Edgar wrote:
....
Was that all really almost 30 years ago??

The "March of History" has always fascinated me. In 1967 I got a tour
of the Apollo control center in Houston, with the 5 IBM 360/75's. This
was probably the most powerful setup in the world at the time; now its
less power than my kid's cell phone. About 10 years later I was in a
huge disk farm in Greenbelt MD where hundreds of "washing machines" held
all of the telemetry from all of the US satellites for 6 months. It
added up the the almost unthinkable amount of half a terrabyte! Now
that costs $69!

For years I've be saying that in spite of all this, the most significant
advances were from about 1840 to 1870, when the telegraph and the steam
engine transformed the world from the way it had been for hundreds, if
not thousands, of years to a world not much different from the way it
was yesterday. However, now I'm not so su are we on the verge of
another major shift for humanity?