Into my letterbox recently came a 30-year-old column I wrote for the very first edition of IT Week’s sister publication, Personal Computer World.

The article included a couple of inaccurate predictions. I happily explained how great content-addressable memory would be, and how the Von Neumann architecture was as dead as the dodo.

What I got right, apparently, was a prediction that the world would go “on line” and that this would mean the history of society would become the history of computing. I’m astonished that in 1978 I foresaw the internet, because I certainly forgot about it 10 years later.

Anybody could look at the first car, and imagine roads covered with speeding traffic; what was required was prescience of the sort that foresees five-lane traffic jams on the M1. And in the same way, I wish I’d been clearer about what “society” means.

I’m not anti-eBay, but the number of people selling copies of Adobe Creative Suite there alarms me. We have authority frowning on the online auction giant for touting tickets for gigs and games, and we have sniping scripts buying bulk tickets in the first place. I’m sure eBay does what it can, but the history of society is, inevitably, bound up with the history of crime. And now, it seems, so is the history of computing.