I don't know about anyone else, but in 1982 I was reading Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, John Brunner, Arthur C. Clarke, Lester Del Rey, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, Robert A. Heinlein, C. M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, Roger Zelazny, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Larry Niven, Piers Anthony, Anne McCaffrey, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Dean R. Koontz, Ben Bova, Frank Herbert, Spider Robinson, John Varley, Gordon R. Dixon, Orson Scott Card, Joan Vinge, Brian Aldiss, and others. I didn't feel any lack of SF; quite the opposite - there was more good SF coming out than I could possibly keep up with.

By then I had seen Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Flash Gordon and Time Bandits, so I had some concept of what SF should look like on a movie screen. In my peer group, Tron did not strike us as a rallying cry for the hacker/hobbyist scene. Wargames was that movie (a year later); Tron just wasn't. It was another SF movie, not much better or worse than others of its era.

In computers, I would absolutely and categorically disagree that 1981 was "blah" for home PCs. The Sinclair ZX80 and Radio Shack Color Computer (released in late 1980) were big deals because many more people could afford them than an Apple ][ or TRS-80, and in 1981 the ZX81 and VIC-20 were released, so 1981 was really the first big year for affordable computers. The C64, when it was first released, was an upmarket, premium priced VIC-20. Even in 1982/1983 more people were still buying VIC-20s than C64s. And don't forget that the IBM PC, TI 99/4A, and (in the UK) the BBC Micro all came out in 1981.

In today's world of PCs, there has been nothing to really excite us for about 10 years. PCs are mature - they are only getting better incrementally. Where the action is today is mobile handsets. My current PC can run a flight simulator slightly better than my previous PC. My current phone can run a flight simulator at all, for the first time, unlike any other phone I've ever had. Is it useful to have a flight simulator in my phone? Not at all, but most of what we did with computers in 1982 wasn't very useful either.

After mobile handsets hit their plateau, I don't know what's next. I don't see any other devices on the horizon. There's no reason to suppose there has to be an exciting new technological device all the time. Maybe if tablets take over from and/or merge with laptops, or something.

Yawn. Call me back when McDonalds, Burger King or Wendy's lets you pay what you want for a hamburger. That would be mainstream.

Personally, I just turn to my wife and say, "Honey, who's that guy?"

Which games?

Don't even talk about paper tape. I once manually reconstructed a lost section of code with masking tape and a paper clip to make the holes. That was 30 years ago, but I still don't ever, ever want to think about paper tape ever again.

I have also used them in the distant past. But I'm pretty much 100% sure you don't still use them.

What high school was this? I want to send my kids there.

...unless you're analyzing algorithms and assigning them to complexity classes, or at least determining their order of operation.

So if you wanted to have a high school level class that was correctly named "Computer Science," what would you put in it? Writing working programs is computer engineering, and complexity theory is too advanced for high school students.

By that guy's standards, we are all "quiche eaters." Not a single one of us uses an 029 keypunch to enter Fortran any more.

Pascal was, and is, a good teaching language.

Since when are 6 digit user IDs a thing?

Nope. I guess we've been lucky.

Actually, yes. The last time I replaced a burned out headlight was three cars ago, as it happens.

Altavista was what Google had to defeat to become #1. It's like saying the Edmonton Oilers could "easily" have won the 2006 Stanley Cup, if they hadn't lost to the Carolina Hurricanes in Game 7 of the finals. Many people use the word this way - I don't think it's that bizarre a definition.

June 29, 2007.

The reason I prefer USB is that PS/2 devices often don't reliably resume operations if you disconnect/reconnect them. Would you consider that a technical reason?