database computer dream died three times over. even microsoft couldn't ship it, though antitrust killed their ability to do anything. and i thought i had found some sort of secret way — the universal schema, before it fell back down to earth to a gazillion structures

my last gf kept trying to understand my persistent passion, my ongoing project for a better interface through some sort of general purpose data structure, and she just said it was not possible, and she had written a blog post about why

i'd heard that the kinds of structures i desired lied in smalltalk and i have yet to actually investigate this, but every technology fell into disuse because of some tradeoff. weren't lisp machines slow and prone to failure if you did one thing wrong?