Comment by coldtea

I started programming 40 years ago as well. The magic for me was never that "you could talk to your computer and it had a personality".

That was the layman version of computing, something shown to the masses in movies like War Games and popular media, one that we mocked.

I also lived through the FOSS peak. The current proprietary / black-box / energy lock in would be seen as the stuff of nightmares.