At least Johnny Mnemonic hasn’t happened yet… although Neuralink seems to be trying.

Or having a mouse at all. Even in the late 80’s, mice were a luxury item. And those horrible resistive touch screens in the auto parts store were a nightmare compared to today’s capacitive phone screens.

Light pens were cool, though.

Yes! I dunno if it’s still reasonably possible, but I remember downloading a text copy of Wikipedia and thinking how cool that was. And earlier than that, back in the CD-ROM era (90s), digital encyclopedias were actually an exciting use of the technology and I was given one as a Christmas gift.

I might be misunderstanding, but dumb terminals are super old, dating back to the 60s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_3300). The idea of having your own personal computer, rather than time sharing, was very exciting to people. Like the Apple computer kit in the 70s, and the IBM PC in the early 80s. People wanted their own computer rather than having to rely on and pay for those centralized services. So I’d say that cloud services are more like a return to the bad old days rather than some exciting prospect.

Terminals existed in libraries even in the early 80s, probably earlier than that, to replace the card catalog. And to my knowledge each library didn’t have a minicomputer or mainframe in it, as that would have been way too expensive. I think they were probably using either dial up or some kind of old connection to a mainframe in the city, but I’m just speculating.

With what?

I remember reading in the 80’s, can’t remember where (this 60’s Time-Life book series, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Science_Library), where they were discussing the latest advances in training neural nets, and the idea that with a big enough net they could simulate the human brain. Maybe those Time books are on archive.org, I’ll have to look for them sometime.

On Wikipedia it seems that research dates back to the 40’s, but work was definitely in progress in the 50’s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_(machine_learning)

So for us old farts, LLMs (even though it’s different technology obviously) seem more like “finally” because since Eliza we’ve been hearing and dreaming about it for ages. Too bad that the reality of them is so dark! And every movie and show tried to warn us: 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Ultimate Computer (Star Trek TOS), TRON, Terminator 2… but we thought “nah, that’s just the movies”.

Yep, for example, emulation was being used at IBM in the late 60’s (and a descendant of it is still in use today, called z/VM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/CMS

Perhaps they expect they’re all getting laid off once the Paramount deal closes, so they might as well.

I need to know more about where you stand on gender/sexuality so I can decide whether to upvote or downvote you. /s

Agreed. I found this article, maybe it’s similar? https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Hormuz-Traffic-Stalls-as-US-Iran-Talks-Collapse.html

With any conspiracy theory I ask myself “Would I be able to do anything about it even if it were true?”. So far the answer has always been “No”. Therefore, I feel it’s pointless for me to let myself get upset or waste time and emotional energy on them when I could instead be doing something else.