I was prompted to browse through old scanned issues of “Byte” magazine (available from vintageapple.org), after watching a YouTube video by a guy who has collected a complete set of actual paper issues <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lU537upx3c>. In the November 1995 issue, there was a back-page column by Ted Nelson (originator of the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia”) called “Things To Come”, where he casually threw out a bunch of prognostications on how he thought computing would develop. I was struck by this quote, under the title “Tomorrow’s killer applications”: My hope is that there will be no more applications, because future software will be set up to be tied together, piped together, scripted together. I would say that has partially come true. We have a lot of software components now that can be reused via scriptable APIs, or even just shell scripts. However, nobody considered that such usage is the anithesis of how GUIs work. Most of the predictions in the rest of the column were, shall we say, a bit wide of the mark. For example, the next sentence after the above was “The real killer applications will be nanotech bugs that escape”, which is perhaps best left to just lie there quietly ...