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For anyone who's first computer interaction was a microcomp like the C64, sure. But i suspect that for anyone that had spent time with mainframe/minicomp termin

For anyone who's first computer interaction was a microcomp like the C64, sure. But i suspect that for anyone that had spent time with mainframe/minicomp terminals, particularly those attached to the Arpanet, it may not have seemed as such a far fetched claim. Never mind that France rolled out Minitel back then, and similar systems were also deployed elsewhere in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Minitel_in_other_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Minitel_in_other_count...

abecedarius 9y ago
I had a networked account in the later 80s. I also read Ted Nelson (Literary Machines) and Eric Drexler (http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_14.html http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_14.html) predicting something like the web but in important ways better -- there are ideas there worth returning to for today's fights about "fake news" and open-access science. Drexler was right about the timing, too. Those guys were on the futuristic fringe, but their ideas looked good to me. So why didn't I believe Pournelle? I was like, sure, someday, but his scenario seemed practically AI-complete. I did not foresee it coming so soon out of a little bit of the right sort of natural language processing plus some great engineering. I'm sure there were people with a better imagination! But hindsight really is way too easy.