<shudder>
As a computer programmer and a student of computers since 1981 I have to freak when I hear this.
When I first got interested in computers, we huddled together over a teletype machine (sorta an early fax-type machine - the typing noise you use to hear in the background of news casts) and played a game with a remote computer. We tried to guess the winner of a fictional horse race and played tic-tac-toe (an ever popular example).
I was around 8 years old and the year was probably 1971.
That was somewhere near Washington, D.C. or perhaps College Park, MD.
Of course, even the supposedly advance Virginia Tech (VPI&SU) used punch cards until the early 80's when we switched entirely to a VAX machine from a Multics system, at least for teaching computer science students. Shortly afterwards we all noticed e-mail addresses got much easier to send, then the addresses shortened and we had the advent of the internet. Then came the World Wide Web with the Mosaic browser (which actually followed gopher systems and early ftps). That's a good general outline of things. There are missing details but they are just that, details.
It boggles the mind to see how much things have changed in such a relatively short time.
I think "Future Shock" is a real possibility; we probably already see its effects but we don't call it that. I wonder whether some of us will end up living in a Brunner predicted "Precipice"-like town. Maybe we already are.