It’s making a surface level imitation of behaviors, without understanding the underlying reasons, hoping for the same effect.
So maybe Jobs might have made experiences that looked superficially similar to this, but he would’ve done it in a manner that actually understood the customer.
How meta. It appears I’m guilty of cargo culting the phrase “cargo cult”, since I superficially use it to describe really any modern form of tech fad following, all in an attempt to be hip with “modern” terms.
These foundational things are pretty frequently skipped or glossed over. There's a lot of stuff above and beyond that needs to be covered.
For example, in 1994, you probably didn't spend a whole lot of time talking about concurrency or parallelism. Most software didn't need to think about those things.
But beyond that, kids these days have a very different relationship with computers than we did. They very VERY rarely interact with the filesystem (in my day, that was everything). Instead, it's a slick UX with apps to tell you everything to do.
Back in my day, even fairly novice computer users were familiar with the idea of mounting/unmounting stuff because they'd pop in a 3 1/4 floppy write stuff there, and pop it out. Formatting a floppy was a fairly common occurrence (for some reason).
Things are just different. On the one hand information about this stuff is WAY more available than it ever was. On the other, there's a lot more information and things are constantly changing. You can see that in old games like starcraft. There, the authors had things like their own custom linked list implementation. You'd pretty much never see something like that in modern software. You'd get funny looks with people saying "Why aren't you using a library for that? There's `ac`"
I had that, turned out I had undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder (Asperger’s syndrome) and ADHD as a comorbidity. It’s a miracle I managed 20 years in software engineering.
Research on YouTube: Tony Atwood (Adult ASD) and Russell Barkley (ADHD). It should give you an insight into executive function issues that lead to depression / burnout.
Looking back though, a lot of things now make sense.
