Yeah, I'm not sure where this incredibly open world of 1999 (to say nothing of 1989 or 1979) existed.
Telephony has always been very closed--fringe phone phreaking notwithstanding. Heck, some of us have been around long enough to remember when you had to rent a phone from a regulated monopoly.
And in the 90s, Windows was mostly your choice in a computer. You could build your own PCs but you mostly had to run Windows. (Linux was still quite early days at that time.)
Access to computing under the hood is much more democratized than it used to be even if the vast majority of people choose to use effectively appliances for certain tasks.
And, if I recall correctly, in the '90s, you had to pay for developer tools for Windows. (Or Mac, but Windows was, indeed, mostly your choice in a computer.) Today, every mainstream computer shipped—Mac and Windows—has a dizzying variety of free-as-in-beer development environments available for them, many also free-as-in-freedom.
Yes. Developer tools (and consumer software generally) were quite expensive. A typical compiler from Microsoft was hundreds of dollars. (Borland drove pricing down somewhat.) I forget what an MSDN subscription cost but it wasn't cheap.
Telephony has always been very closed--fringe phone phreaking notwithstanding. Heck, some of us have been around long enough to remember when you had to rent a phone from a regulated monopoly.
And in the 90s, Windows was mostly your choice in a computer. You could build your own PCs but you mostly had to run Windows. (Linux was still quite early days at that time.)
Access to computing under the hood is much more democratized than it used to be even if the vast majority of people choose to use effectively appliances for certain tasks.