In 1982 Time's "Person" of the year was the The Computer ( http://content.time.com/time/interactive/0,31813,1681791,00.html http://content.time.com/time/interac

In 1982 Time's "Person" of the year was the The Computer ( http://content.time.com/time/interactive/0,31813,1681791,00.html http://content.time.com/time/interactive/0,31813,1681791,00....) and I can remember a MIT CS professor, I think it was Michael Dertouzos, bemoaning how this would further skew enrollment. (Note also that at that time most of the department's majors were on an EE track.) Computers were red hot in a way I'm not sure even the dot.com boom reached, and that boom and bust cycle was perhaps longer.