"Innovation" ? You mean the term that was created because "invention" was too obvious of a stretch?

Exactly how much of what has been billed as "innovation" couldn't simply have been done on a mainframe with 3270 terminals? I'd say the entirely of the "web 2.0" and "mobile app" trends could have fit into that.

The actual hard tech problems that have been solved consist of like virtual machines, miniaturized computers, search engines, and LLMs. Which are great, for sure. But the majority of the user-facing software on top has been noise, outright trash even.

While command prompts and programming languages have always been generally poor (ie obtusely machine focused), I'd say they were at least honest. As if you put in the effort to learn something, you would actually get something out of it - not just the ground shifting under your feet. Otherwise you could just not engage, not put in the effort, and that was fine, too

Now you're basically forced to engage, and when you do end up engaging it's always the lowest common denominator surveillance industry entitled-to-your-data tripe. And while you can engage a little harder to run up the hill of self-actualization, the industry is even working on plugging that "hole" with captchas, remote attestation, and their ilk.