Those not around (or aware enough) back then don't grasp how staggeringly little computing power there was, and how enormous the effort to do that paltry proces

Those not around (or aware enough) back then don't grasp how staggeringly little computing power there was, and how enormous the effort to do that paltry processing. Sure there were "desktop computers", but they barely did anything; a computer sophisticated enough to do anything meaningful in one's home would have required an entire room devoted to it - and still wouldn't do much. Today's Lightning cable literally contains more processing power than a "home computer" from the early 1980s. "Document processing", today a simple matter of scanning a paper at >300dpi and running OCR, was a huge undertaking just to identify & fragment documents (varying extreme compression of components based on differing legal importance of preprinted content vs handwritten content vs legally-binding signatures) precisely because there was so very little space to store anything in. One common image today could easily overwhelm an entire storage unit back then. (Tangent: I believe this is a major & widely-disbelieved source of much of the consternation surrounding Obama's birth certificate). The notion of utility-level remote computing was necessitated by computing problems of real practicality requiring such scale, not just of straight capacity but of complexity to squeeze maximum usability out of such under-powered hardware, that doing it at home was unthinkable. Nobody expected computing power would increase, per volume & dollar, so incredibly much. Some 40 years later, processors are about 10,000x faster, displays 10,000x more detailed, and memory & storage & networking 10,000,000x greater. I remember my brother taking all day to download a large book; today we use as much data for 1 web page. "These experts believed that an isolated computer at home would be too under-powered to be worthwhile." It was. Think: modern insulated automated-HVAC 2000 sq ft home, vs mud hut. They couldn't comprehend what was to come; most today can't comprehend where we came from.