this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 3 points 3 days ago

I assume it's happened with pretty much every technology at some point.

You start with a product that isn't very reliable or user friendly. You need good knowledge of how it works to even use it, and the manual process it replaced. It breaks often enough that maintenance is done yourself. Entire manuals will be provided that tell you everything about how it works.

Then as it gets reliable, the need for the user to poke around falls away. You can still do that, but you don't need to in order to just use it.

Eventually, they realise the reason they're still getting failures is that people are poking around and breaking it, so they make it harder to do that.

And then you end up with an opaque black box. It just works (until it doesn't), and people don't concern themselves with how it works. When it breaks they get a new one, or take it to a master of the old ways.

Looking back, I don't know why people are so surprised it happened to computers as well.