Two things never cease to amaze me:<p>A. How prescient some of these guys and gals from the 1960&#x27;s and 1970&#x27;s (or perhaps, further back than that) were.  John McCarthy, Douglas Engelbart, Vannevar Bush, etc...  all of these folks saw so much of today&#x27;s technology landscape so many years before most of the technology actually existed (or, before it was practical &#x2F; cheap &#x2F; readily available).<p>B. How far we still have to go, to realize some of these 1960&#x27;s &#x2F; 1970&#x27;s visions.  For all we&#x27;ve accomplished, there are <i>still</i> things that Engelbart, McCarthy, Bush, Licklider, etc. spoke about back then, that we don&#x27;t have yet.  Of course, some of that is down to political &#x2F; economic issues, and not just technological ones.  For example, some of the things that McCarthy describes in this paper sound a lot like applications of the Semantic Web, which still isn&#x27;t fully realized for a combination of reasons:  technological, economic, political, etc.<p>The good news, I suppose, is that you can go back and read some of these older papers and still find interesting ideas for things to work on.  Heck, there&#x27;s probably a handful of really good startup ideas buried in the works of McCarthy, Engelbart, Licklider, Bush, W. Ross Ashby, Norbert Weiner and other luminaries of that era.