We started down a road with more home cooking through things like Visual Basic. I remember seeing lots of useful things built by non-professionals during the era of VB 6, but it seems like nothing in the web era has filled that void.
The old hobbyist computers would put you in front of a prompt when they booted up.
I'm working on something like this, actually. Here are some 2-minute videos:
And while the blinkenlights in the server room start to morse at you through the window in the door in a menacing pattern, the guys and gals in server ops demand answers as they point at the avalanche of warning- and error messages that started lighting up the terminals like a Jedi knight fighting a swarm of mosquitoes in the swamps of Dagobar at midnight with his light sabre.
At this moment you can only begin to fathom what happens in operations at this moment, with orders being delayed, fulfilment rates dropping by the minute, pickers and lorry drivers starting to get pissed off at the nerd in IT who must have screwed up again and they know where your car is parked.
I guess what I really wanted to say is: be careful what you wish for, it might bite you in the end :)
Drag'n'drop UI, Python in the browser and the server, one-click deployment - we're aiming for exactly that niche!
And it wasn't web-based nonsense that's hosted on someone else's server for a monthly cost. They actually owned the results. That's a big difference versus what companies would offer today.
TCL/TK was great for making quick GUIs, but I never saw non-technical people use it for that purpose. Still seemed to be non-programmer, but still technical, professionals.
I've been poking at this problem: https://github.com/akkartik/mu