What this post is lamenting is the loss of some actor like MECC. We had great software written for students (not adults) at one point. Many of us here have used

What this post is lamenting is the loss of some actor like MECC. We had great software written for students (not adults) at one point. Many of us here have used it and fondly remember it. Titles like Oregon Trail, Reader Rabbit, etc... Unfortunately, MECC got spun-off from the actual Minnesota education system, then purchased by a giant ed-tech company and left to wither. The endowment that MECC (in its purist form) left behind faded in time. There is still a lot of great educational software out there. It's just all locked away on a MacOS 9 box, tied to libraries and runtimes that never made the jump to Mac OS X and then iOS. From the business side of it, we'd honestly need something of a PBS-like software company to reconstruct what we lost with MECC. I think that's the only way it'd work. The software would have to be made, not because it was profitable, but because it needed to be made and was a good thing for our society to have.