The More Things Change…
…the more they stay the same.
He stood … chatting enthusiastically to the cashier about the directions the computer industry was likely to take in the following year, suggesting that parallel processing was going to be the key to really intuitive productivity software, but also strongly doubting whether artificial intelligence research per se, particularly artificial intelligence research based on the ProLog language, was really going to produce any serious commercially viable products in the foreseeable future, at least as far as the office desk top environment was concerned, a topic that fascinated the cashier not at all.
– Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, 1987
Nineteen Eighty-Seven. (AKA The year the Macintosh II was released.)
