I remember when people would vigorously complain that Toolkit X was simply unsuitable for any task because it did not conform to the operating system's standard visual appearance.

Now I struggle to even define what an "operating system's standard visual appearance" is. Apple's still the best but not what they used to be on that front even so.

I'll still die on this hill, but I think that the reason there's a computer literacy problem is because we moved away from following OS conventions (when they existed) and into bespoke, branded UIs for everything, and then eventually to web where every site and webapp behaves differently.

In the early days, if you learned the OS, those usage patterns and skilled transferred to every app on that OS. They all looked roughly the same, shared the same menus, shame shortcuts, same icons, etc. You didn't have to learn how to use Apps x, y, and z. You just had to learn Windows (to an extent).

Then marketing got involved, and then the web, and then suddenly every piece of software had to stand out and look and behave as unique as possible, throwing years of HIG research out the window.

I miss the days when there was no "standard visual appearance" for the OS (e.g. DOS). I liked the diversity of interfaces.

Years ago, I remarked to a friend that I'd spent half of my (computing) life post-high speed Internet, yet almost all my happy memories are from before that. It was the same for him, and we both explored why that was.

The homogeneity of interfaces was actually one of the reasons we came up with on why doing work at a computer is a lot less appealing.

I don't remember people complaining about Winamp being a non-standard UI, but if it were slow then there'd be tons of complaints - and many of the "fancy" UIs were terribly slow (or the programs were, hard for a user to tell the difference).