I maybe could have done a better job of what so captivated me watching the 'The Computer Programme' and why that feeling's so different today. The idea of ordinary people buying a computer and programming it to do useful things was one. Personal address books was covered in an episode - that's gone. There was the implicit assumption that your machine and your data was your own.
As for specific technologies, here's my rough list of what we're either starting to forget, had to re-remember recently, or have completely forgotten:
- low latency, simple, native UIs that don't require a designer
- operating on data locally first, and not over a network
- information highway instead of doom-scrolling
- message passing (constantly re-discovered, and then forgotten because people complain it's not RPC)
- relational and logic programming - I firmly believe this will come back one day, but it will be called something else and look new.
- static memory allocation. turns out it's still incredibly fast to do this.
- software design
As for specific technologies, here's my rough list of what we're either starting to forget, had to re-remember recently, or have completely forgotten:
- low latency, simple, native UIs that don't require a designer
- operating on data locally first, and not over a network
- information highway instead of doom-scrolling
- message passing (constantly re-discovered, and then forgotten because people complain it's not RPC)
- relational and logic programming - I firmly believe this will come back one day, but it will be called something else and look new.
- static memory allocation. turns out it's still incredibly fast to do this.
- software design