In the beginning was the mainframe. It appeared impressive with its printers rattling out a trance like beat, its many tape drives dancing staccato turns while arrays of lights on consoles and panels were flashing out some strange rhythms.
Rhythms that evoked visions of a future full of excitement and wonder, a future that promised possibilities, adventure and the freedom to experiment. Computers were thought of as our servants, which would be doing our work. Paper was going to be a thing of the past, and so was the necessity to fill in endless forms.
Did it really happen ? What we now have is the internet, which noone foresaw back in those optimistic days, although sci-fi writers foretold mobile phones as portable personal communicators. We also have the World Wide Web now - where banks can easily lose all our personal info that we laboriously typed into some of those on-line forms. Those forms are electronic now - pixels on your screen...
