machine for its time, but there are a load of things that I take for granted now that it couldn’t do (for example, the word processor supported styles, but couldn’t render the printer output, and it didn’t support spell checking). What I want is a machine where the same attention to detail was put into the software stack to make everything work smoothly together, to make common operations easy and fast, and to make it possible for end users to extend it in arbitrary ways.