However, he rapidly thought better of it, and signed up for the United States Air Force.
"Very rapidly we have to think of the entire world wide network as the platform that software is written to, not the individual machine," he wrote.
Technologies that collect, process, store and disseminate personal data are developing rapidly and becoming ubiquitous: think of the fitness tracker that knows rather a lot about where you go running; or the social network platform that can link together tagged pictures of your face with details of where you went to school.
"If you look at the number of internet-capable mobile phones, PDAs and so on, they are rapidly outnumbering the things we think of as computers," he says.
The distinctions between London in 1962, 1965 and 1968 are presumably notable, as fashions and cultural attitudes changed rapidly as what we popularly think of as the '60s took hold.
They include fluency, or the ability to think of many ideas rapidly; flexibility, the capacity to use ideas and tools in unusual ways; and originality, the capacity to think of novel ideas and products.
We are rapidly coming to the end of the phase we think of as representative democracy.
"When you think of the theory of how things evolve very rapidly, this is exactly what we find in the genomes of Zoetropes," says Valente.
A small, energetic woman, Ms. Calkins strode rapidly in from the wings and began by asking the teachers to think of happy and unhappy memories of writing.
For instance, think of the raging debates we are now having about entitlements in light of a rapidly aging population.
