Mr A,
I got my degree in Computer Science in 1982 so I'm obviously much, much more up-to-date than you.
Where I do disagree is over e-mail, we were using it back then largely to organise visits to the pub.
What gets me is how we see the same things coming around time & again in our business, but every time they're heralded as the great new hope.
Today people go on about the different flavours of Linux, some talk of a single unified Linux distribution. It was Unix System 7 & BSD back then, then we got into System 5 and the big "Open Systems" debate - OSF/1 etc, and all the talk of unification. It didn't happen then & it most likely won't now.
We also had the big "micro-kernel" debate (OSF/1 again!) and how we'd load a minimal kernel & add plug-ins to it to customise it to be what we need. This time it's the same debate with Microsoft through the Windows Server 2008 & Windows 7 debates.
The server was going to be the centre of the world and we'd have no intelligence at the user interface - then they called in "X", now we call it Thin-Client. Xerox PARC had the user benefits of it nailed all along in 82, but it needed Apple to bring it to market.
Of course IBM et al had other ideas - they distributed the intelligence into smart comms & IO controllers. Which is why now I laugh when they buy smart HBAs or intelligent NICs to go in the servers - nothing new there.
I guess the internet is different - I recall the early stirings of JANET back in 81-82, and how novel it was to run programs on machines in another part fo the UK and exchange files. One hot book back then for Computer folks was Ted Nelson describing something called HyperText with links in it called Universal Resource Locators. Hmm...wonder what happened to that?
The other hot book back then was Douglas Hoefstatdler (?) - "Godel, Escher, Bach.." - my son thought it was hot 3 years ago when he did CS as part of his degree.
Back then we had 8-bit processors on the desk and 32-bits in mainframes (or 48-bits). For the 16-bit or 32-bit systems we used microsode to make the CPUs give us a richer instruction set. Some people decided to take instructions out of the processor architecture & hailed a new technology called Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC). Then they told us that the way forward was through using microcode...and we had the 386 debacle. Every new turn of the processor screw sees us either losing instructions or putting them back. In 1982 I worked with a guy on processor-memory switching - guess what is in the modern multi-core processors?
In some ways, times do change but how often is it that when you look behind the veneer you see the same old ideas coming up again.
Yours, suddenly feeling old
batninth
PS. We used to play a game back then with the magic word "XYZZY", I even saw that in these very forums only the other day. Can't see it now, I guess the pirate lept out & took it with the treasure