One thing I love about reading old papers/essays/articles is that it makes it so clear the particular things we take for granted now. It is remarkably hard to

One thing I love about reading old papers/essays/articles is that it makes it so clear the particular things we take for granted now. It is remarkably hard to step back and get that objective point of view about the current state of technology with no help from the past. > They will remember that such-and-such a person did some possibly relevant work on a topic of interest back in 1947, or at any rate shortly after World War II, and they will have an idea in what journals it might have been published. For all that the title evokes visions of cyborgs, Licklider here is really just asking for a search engine and the ability to plot some points on a graph, which is beautiful because these are things I do everyday, and they are indeed so useful and commonplace that I take them for granted, but even I couldn't always do these things in my lifetime. I also found the following incredible as a train of thought: > Yet there is continuing interest in the idea of talking with computing machines. In large part, the interest stems from realization that one can hardly take a military commander or a corporation president away from his work to teach him to type.