Shatner plays it pretty straight here, and he does a great job of making the subject mattter interesting to audiences of the day. What's interesting about the video now is that every time he promises us "Thousands of transistors on the head of a pin," you can remind yourself that what we actually got was billions of transistors.
It's humbling from a software engineering perspective to contemplate how poorly we're taking advantage of the semiconductor industry's Promethean gift. My computer still looks a lot like the Apple IIs and TRS-80s did in that video, and the same is true for my workflow.
Shatner plays it pretty straight here, and he does a great job of making the subject mattter interesting to audiences of the day. What's interesting about the video now is that every time he promises us "Thousands of transistors on the head of a pin," you can remind yourself that what we actually got was billions of transistors.
It's humbling from a software engineering perspective to contemplate how poorly we're taking advantage of the semiconductor industry's Promethean gift. My computer still looks a lot like the Apple IIs and TRS-80s did in that video, and the same is true for my workflow.