On the idea of being stuck in a local maximum of graphical interfaces, see the concept of “wheel of reincarnation” by Ivan Sutherland. http://cva.stanford.edu/c

On the idea of being stuck in a local maximum of graphical interfaces, see the concept of “wheel of reincarnation” by Ivan Sutherland. http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland-design-of-display-processors.pdf http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland... Rob Pike’s comment about this is very interesting too: Through the 1970s and 1980s, there was a continuous invention in how graphics, computing, and software interacted. With the dominance of the PC and the VGA card, we now have a largely fixed architecture for graphics in personal computers. There is some playing around with the software model, but basically we have a powerful, privately managed external "card" that does the graphics, and we talk to it with one particular mechanism. During my work on Plan 9, it got harder over time to try new things because the list of ways to talk to the card was shrinking, and other than the blessed ones, slower and slower. For example, a shared-memory frame buffer, which I interpret as the mechanism that started this conversation, is now a historical artifact. Back when, it was a thing to play with. As observed by many others, there is far more grunt today in the graphics card than the CPU, which in Sutherland's timeline would mean it was time to push that power back to the CPU. But no. Not a value judgement, just an observation. The wheel has stopped turning, mostly.