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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right"):
losttourist@social.chatty.monster ("Flippin' 'eck, Tucker!") wrote:

This prediction from The Micro User magazine in January 1985 about where home computers might go, and how computer-touchers might still have different attitudes than the rest of the population, turns out to not actually be a thousand miles short of the mark.

#Retrocomputing #BBCmicro #futurism #TheMicroUser

Dave was in his bedroom, programming. His friends ridiculed the fact that he used a computer that was now several decades old, but he ignored them. So what if it didn't have two-way interactive speech, or even a speech synthesiser? What if it did have an old-fashioned keyboard, with the even more old-fashioned QWERTY layout? The point was, he UNDERSTOOD it. His BBC Micro had belonged to his father when he had been a small boy. Dave, like every other kid, had played with modern picocomputers, from wrist-watch size, which you held up to your mouth to speak into, to the ultra-sophisticated, about the size of his BBC model, but he thought of them as inscrutable boxes. None of his friends knew how their computers worked; it was not necessary to learn even a high level language any more to program them. You simply had to talk to them, and they answered you. His BBC Micro, on the other hand, was much simpler and easier to understand. He had his father's old literature, including the User Guide and the Advanced User Guide, both well-thumbed with the rear pages long since free of the spiral binding with so much use.