>>>I started fiddling around with python and QT on phones and had this sense of déjà vu, reminded me of my experience with early PCs, the first of which was a Radio Shack TRS-80. Smartphones are on the cusp of becoming quite useful and we will be amazed.
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>LOL... I still have my Trash-80 though i haven't fired it up for a quarter century. ;-) I completely agree that smartphones do more than nay-sayers realize and that this is changing rapidly, even in the last 2 months.
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>>>Interestingly, the program I wrote for the "Trash-80" is still being used 40 years later with only one conversion to MS-DOS using GWBasic. I was blown away when about five years ago the user called to see if I was still alive in case something happened.
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>Yep. Seems to me we've been fortunate to live through a period of rare business insanity in which people became accustomed to the "spend, spend, spend" attitude of IT rather than the "I depreciate capital investment over 7 years, not 2 years" mentality that pervades most business. It began with definite business advantages if you adopted IT early and spent, but the spending continued long after the advantages petered out. Many of us made good coin on the backs of this. Now the focus has shifted to mobile and it's started all over again- except that MS isn't the driver of change this time around, they've cast themselves as Burroughs Corporation.

Or Sperry, or GE, or RCA, or Honeywell, or Bull, or (forgot, but I missed one, Ahmdal doesn't count).