All good points and I largely agree, but I think most computers even in the era you’re describing were used primarily for consumption anyway. The people who were actually creating things on their desktops or laptops then are probably still using laptops and desktops for creation. That’s my suspicion at least.
And the fact that modern computers (phones, tablets, etc) work so much better now has to be taken into account when comparing eras. The massive amounts of collaboration that modern gizmos have enabled is pretty damn cool, in my opinion at least, and we’re just at the start of it.
And as far as my personal experiences go, 10 years ago I made my living fixing computers for small businesses and at people’s homes, and it was kind of amazing that the average non techy person could use a Windows computer for anything at all, much less actually creating things. Most people were lucky if they could simply handle email and some light word processing. So personally I’d argue that our relationship to computers as a society is massively better now than it was in the heyday of the desktop.
