I was writing some code the new-school way yesterday, prompting gpt-4.1 through aider, and for whatever reason my mind flashed back 50 years and the utter freaking enormity of it all crashed in on me like a tidal wave. And now I want to make you feel that, too. In 1975 I ran programs by feeding punched cards into a programmable calculator. Actual computers were still giant creatures that lived in glass-walled rooms, though there were rumors from afar of a thing called an Altair. Unix and C had not yet broken containment from Bell Lab; DOS and the first IBM PC were six years away. The aggregated digital computing capacity of the entire planet was roughly equivalent to a single modern smartphone. We still used Teletypes as production gear because even video character terminals barely existed yet; pixel-addressable color displays on computers were a science-fiction dream. We didn't have version control. Public forge sites wouldn't be a thing for 25 years yet. The number of computer games that existed in the world could probably be counted on the fingers of two hands. Because of all this, I learned to program over the next ten years with tools so primitive that when I talk about them today it sounds like uphill-both-ways sketch comedy. You may not even be able to imagine what a slow and laborious process programming was then, and how tiny the volume of code we could produce per month was; I have to work to remember it, myself. Today I call spirits from the vasty deep, conversing with unhuman intelligences and belting out finished programs I would once have considered prohibitively complex to attempt within a single working day. Fifty years, many generations of hardware technology, from punched cards to AIs that can pass the Turing test...and I'm still here, still coding, still on top of what a software engineer needs to know to get useful work done in the current day. Gotta admit I feel some pride in that! This meditation isn't supposed to be about me, though. It's about the dizzying, almost unbelievable progress I've lived through and been a part of. If you had told me to predict when I would have a device in my pocket that would give me instant real-time access to most of the world's knowledge, with my own pet homunculi to sift through it for me, I would have been one of the few that wouldn't have said "never" (because I was already a science-fiction fan), but I wouldn't have predicted a date fewer than multiple centuries in the future either. We've come a hell of a long way, baby. And the fastest part of the ride is only beginning. The Singularity is upon us. Everything I've lived through and learned was just prologue.