We probably all have fleeting dreams of running away and becoming luddites. 
Except for those of us who have read A Canticle for Leibowitz .
I actually have a dream that all this progress will one day give us the
freedom to be as outdoorsy as we want. But, then, I also want a jetpack.
There must be a physical limit somewhere! Quantum mechanics sets a limit. I wonder if a 1 Exabyte drive is possible. Anyhow its fascinating - I´ve been there too with a 30 megabyte harddrive
In my FORTRAN programming class as a freshman in college in 1972-73, we had to write and successfully execute several programs over the course of the quarter. (We had three of those per academic year instead of two semesters.) For each programming assignment, we had to first write a program in FORTRAN (a computer language, precursor to today’s Java and such, although no one writes programs any more, they “develop software”) that we hoped would solve whatever was the problem at hand. Then we sat down at a card punch, punched out the cards for the JCL (Job Control Language), the program itself, and any necessary input data, arranged them in a stack, rubberbanded them and placed them in the teaching assistant’s inbox to begin the execution and grading process, which could take several days to fully play itself out. Once a day the TA would take everyone’s card stacks, run them through the mainframe, gather up the printout and our card stack, and return them to us. If we had it right the first time, we’d get an A. If we had to correct errors and resubmit once in order to get it right, we’d get a B, twice would get us a C, and so forth.
The thing was, though, that the professor decreed that compilation errors would be counted as a trip through the execution process, thereby costing us a letter grade if we had any. For the uninitiated among you, compilation errors in a computer program are akin to incorrect spelling or grammar in an essay. Except that with an essay, it usually takes quite a few spelling or grammar errors before the reader says WTF? and gives up. With compilation errors, though, all it takes is one to make the computer throw up its hands and refuse to execute your program. This meant that as we wrote and cardpunched our programs, we had to be meticulous in checking that every character on every card was absolutely correct, because if we happened to misspell one word or leave out one period or semi-colon somewhere, it would cost us a full letter grade on the assignment.
The professor’s reason for doing this, which he repeated to us over and over and over again, was that computer time was so expensive that even the nanosecond it would take for the computer to tell us that we forgot a period was worth more, much more, than the minutes or hours we might spend scouring our hundreds or thousands of cards to make sure we hadn’t forgotten it. This was a life lesson he wanted us to learn, so that even when we became CEOs of major corporations and our time was worth hundreds of dollars an hour, we would never rely on a computer to check our spelling for us, because that would be sinfully wasteful.
Yer man is probably rolling in his grave 24/7 now that probably millions of kids are not even learning to spell in the first place thanks to spell-checker in Microsoft Word. I just hope that his final resting place is not a pauper’s grave funded by all the money he saved by doing his own spell-checking.
How’s that working out for you and your classmates, BTW?
My father’s favorite complaint about early compilers were that their output
was: “3 Errors”. No indication of where or what those errors might be.
I was still using a slide rule when I got my first engineering job way back in the early 70s. My first real computer was the original Mac with 128K of memory. My first real calulator was an HP41 with a memory module so I think that was 2K? I just got a workstation at work (duh) with a 64bit processor. Progress marches on I think.
That was back when computers still had a bit of p*ss and vinegar in 'em!
Oh goody, more space to store my satellite surveillance files on all of you …