The ones with actual users ...

These are the sort of self-generating monopolies I've seen in the past 25 years of the internet.

Effectively, everyone goes there because everyone goes there.

A bit more than herd mentality, but makes any startup something which requires large amounts of energy to succeed and then keep going. Never stop.

Twitter has self-inflicted wounds, thanks Elon, but continues to limp along. I find myself less likely to visit because -- not everyone is there any more.

Not all Venture Capital are angels, some come in and kill the fledgling company and take it's IP, others wring it dry over months or years while skimming money off the top. Never occurs to some investors a company could be the next Alphabet or Meta.

This would then block the future as depicted in Minority Report.

"Hi there! Would you like to buy another [highly personal and embarrassing item]?"

There's a relief.

I visited Activision in the mid 1980s, when it was a shoe-string operation. Games for the C64 were coming along and quite impressive, including Little Computer People, which was running on a desk over a weekend to check for stability.

Seems it's all about IP these days.

They're coming for the upper bands which were available to Ham Radio enthusiasts. FCC doesn't care about us anymore.

Such a useless post and reflecting lack of actual knowledge of Fry's.

20 some years ago I bought my first laptop (still have it) at Fry's in Sunnyvale. It was still in the little grocery location, the shelves (and even former refrigerated goods) aisles has resistor and capacitor models sticking out of the floor. It's long since become some health club or other business after Fry's moved to a big store a couple blocks away.

In the hey day of the stores on E. Arques, E. Brokaw and E. Hamilton had about 40 or 60 cashiers, the queue moved pretty swiftly and they didn't take American Express. I tried to buy my first digital camera there and found that out. Went over to Wolf Camera to pick it up. Anyway, over the past few years I've visited the number of cashiers has dwindled down to only a handful. Few floor walkers, where once they were all over you, asking if you needed any help. Last visit I didn't see one at all.

At the end Fry's probably only had a dozen people working in each of their giant stores, a far cry from the hundreds they employed a decade or two before. The downsizing has been happening over time. Weep not for droves of employees losing their jobs, weep for the few who worked in desolate stores, with unstocked shelves who knew the writing was on the wall. They've been circling the drain for years.

The main hurt here is losing a chain which once carried just about everything the home hobbyist/maniac could ever want. That's been going on with the closure of Weird Stuff and Halted Specialties. I'll have to look to see if there's anyone left who sells components, wire, cable, solder, special tools, etc. I'd say they failed to plan well and we've known the eventual source of stuff is going to be our mailbox.

A number of sci-fi writers have already explored the topic of us creating something which provides the perfect breeding ground for the kinds of diseases which would wipe us out. I believe there's merit in considering these possibilities. We don't yet have enough data to determine if GMO crops are going to produce some new vile bug which would prove disastrous, however findings now state that advances against pests and organisms (fungal, viral or bacterial) only beat the organism for a few years, before they adapt (clever little buggers) and start over from square one. What do we do if we create a host for a super bug? Not like we can modify our own DNA every few years to keep ahead of the game.

There's a reason all the major devs have moved from Perforce / SVN / etc to Git...and that's because they were all fucking awful.

So yes, history would have been different. Git is still a bit bad, but nowhere as bad as all the failed SCS from the old days.

Jesus, it's amazing that guy even considered himself a programmer. He was an amazing businessman, in the way that any well funded sociopath in the right time period is...but was he ever really a "programmer"?

I know there is a lot of contention over what he might have written, versus what he bought / stole.

In the end though, the victors write the history books...or auto-biographies.

This is why I licence my code as BSD. I want people / companies / E-Corp / whatever to be able to take it and make it their own. Mix it up, re-work it, and not worry that I am going to bitch-slap them 10 years later, when they have a profitable product, and demand money from them.

My work is pretty specific, it's for a single game engine, and a pretty focused type of game. What I want is for more people to come together, benefit from my work, re-mix it, share it, and then perhaps...maybe...some of that to bounce back to me and help me make my stuff more awesome.

I don't give a fuck how rich you get using my work, I only hope that I can make a decent living off it one day.

Creating a viable eco-system of people who use the same code as I do, increases the chances I don't have to write a particular piece of code, and we *all* benefit.

I can't believe I forgot to mention Motown.

I think you forgot the following two decades. The 70's gave us disco, and then the 80's gave us rap / hip hop *and* electronica - think Kraftwerk, Numan, Yello, etc.

Each represents a big enough change from the previous generations and forms to fulfil your criteria. Certainly bigger than white guys stealing black guy's music and playing it with electric guitars.

I'll second this. It can play back 4k content in HEVC, making it pretty future proof too.

It looks more like it should be pronounced Cux (cucks).

Is that you, clean coal?