> It was early in April in the year ’83 that I woke one morning to find
Sherlock Holmes standing, fully dressed, by the side of my bed. “Very sorry to knock you up, Watson,” said he, “but it’s the common lot this morning. Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up, she retorted upon me, and I on you.”
See also: "ejaculation" used to be synonymous with "exclamation" and it's used heavily all across the Sherlock stories eg
"The ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that our door had been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had framed himself in the aperture."
> "The ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that our door had been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had framed himself in the aperture."
Makes the "romance" books my grandmother would read sound like they were lifted from the Sherlock stories
I had to consult with my elders to verify this, but I can now confirm that in 1950s England, "turn it up" meant the opposite: "stop what you're doing, settle down".
I read somewhere - I think in a previous thread, about the New Scientist version of this story, where somebody posted text from a site selling ACR services - that the real interest lies in empirical measurement of what adverts you're seeing, and the context that you see them in is of only secondary interest. I guess the ads you see could be matched up to what you buy. It's an "are our adverts working on this person?" question (and thus "can we show that our advertising service is worth buying"), more than a question of "what advert do we send this person next?"
It's a curious thing, though. We have this idea that economic activity with consent is beneficial, and without consent it's theft and harmful. But this is a rule of thumb. The vast majority of things people do are - variously - pointless, inefficient, sentimental, superstitious, idle, crazy, and otherwise indefensible except by the reasoning that it's our right to do what we like with what we own, what we've earned and paid for. This we call wealth, and having it makes us feel happy and secure, but to actually centrally analyze it and assess its usefulness would be a bad thing. That would only make its value evaporate. We want to be free to do dumb things, and not to be told.
I'm struck by how badly we wanted the opposite of everything on your list, back when a C64 was what a kid was typically stuck with. Well, maybe not the opposite of point 6, there's nothing fun about a locked-down machine. But we very much wanted graphics, and sound, and 3D and simulation and virtual reality and MMORPGs (and internet, or at least improved telnet). And we wanted to be wildly distracted by a machine that does magic tricks and spins fantasies. OK, we wanted to be creative too, but as an afterthought.
Possibly the joy of the golden age was in ruining computing for everybody who came after.
I started using computers with Windows XP and Windows 7 and the computer experience was way saner than what we have now (but that may due to the fact that everything was local in my town as internet access was scarce). It was a creation machine as well as a consumption one, mostly because it was not expected to have a 24/7 connection to the internet and software has to be file interoperable instead of having data silo in databases. No notifications other than system ones. And actual desktop design for the UI.
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