Using the back of a different envelope, let's hypothesise some mutation to ebola that gives it a 70% mortality rate (the mean of the mortality rates you cite), and a flu-like transmission profile. Then in around 5 years of cycling through the population, we'll be down to about 2.1 billion people left on the planet. That's around the population in the late 1920s to late 1930s.

Add on your 69 years for 3 generations and we'll be back to a population situation of 1933 + 69 = 2002. In short, we'd be back to the approximate population position of today.

I see that you cite American flu rates, suggesting that you may be American. Given that, likely you live there and rarely leave (average American)? Of the last 3 years I've spent about 8-9 months (I'd have to check my pay slips) living in various countries of Africa and on my last rotation out of there an aircraft fault put us down into Abidjan airport, which borders the most recent ebola outbreak. My next rotation into Africa will see me in Gabon, in the thick of the "ebola belt". Ebola isn't a theoretical issue for me, and I'm paying close attention to the vaccine work, and would consider participating in clinical trials of one.

Yes, I remember the Psion Organiser. I never had one myself, but a guy at work dropped his into one of the chemical storage pits (filled with an oil/ water/ salt mix), and since we were 2 weeks from getting back to shore, he asked me if I could try and bring it back to life. All I did was clean it - very carefully, inside and out, water, alcohol, water, alcohol - and then dry it very, very carefully. But it worked when I put it back together, which allowed him to back it up. And it carried on working until the next hitch on the vessel, which astonished everyone.

That stuck in my memory for 8 years later when I was looking for something better then a Nokia Communicator, and which I'd be able to take to work. I wasn't disappointed by the hardware Psion were selling then.

Sure, it was running a great OS for the time but that OS did not have the kind of app ecosystem that the iPad does.

And it didn't need it.

Writing documents - covered on the stock ROM (and you could get converters to go to Word and or Write formats too).

Spreadsheets - I could make the stock ROM's spreadsheet do the calculations for steering oil wells. Other people I knew ran their stock portfolios on their Psions. Converters available.

Drawing ... well, you could do it. The 4-shade grey screen was a limit there, but it was good enough for my purposes. Converters available.

Database - again, good enough for my purposes. I knew a mud man who did his stock control on one, so I guess that was good enough for him.

Presentations ... I think they didn't see making presentations as being a use case.

There were a LOT of other apps out there - I remember buying several, such as astronomical tools - but you could take the machine out of it's box on Xmas day and be up and running for any regular office tasks.

I used a Compaq desktop system which included a touch screen in 1989. It worked - and since I was new to computers then (I didn't actually have one at home at the time, and at work we used industrial rackmounts with teleprinter terminals and HP 9800 series systems for report writing.) The technology for touchscreens is decades old. IIRC those touch screens added about $1500 to the cost of the system, which wasn't a particular problem. If MS had agreed to include the drivers for them in Windows 3.0, then we'd probably have had the touchscreen revolution in 1991.

We hooked those systems up to the old Motorola analogue mobile phones - we could get 2400 BPS data links from 70 miles offshore. Since the antennae for a formal radio system would have cost 10s of thousands of dollars for installation, and be repeated each time we needed to hire a vessel, then the price of the touchscreen didn't seem too unreasonable. We saved hundreds of thousands over the years that system was working!

Ahhh, memories. Xenix! X! Multiple overlapping windows! All so new then.

... Interesting.

And with an $800 BoM, you'd have been up against a £400 Psion 5 (retail cost), which included all applications necessary (was a web browser considered necessary at the time? I honestly can't remember. I know I did do some web browsing on it, because it would connect well to my Sony mobile or Nokia Communicator ; but I honestly can't remember if the web browser was built in or one I chose)., a large installed base of users with their own applications from the 3- and 5- series and an established dealer network.

Oh, hang on - you priced things in dollars. American? Then no Psion dealer network. Maybe you'd have survived.

Technologies that had to mature before the tablet computers became practical:
Wifi networking.

Useful, I'll agree. Not "necessary". I ran cables throughout the old house in the mid-1990s, and was getting a stable 100MBPS connection from any computer from about 1996 until we left in 2012. If I had a guest and I wanted to provide them with WiFi, I'd turn on the laptops WiFi card and the last time I did it, they could get half the connection speed that I had through the cable. I was considering running 1000-base, but would probably have left it until the previous cable was 20 years old before replacing it.

Capacitive Touchscreens -- Most early designs used a stylus, which sucks, and had poor resolution to boot

I used a touch screen with a stylus. You might think that they suck, but I'm perfectly happy with them. My Psion used one (and I never lost one!) and my last - or last-but-one - phone also had a stylus (which I also didn't lose, until I lost the phone itself). You might think that they suck, but that's a subjective opinion, not an objective fact.

Low power but still acceptably fast processors -- A huge sticking point, lots of early tablets had extremely poor battery life on top of being slow

Yeah ... in 2000 I objected so badly to replacing the AA cells (rechargeable or primary) EVERY DAMNED MONTH. It was such a pain in the arse having to go to any shop in the world and buy two batteries EVERY DAMNED MONTH. It's so much better having to carry a charger (and the panoply of adaptors for the 5 different sockets that I meet most months) with me and having to recharge the device several times a day.

A touch enabled OS -- WinCE is terrible to use with a finger, and really pretty bad with a stylus. Symbian was never great. PalmOS was too narrowly focused on Palm pilots

When I discovered Symbian, I never felt the need to try a WinCE machine or a Palm machine. I just got on with using the applications and barely noticed the OS. Which is how it should be.

Battery capacity -- Battery technology has come a long way inetwork speed n the past 15 years. Early attempts would use NiCad batteries, which just aren't good enough, especially with the relatively high energy consumption figures from the old chips

See above comments about the horrors of a monthly battery change (Either NiCads, NiMHs or primaries).

The technology to make effective "tablet" devices was available in the late 1990s - Psion did it. To this day, it's a mystery to the community of "Psioneers" why they stopped manufacturing them, or why they didn't sell the hardware division as a going concern when they restructured to become a software-only company. If they'd continued ... well, the world is full of "if onlys".

Because it, well, works. The older tech worked poorly when it worked at all and suffered a much higher rate of failure.

Crap resistive touchscreens were crap because they were crap. Good resistive touchscreens were good because they were good, not crap.

See up-thread for comments about the Psion 5 family. I forget who made the touchscreen - I know that the display was a Hitachi part, but I can't remember if you could get the touchscreen separately. That was a good part - and probably one of the highest cost items on the BoM to build the device. But it was also one of the major features of the device, and essential to it's success.

Capacitive touchscreens are more accurate to use with a bare finger than resistive ones, which call for a stylus

[SHRUG]

When you want accuracy from fingertips, you use an implement. Be that a dissecting needle and forceps (I spend several hours each working day at the microscope - it shows), or a stylus, or a keyboard. Fingertips weren't designed for precision work. They evolved to their current form while we were still making tools by banging rocks together. By the time we started to make needles and fabrics, our ancestors were already "anatomically modern humans".

I used Psion 5s and 5mxs for about 10 years until supplies dried up - during the period that this device was designed. Applications and an excellent (for a pocket device) keyboard made the Psion ; the stylus wasn't a problem.

13 years ago I was using a Psion 5 pocket computer (running EPOC, later renamed Symbian). Terrible feature set - you could drop in as large a CF card as you could afford. Connectivity was by serial cable (I moved data on and off via the CF card, so didn't bother much with the cable, and often forgot to pack it.) A half-VGA 4-grey screen (internally EPOC could handle 16 colours, but the colour screens destroyed the battery life and wrecked the price point). A keyboard with good responsiveness and which you could type on for hours (I did all the time). A touch screen that worked. A suite of office applications which met my needs. And most important of all - it would run for a month on a pair of AA cells.

13 years later, the tablet market is bringing out some devices that are comparable with the Psion 5, but are all severely crippled by being hooked to an app purchase "store", instead of providing adequate functionality out of the box. I spent about 5 years after Psion stopped producing the 5s using ebaY to get spares to repair mine (the screens were not robust!) before reluctantly giving up on them. But that month of battery life ... irreplaceable.

I don't see tape being killed off until magnetic density in HDDs hits major diminishing returns. Even though there is only one tape drive maker these days (Quantum with the LTO line), they can keep advancing tape because the media has a lot more area than a HDD platter (or a stack of platters.) An average LTO-6 tape is 846 meters long, and that is a lot of space, even with factoring in the physical contact that the media has to go through.

It would be nice to see a consumer grade tape drive that can run from USB 3 or 3.1, especially if WORM cartridges were available, with media about 1TB native in capacity. Couple this with some decent backup software, and it would come in handy to mitigate data loss. Tape's advantage is that it is inexpensive, easily stored (drop a cartridge, and if there is no physical damage, it will still work), and can be set read-only in hardware.

I've wondered if a HDD maker could make archival grade hard disks, with media that can last 25 years or so. This might require multiple sets of read/write heads (similar to a drive that had two sets and could access different data sets at the same time independantly.) Couple that with a form factor that is easily grippable/manipulable by a robot, and that would replace both VTLs and real tape libraries.

I've seen a couple hard drives in laptops that present themselves to the BIOS as multiple volumes, although I don't know what brand they are (if someone does know the make/model, please enlighten me). One had a 32 GB SSD partition, then a 512 GB HDD partition. Unlike drives that have an 8GB cache, having two volumes allows the OS, swap, perhaps an application to sit on one volume while everything else is on the HDD.

As for the backup hard disk, that is a wise idea as the first level of defense. It can't hurt to have another means of backup just in case malware nails that drive, but having the backup drive will counter a number of "oops" issues (deleted files, etc.)

There is a balance. If you bend over too much and let them "do your job", there may be grave issues several months down the road.

The problem with that is the "it happened on your watch" statement that will be uttered come any calamities in the future. The patch they rejected that causes an outage later on won't fall on their heads. It will fall on the sysadmin's head. Even though it won't be the sysadmin's fault, they will get fired because management has to appear to do something, and the sysadmin was in the driver's seat.

One can't be a complete douchebag, but one can't just cede control over completely. If push comes to shove, it is better to get laid off because a H-1B is taking over than be fired for cause.

Another thing that might happen is that change management gets selectively enforced. One set of machines would be scrutinized where every change, even an addition of a drive to an array, would require a meeting and people signing off on the change, while the machines running a different OS would be able to be taken down, reinstalled, or otherwise modified at will without any paperwork needing to be done. (And vice versa.) Even SANs need to be documented because if someone puts both paths of a production box's MPIO links on the same drive controller, then reboots the controller, there will be Hell to pay.

Change management needs to be even across the board, be it SAN configurations, Windows, UNIX, router configurations, ASA rules, phone switch configs, VMWare configurations, and so on. If one group starts getting a free pass, then the whole system ends up being pointless come an outage that ends up being traced to undocumented changes in a part of the company that has gotten carte blanche.

Change management in even a SMB requires someone dedicated to the task of dealing with documenting changes. It requires a dedicated server, change management software, and someone who will maintain/backup/archive that. That server will be a PITA... until an outage happens and the fingers start pointing. Then, it can save a person their job.

Ideally, the change management software should allow people to put in their own changes. Say an admin is changing passwords or moving files from one filesystem to another. Might as well have a tool where items like that can be documented. Same with calls to a vendor for support, so later on, if something breaks, a simple search might come up with historical data.

All and all, a change management system is a good thing. However, it needs to be universally enforced with various grades of policies (emergency fixes can go on without approval, for example) for it to be of any good.

I expect by the time I die, McDonald's workers in the US will be able to become millionaires pretty quickly. Zimbabwe is full of millionaires, if you're talking Zim dollars. Of course, they burn their currency in the street to stay warm because it's cheaper than newspaper.

To be fair, give me an M1 Garand and I can empty a couple clips in 2 minutes. Same with my SKS. On my AR, each mag will hold 3 clips of ammo, so I guess I could go through 3 clips without ever changing the mag. But, most of my ammo wasn't shipped that way and I'm sure as heck not gonna waste my time reloading the clips I have. Those little clip-to-mag adapters are annoying to deal with, usually easier to just load the single rounds.

I wonder if the clips work better in cold climates, where people are more likely to be wearing cumbersome gloves?