We're Not Innovating, We're Just Forgetting Slower

Summary

We’ve mistaken complexity for progress — and forgotten how things really work. A 41-year-old home computer still boots instantly, while today’s “smart” tech buckles under its own abstractions. In our rush to repackage yesterday's ideas with today's branding, we've lost the joy of truly knowing how things work. My Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Home Computer still boots. Forty-one years after I first plugged it into our family’s wood-grain TV, it fires up in less than two seconds, ready to accept commands in TI BASIC. No updates required. No cloud connectivity. No subscription fees. No ads. Just pure, deterministic computing that does exactly what you tell it to do, every single time. Texas Instruments Home Computer from 1981. Source: Vo Thuy Tien / Pexels. Meanwhile, my Google Nest Wi-Fi router is no longer able to create a PPPoE connection using my fibre modem after a “helpful” update from my ISP. But my PCs can still create a PPPoE connection, so I’ve wired the modem straight into the PC. Which means no Google Nest Wi-Fi. Which means all those Wi-Fi lightbulbs in my home? Not working right now. My fault — I know. This isn't nostalgia talking — it's a recognition that we’ve traded reliability and understanding for the illusion of progress. Today’s innovation cycle has become a kind of collective amnesia, where every few years we rediscover fundamental concepts, slap a new acronym on them, and pretend we’ve revolutionized computing. Edge computing? That’s just distributed processing with better marketing. Microservices? Welcome to the return of modular programming, now with 300% more YAML configuration files. Serverless? Congratulations, you’ve rediscovered time-sharing, except now you pay by the millisecond. The Longevity Test There’s something deeply humbling about opening a 40-year-old piece of electronics and finding components you can actually identify. Resistors, capacitors, integrated circuits with part numbers you can look up. Compare that to today’s black-box s...