Walking home along Brighton beach-front, late on Saturday night, my wife and I saw what looked like a corpse, or perhaps a drunk. As we got closer, however, we saw that the corpse was moving. It was also dressed from head to foot in pink lycra. It was a man, lying on the ground, his neck resting on a wooden bench, with one leg behind his head. As we walked past, he paused in his efforts to force his second leg to join the first, glancing up at us with an expression that said "And...?"

Mentally cataloguing this with all the other bizarre experiences I've had since moving to this town, it occurred to me, yet again, how wonderful it is to be surrounded by freaks and weirdos. Having lived for several years in a London suburb where even the wearing of an unusual T-shirt was to invite frantic curtain-twitching from the neighbours, I'll never take this kind of freedom for granted.

It leads to new ideas, to change and to questioning of the status quo, all of which are of vital importance to anyone claiming to be civilised. Both art and science spring from the weird, the unusual, the non-conformist. You probably wouldn't have enjoyed sharing a flat with Vincent Van Gogh or Albert Einstein, for example, but those two strange men changed the world dramatically, even after their deaths.

Yet there is a drive for homogeneity, similarity, compatibility, in so many areas of life, usually led by mundane people in bland committees. These Vogons (if you've ever read Douglas Adams) do their best to do their worst wherever innovation is concerned.

Computing is no exception. Even projects that begin in innovative ways tend to stumble once they reach critical mass, dragging themselves back into the herd under the weight of their own gravity. Recently I installed Ubuntu Linux as a dual-boot with Windows XP on a laptop. If I squint I can't tell the difference. True, one is free and the other is not. And there are all sorts of ethical and technical arguments to consider if you look behind the scenes. But, taking the stance of a non-techy end-user for a moment, I don't care: as far as I can see, one has a slightly better version of 'Patience', that's all.

Where's the innovation? We've had windowing operating systems for over 20 years now. All the new operating systems, whether Windows, Linux or Mac OS, are just variations on the same old theme, with slightly better anti-aliased fonts and colour schemes. We have so much computing power sitting on our desks yet we use it in much the same way we did a decade ago.

Maybe this is simply the best human-machine interface possible, but it would be interesting to see some alternatives. After all, homogeneity in nature doesn't work; large homogeneous populations tend to die quickly from diseases. Without the highly profitable anti-virus industry, the same would happen swiftly to our computer systems.

I've used DOS, Unix, DESQview, Windows (from 2.03 onwards), Mac OS (from System 6 on), SiBO, EPOC, Symbian, Palm OS, Newton, countless flavours of Linux, Windows CE / Pocket PC, QNX, BeOS and many more that I've forgotten. All had their unique features, but most had much in common, too.

I'd love to see a weird, new, different approach to interacting with a computer. I don't care if it's incompatible or non-compliant with existing standards. I don't care if the marketing department says it won't work. I just want to know that there's some real innovation going on in the world of operating systems development. I want to see the late-night, lycra-clad, park bench contortionist of an operating system. Just because.