Maybe @Leo should invite Alex Ziskind on IM to talk about setting up the Sparks properly and Macs.
Regarding AI, it is more the fact that the companies are exploiting people who have created knowledge in the past, without compensating them, then taking their jobs away at the same time.
They aren’t being the loom makers in this case, they are being the far cat factory bosses exploiting the workers
We used Compaq luggables quite a bit when I started work. Alongside RMs, Tandys and a variety of early PCs. Had a look around our local computer museum a couple of weeks ago - has all of them in there; got quite nostalgic
I used the top row, had the ZX81 and friends with Spectrums, I really wanted a QL, but they were gone by the time I had saved up for one, went with an Amstrad CPC6128 instead, then an Amiga.
Used aPC and AT in my first job.
We had the Galaxy game (yellow case with red buttons).
There looks to be a version of the handheld PacMan game I won from collecting bottle caps as a kid. (There’s a memory I hadn’t accessed in some time. I also once won a Sprite yoyo the same way. ) I remember the game being too limited, and I ended up taking it apart to see how it worked!
Regarding old technology: you’ll still see dot matrix printers in use in a lot of industrial or commercial settings. Really any place where you need to print a lot of text and don’t particularly care about fidelity (e.g. dispatch releases and flight manifests at airport gates). I have a Panasonic dot matrix printer at my house which is networked. I can even AirPrint to it. Why? WHY NOT? MWA HAHAHA.
As for AI, something that I think gets overlooked is the technology (or rather the companies behind it) are also making our hobbies unaffordable. If youre a gamer, home labber, or just in general need computing in the home, you’re more or less SOL. Everything relies on storage these days, and the craze has just destroyed the market for anything with flash memory.
They were also used until fairly recently for logging. In slaughterhouses they had to record the weight and findings for each animal that was inspected and that had to be without any break in the chain. A serial printed page that writes a line every time the measuring device is used (E.g. Fat-o-meter) or the scales, the values were spat out on the dot matrix printer.
That started to change around 2015, where the values could be written to a database with signing, so that the values couldn’t be changed after the fact.
I work for a chemical company these days and we still have some old dot matrix printers in the cupboard.
Regarding Harry and Leo’s references to the Osborne luggable computer, I just finished reading the book that Adam Osborne and John Dvorak wrote about Osborne Computer Corporation, called “Hypergrowth”:
NVIDIA’s profits double to nearly $60 billion on the AI spending boom
Apple’s M5 Ultra and M6 chips arrive — with new Macs hitting five-figure prices
Meta’s $16.68 billion child safety settlement and whether it entrenches Big Tech power
Bill Gates warns of AI dangers Big Tech won’t admit, plus analysis of the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack
Data center backlash in midterm politics, gene-edited cholesterol treatments, Flock surveillance, and the end of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
) I remember the game being too limited, and I ended up taking it apart to see how it worked! 
