I guess this means I really am old now.
The e- prefix. It used to be ubiquitous around I think the 90s, but then at some point must have gotten rapidly unpopular and basically vanished. The only place where it survived was in the term "email" as some sort of linguistic fossil. Though recently it seems to come back in terms like "e-commerce", "e-cigarette" or "e-paper".
Cyber-. I think the roots actually predate the computer age with the 19th century field of Cybernetics. From that it took on a strong role in 80s science fiction at the beginning of the internet with visions of augmented humans and livable virtual worlds. Then Gibson gave us the "cyberspace", which became mainstream and for some time described the actual internet - before at some point taking on a terribly stale and outdated feel like "information superhighway". But for some reason the prefix eventually reemerged with a different meaning and today seems to mostly refer to security or military matters with relation to the internet. I'm not sure how exactly this change of meaning happened.
If we get far enough, we might have multiple Space Ages-- the original Sputnik-Apollo era, the era when it starts to become viable for ordinary civillians but novel and likely still seeking a killer app, and finally the era where space travel is universal.
What currently connotes newness? Or is the present age so dystopian and pessimistic that we lack one?
I couldn't agree more.
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... username checks out
(gd&r)
Btw "Tron" the movies are a reference to the BASIC debugging command TRON/TROFF for trace on/off.
Edit: it seems to be false.
https://www.tampabay.com/trons-original-trailer-made-more-se...
> TRON is also a debugging command in the BASIC programming language, meaning "TRace ON." However, movie producers swear they didn't know this when naming the movie and just picked the name from inside the word "electronic."
Wikipedia agrees.
This just confirmed my principally suspicious attitude about trusting videos as sources.
Via Wikipedia:
...the Greek word for amber, ἤλεκτρον (ēlektron).
-r jumps to mind
It just conveys this optimistic, futuristic attitude. Like you can do anything. The only limit is yourself.
