I was using the Internet before the WWW, and there was already a pretty good ecosystem from nerdy stuff to consumer-usable. Email, Usenet, Gopher, FTP, IRC, were all widely usable.
Gopher especially made a great way to index and search (with WAIS) things on multiple different services, without being a mess of text/hyperlinks/images/sound/video in a hairy ball like the WWW.
About 20 years ago, I was trying to get audio playing to stay stable, and have audible alarms from KCal. I did everything, recompiled kernels, nothing fixed it.
So I went out and got a G4 Mac mini, set it up with my audio and it worked perfectly. Within a week I'd shut off the Linux trash for good. Mac OS X does everything better.
For servers, I use FreeBSD, it's dumb to run Linux there, too.
Nothing's improved, I have the same audio problems on my RasPi in Linux. Linux is bad at just about everything, any other OS or possibly just a dead badger will do the job better.
There's a massive number of security holes in bash, shellshock being the most egregious. bash has some really terrible design flaws, especially parsing $var multiple times so you can't reliably break on spaces. Almost any other shell is safer and more productive.
THE ECONOMY! Everyone must return to work, despite the very low and acceptable risk of being eaten by zombies, in order to keep our real estate investments worthwhile.
Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. I first saw one in school, and while the rest of the kids took a turn playing a snake game, I read the instruction card. Hit break, read the program, decided I could do that. Took a summer class (for adults, I was the only kid). Got my own. Programmed a lot. Despite (because of) the limited graphics: 64x16 chars, or 128x48 B&W pixel graphics, there were a lot of games on it, very low barrier to writing your own.
Couple years later got an Atari 800, which is still my favorite computer of all time, and I make retro games or demos for it.
Budget's about half what it should be, but Keychron makes really great mech keyboards, you can pick a range of switches (I use Gateron Red, clicky but not too stiff; YMMV).
You should reconsider bluetooth if you can, there is lag in it, and sometimes just random disconnects if there's interference. USB's the way to stay fast & stable.
Use Apple's Numbers. Set up a small spreadsheet with autofill date, expense, note field. Sync it with iCloud and you can just open it on desktop as well.
Vim9script is fine, I write enough small scripts in it that it hasn't annoyed me. Vim's plugins, and NerdTree in particular, make it a perfectly good editor for this millennium as well as the last.
Society. Except it's not punk, it's the rich who are a different species.
Species. The first film is just Humans making a massive mistake about alien contagion, but the sequels, lower and lower budget, "democratize" the alien infection. So many tentacle babies. Everyone can have one.
RCS is not end-to-end encrypted, so their bubbles will remain green.
Google's proprietary extensions add E2EE, and Apple's not going to pull a Beeper on Google.