You Know You've Entered a Timewarp When...

For strange reasons possibly related to a previous job, I have a version of VMWare Player installed on this PC. There is no real point to it at the moment. Previously, when I was working in Technical Support for a large Mobile Network Operator, there may have been some point. But now, since I no longer work there, it is more of a plaything. Something to allow me to mess around with other OS's, some older, some newer. I still have, for unfathomable reasons, a Windows 2000 installation disc from my university days. As a result, a basic Win2K virtual machine resides inside my PC. There is no real point to it. I just thought it would be funny to run an older OS. I suspect, as I have aforementioned, it would've had some use for me to research older machines in case some customer called up and mentioned they were still running Win2K. But now it is mostly irrelevant.
I have also decided to play around with Ubuntu. There is probably little point to it given I don't even use it in any serious capacity and I'm not intending to be a Linux convert any time soon. However it does give me an opportunity to put those old command line skills to some use. I once said that it was a good way to scare off non-computer literate people by typing in lots of commands into a terminal/command prompt style window. If it produces a large amount of output, so much the better.

This actually reminds me. I wonder what would have happened if the GUI, and by extension, the Personal Computer, was never invented. Or more likely, never caught on. Would it be like in those old cyberpunk films and novels where people just typed like madmen at the keyboard, staring at endless lines of text scrolling past at light speeds? Instead of having phones more powerful than many computers that fit into our hands, would we still be using dumb terminals timesharing on a massive mainframe the size of several office buildings? Would most of us even be using computers if it were not for the GUI and the PC?

We will never know as here we are at the point where computers may end up being the size of a pin and being fitted into your brain, if they haven't done so already by the time you are reading this. We live in interesting times...