[yorwba]

> Now skip forward from 1940 to 2010: apart from our obsession with little glass rectangles, the world would be fundamentally familiar.

This is similar to summarizing the discovery of space-warping technology by "Except for everyone's pockets now being bottomless Bags of Holding, the world hasn't changed much."

It misses the fact that computers are involved in everything today. When you listen to music, the sound is undistorted thanks to computers. If advertising shows a smiling woman, her face is prettier than life thanks to computers. When you see a plane flying overhead, it is saving fuel thanks to computers. Even mobile telephony requires computers. (Imagine having an operator in every cell tower, manually routing calls.)

It is easy to overlook, but lots of little details of our modern lives would seem utterly impossible to someone from 1940, and I don't think this kind of change is going to stop anytime soon.