The crucial differencee between Gordon Bell's take on MyLifeBits and Co-Pilot is that the first was to empower you, the user of these computing resources, give you the benefits of perfect recall, augmenting your abilities. What corporate giants are creating, however, is all about empowering them to squeeze more money from you via an illusion of value that is mostly aimed at making you dependent and addicted.
It's quite simply where the money is so you don't have to even postulate subversive intent on their part: even the most "don't do evil" oriented company will just naturally steer in that direction, because money exerts gravity and more money changes how humans and computers move relative to each other.
"My" first PC was a PDP-11, actually a DEC Professional 350 that sat on my home desk for a few month and unfortunately only as a loan, while I did work for a bigger PDP-11 at the office. Going back from that multi-tasking machine to x86 PCs on DOS was so traumatic, that I tried to escape via Unix as early as on a 80286, when Microport's System V Rel 2 simply wasn't ready yet for prime time and the compiler often spew out random garbage. Boy was I happy when I finally got my own VAX via an 80386, although it was always kept somewhat short of what VAXes could do until Mendel Rosenblum and Diane Greene forced Intel to include hardware VM support into x86.
I've also always been a history buff and Gordon's wonderful videos on the early history of computing were just top notch. His interview where Ken Olson, the DEC founder, confesses having messed up on the PC, just showed the big souls and humility these guys had. And arguably opting for ECL vs CMOS might have been worse. Today's IT leaders seem robotic maniacs or worse in comparison.
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