I was 10 years old in 1980. I wouldn't have had much of an opinion just then, but in 1981 I learned BASIC on an Apple II at a summer camp and started reading By

I was 10 years old in 1980. I wouldn't have had much of an opinion just then, but in 1981 I learned BASIC on an Apple II at a summer camp and started reading Byte, starting with a theme issue on AI (just missing the theme issue on Smalltalk). I started reading sci-fi too. From my standpoint of a few years later, I expected the world of 2020 to have seen roughly this much technical progress in bits, and also comparable progress in atoms (that is, more than we have seen). At the time it looked like we were in a bit of a technical-progress hiccup in the 1970s, but recovering, when actually the Great Stagnation thesis seems to better match reality. I'm sure there were plenty of people a little bit older who would've already found those predictions familiar and unsurprising, except to some degree the Soviet part (perhaps rightly -- the Soviet Union was certainly in decline, but that it fell in just the next decade may have been unusually good luck).