Comments on: Behold the Computer Revolution

By: Yaos

Yaos — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:56:03 +0000

“To dictate a letter, he punches up his secretary, at her office desk or at her terminal in her home. She’ll type it on her keyboard— and the text will emerge in the downtown office, to go into the files and into the mail.”

Too lazy to go to work and too lazy to type his own letters. What a jerk.

By: Tracy B.

Tracy B. — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 20:56:40 +0000

Up until last year my office was still using an IBM 370 to do compiling… here’s to LINUX!

By: Theo

Theo — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:22:32 +0000

“What if computer-equipped authority, insufficiently restrained, should turn hyper-inquisitive someday? If every purchase one makes, down to the last 10-cent newspaper, is recorded by a computer, showing where it was made and at what time; if millions of telephone conversations can not only be recorded daily but instantly scanned to pick out key words considered alarming by the surveillance officers…. The implications surpass the horrors of George Orwell’s 1984.”

If they hadn’t used the words ‘10 cent newspaper’ you could have been mistaken for thinking that paragraph was written yesterday.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 11:11:59 +0000

“And so I may yet have a chance to sit home and punch my push-button telephone to ask a computer for the best car route to the beach on Labor Day, and see the directions spelled out on my TV screen. Or see my wife pushing those buttons to order bargains from the department stores, with the charges automatically deducted from my bank balance— without mistakes!”

I love the ‘without mistakes’.

It’d nice one day to see one of these advertisements which said something like:

“And if the boffins’ prediction of the huge rise in computing power come true, maybe one day we’ll have the chance to send our friends silly little games down the telephone line which they can play whilst pretending to do work, or I’ll be able to bore anyone who can be bothered to read it (which won’t be many) with my ill thought out views on some socialite, or maybe even we’ll have the ability to send pictures around of friends doing silly stunts with skateboards”