> in 1998 if you were planning a trip you might have gotten out a paper road map and put marks on it for interesting locations along the way In 1998, I used ht

> in 1998 if you were planning a trip you might have gotten out a paper road map and put marks on it for interesting locations along the way In 1998, I used https://www.mapquest.com/ https://www.mapquest.com/ to plan a road trip a thousand miles from where I was living, and it was, at the time, an amazing experience, because I didn't need to find, order and have shipped to me a set of paper road maps. In the 1970s, when I had a conversation with someone on the phone, the quality stayed the same throughout. We never 'lost signal'. It was an excellent technology that had existed for decades, and, in one particular way, was better than modern phones. But guess what? Both parties were tied to physical connections. Google Maps is one product, and provides, for the time being, an excellent experience for the most common use cases. > amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly So that's a nice, relatively static and local database lookup, cool. I wrote 'green screen' apps in Cobol for a group of medical centers in the early and mid 90s. A lot of the immediate user interface was relatively quick, but most of the backend database lookups were extremely slow, simply because the amount of data was large, a lot of people were using it in parallel, and the data was constantly changing. Also: that user interface required quite a bit of training, including multi-modal function key overlays. This article has a couple of narrow, good points, but is generally going in the wrong direction, either deliberately or because of ignorance.