>>>Only those with no imagination---
Were you even alive then - 1976?
Yes, actually I was alive then, and for quite a few years before that.
I was. Remember that was a time when being able to buy a video & watch it at home was an alien concept (pre-VCR).
Not true. I was shooting video on 1" cartridges in my HS film classes in 1976, and believe it or not, there was a movie sale and rental industry then. It was small, by mail order, and expensive, but it did exist.
If you had said to someone, "Someday you'll be able to sit on a bus and watch a video from 10,000 miles away," they'd probably lock you in a loony bin. Or just say, "You're a nutty nerd - let's give you a wedgie."
I think those reactions had more to do with the goofy grin, flood pants, and the bad haircut you had than anything else. :-P
Computers in 1976 were the size of small rooms,
I think you're a little confused about the whats and whens.
I lusted over SWTP 6809s and various Z/80 systems written up in Popular Electronics throughout the 70s -- too expensive for my paper route level of income. Apple 1s were around by '76, and the first Apple ][s shipped in 1977. Circa 1976 HP donated an old mini to the HS I went to -- it was the size of a four drawer filing cabinet. Apart from that, most of those were smaller than a Selectric typewriter.
Yeah, the Burroughs mainframe at my dad's office years earlier filled up the whole room, but actually, if you knew what you were looking at, you knew most of it was tape drives, line printers, and other stuff.
and they were just beginning to be shrunk to PC size, but they were hard-to-use (no keyboards or screens; they used esoteric switches).
Esoteric? Like the switch on the wall that you turn the light on with? Actually you could get a SWTP terminal with a full QUERTY keyboard and a 40×25 CRT to go with your 6809. Apples -- 1 and ][ -- had real keyboards.
Nobody at the time thought common people (read: uneducated boobs) would have computers with self-assigned addresses. Nobody thought there'd be more than one computer per home, much less 2-3 per person. Most envisioned computers as being like Star Trek - a single unit running the whole house. The number of homes was only 900 million, so having ~4000 million addresses was plenty.
The 1970 Census put the US population at 200M. By 1980 it was 226M. I don't know what the typical household was, say family of four. I think that'd make for a lot fewer homes, but really, what does that have to do with anything?
Again, there were people -- with imagination -- who were anticipating the computer revolution. Not unsurprisingly, they were right.