And back in my day it was ...(PONG)
I remember when the rich kids down the street got Pong and I played it down in their basement in the color TV, and I had to have one. So I demanded a disbursement of my paper route money and ordered what I thought was the "same thing" from the Sears Roebuck catalog, and it came in the mail.
We didn't have a color TV, which was okay because the cheap Pong knock-off was only in black & white anyways. The controllers were cylinders with dials on the ends and you bounced the ball back & forth. You could make it go faster & slower. Complete piece of shit. As an antique, it's probably worth hundreds or thousands now. I played it about 3 times and it slowly degenerated in the Living Room until it eventually disappeared. It wasn't until my money was spent that I discovered that there was only one Pong, and the piece of crap that I had was a cheap imitation.
This was LONG before brand names of electronic games meant anything. There was no Sega, etc... Eventually Pong meant something, but more like a reference point. Certainly not as an indicator of quality or playability. Now it's a different kind of reference point. The first, I guess, but looking backwards and not forwards.
It's easy to see the future in retrospect. "If I were there at that time, I would have clearly seen that...." etc.... but if that were true then what's going to be the big-huge money-maker in 20 years, the thing that's right there in front of all of our faces only no one sees it for what it is destined to become? I remember the Apple IIe I learned Apple Basic on in High School. I thought it was a piece of shit, but the Computer Science teacher kept going on about how it was going to be the future, just because it was a step up from the old punch-cards, which I also remember. Feeding code into a computer by punching holes into a paper card and running it through a mechanical machine that reads the holes and translates them into if/then and for/next statements.
This is no "those were the good old days" story. I heard those stories from the generation before me, and they could only tell those stories because there wasn't any online documentation nor videographic evidence of what the truth really was, and that is not true today. The past is not a place to wish to go back to, it serves no useful purpose like that.
Instead, the past should be an indicator of what the future can and will bring. The opportunities of the past are no different than the opportunities of the present; all it takes is the ability to see things with greater level of clarity than everyone else, and maintain a believe in that clarity long enough for that vision to translate into financial success. There was a 5th Beatle, who never really made the band, and was left behind long before they became "bigger than Jesus". Don't be THAT guy. Nor do you want to be the guy that hires that low-life Mark Zuckerberg to do a minor project and have that motherfucker steal your idea and become a Billionaire.
