Moore's Law

The thing about Moore's law - for science fiction it's a stone cold motherfucker. I was just reading a book (which shall remain unnamed) that was first printed in 1982. It's a good book, but I've been trying to ignore a series of typewriter references. This book even says something along the line of "he did most of his writing on the computer of course, but the typewriter was still necessary for filling out forms and the like."

Well - I just hit the scene where a police detective realized someone broke into his office and accessed his files (this is 2007 by the way). He goes into his trash can and retrieves his old typewriter ribbon and reads off it - to determine what the person copied from his files.

Honestly you can't suspend disbelief when you read that. You just can't. It's not like you can blame the author - who could predict Adobe Acrobat and web forms in 1982 - two years before the very first Macintosh?

My nephew is in fifth grade. My suspicion is that if I handed him a typewriter ribbon he wouldn't be able to identify it. (Hmm - I'll ask him next time I talk to him.) I wonder what he would make of Resident Evil's save system?