I just was talking with a friend, she's somewhere in her 60s, and she told me about the earliest computers she worked on which were the predecessors to today's machines
basically, anything before that was a completely different animal with vacuum tubes, no ram, no way to input data outside of switchboard type operation, math co-processing being done by mathematicians, no ram, no rom, etc
but my friend worked on the non qwerty keyboards, card readers, some tube stuff, and ram was the size of a large building and she remembers when the woz came along and pushed the field farther and faster than all the engineers in the last 20 years put together...she was at parc and they had no clue what they had and were going to cut funding for their co-creations of a mouse, gui, and ethernet (all thought to be completely useless wastes of money by xerox)
but then again, nobody thought that software should be sold but given for free, even when it took manhours to make the product...go figure
i guess hindsight is 20-20
leonardo davinci came up with something remarkably similar to the wright brothers invention of the airplane but there was no conceivable use for a flying machine at the time
i think it is kind of like stem cell research where people get it mixed up with abortion and george bush is alienating most republicans with his anti stem cel research stance while poor ronald reagan wastes away in his horrendous condition
wait, what was this thread about/
