The state of the art of computer science has gone (steadily?) downhill for the last 30 (maybe 40) years. The computers are bigger and faster, but the knowedge of what to do with them has decayed.
That time would it put it at about 1974, when the altair came out, and home users got to build their own computer for home use. Except I seem to remember that most software shipped in cartridges. The problem was when software was sold to the end user *and* technical support was offered to baby them along. There are a few pockets of resistance to the decay. A rebellion of a few programmers who refuse to baby their users, while at the same time enabling those users to learn the system. Imagine that... Hard love works.
