That's just the thing, desktops computers have always been in an important way the antithesis of a specialized appliance, a materialization of Turing's dream of the Universal Machine. It's only in recent years that this universality has come under threat, in the name of safety.

I wouldn't save the driver is "safety". It's happened that a few highly-specialized symbolic manipulation tasks now have enough market value such that they can demand highly specialized UX to optimize task performance.

One classic example is the "Bloomberg Box": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal which has been around since the late '80s.

You can also see this from the reverse (analog -> digital) in the evolution of hospital patient life-sign monitors and the classic "6 pack" of gauges used in both aviation and automobiles.