General Discussion

Computer evolution during 5 years: I learned Basic in high school on a dumb terminal and we saved the program on paper tape! You would then "read in" the paper tape the next time you wanted to run the program.

In college the programs were saved on a deck of IBM punch cards. Also started playing with Fortran and COBOL.

In grad school we wrote fairly useful Basic programs to do some pretty complex budget projections. And then we started using SPSS to do factor analysis and multiple regression to predict the stock market! (I really wish I'd put my money where my brain was as I probably could have retired by age 25).

I wrote my thesis on the main frame computer and saved it on the computer. My advisor said he'd never heard of anyone using a computer for word processing before and my thesis was printed by a dot matrix printer, on green computer paper with sprocket holes along the side.

Regrettably all letters were all capitalized, (you couldn't turn off the caps lock) which made the paper hard to read. IBM Selectric type writers were all the rage then.

Now we've progressed to voice recognition, AI, and next up will be ...thought recognition? Thought police?

I would love for computers to do more of the dull, repetitive work and leave creativity to the humans. However that is not what is happening.

What a long strange trip its been. And what a fast and even stranger trip its going to be.