Happy Birthday Sputnik

According to Computer World, "Fifty years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957, radio-transmitted beeps from the first man-made object to orbit the Earth stunned and frightened the U.S., and the country's reaction to the "October surprise" changed computing forever."
Licklider wrote "Man-Computer Symbiosis" in 1960, at a time when computing was done by a handful of big, stand-alone batch-processing machines. In addition to predicting "networks of thinking centers," he said man-computer symbiosis would require the following advances:
Indexed databases. "Implicit in the idea of man-computer symbiosis are the requirements that information be retrievable both by name and by pattern and that it be accessible through procedures much faster than serial search."
Machine learning in the form of "self-organizing" programs. "Computers will in due course be able to devise and simplify their own procedures for achieving stated goals."
Dynamic linking of programs and applications, or "real-time concatenation of preprogrammed segments and closed subroutines which the human operator can designate and call into action simply by name."
More and better methods for input and output. "In generally available computers, there is almost no provision for any more effective, immediate man-machine communication than can be achieved with an electric typewriter."
Tablet input and handwriting recognition. "It will be necessary for the man and the computer to draw graphs and pictures and to write notes and equations to each other on the same display surface."
Speech recognition. "The interest stems from realization that one can hardly take a ... corporation president away from his work to teach him to type."
I think that it is very cool that the ideas of people in the past are starting to become reality. This is what makes our species one that will hopefully continue to prosper. We need people with these imaginations to continue to stand up for there believes and ideas so that we can continue to grow and to help us catch up with other nations around the world.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9036482&pageNumber=1