Illustration of a white ball bouncing on a blue court between green walls, like a game of Pong seen up close

From Pong to Prompting: One Lifetime Inside the Machine

Fifty years of technological change taught me one thing: the next big thing usually looks like a toy until it doesn’t.

By Brad Ruiter

5 min read

I was born in May of 1970, which means I’ve had a front-row seat to more technological change than any generation before me got to see in three lifetimes. Not because I sought it out. Because it kept showing up in my living room, uninvited, and never left.

My earliest memory of “technology” wasn’t a computer. It was two white paddles and a dot bouncing across a black-and-white television, hooked up to a game called Pong. That’s it. That was the whole miracle. My two brothers and I burned entire Saturdays on that thing, arguing over whose turn it was, with no idea we were watching the first wave of something that would eventually change how the whole world works. We just knew the dot was fun to hit.

A few years later, my buddy James from grade school got an Atari 2600, and that changed things again. Now we weren’t bouncing a dot, we were blowing up asteroids, with dozens of cartridges to choose from, each one its own little universe. That was the arcade era finding its way into the den, and it hooked an entire generation of kids who’d go on to build the very industry that raised them.

Around fifth grade, a different friend introduced me to something that had nothing to do with graphics at all, and looking back, that’s the moment my technology awakening really started. His father was a computer science professor at a local college and kept a TRS-80 from Radio Shack in the house. The first games we loaded came off an actual cassette tape, plugged into the machine like a tape deck. You’d hit play, listen to a screech of static that sounded like a fax machine arguing with itself, and wait for a game called Pillbox to crawl its way into the computer’s memory. Later, that same house had upgraded to a whole stack of 5.25-inch floppy disks, and that’s where I played Zork for the first time. You typed a command, hit enter, and waited while the drive ground through the floppy, deciding whether you’d just walked into a room or walked into your own death. No graphics, no sound, just text and a machine thinking it over.

Somewhere between that cassette tape and that floppy disk, something clicked. The waiting was the machine working something out, and I wanted to know what it was working out and how fast it could get.

The machine gets personal

Through the ’70s and into the ’80s, computers went from something a business kept in a back room to something that fit on a desk in a bedroom. The Apple II showed up in 1977. The IBM PC landed in 1981. By the mid-’80s, kids who’d grown up on Pong and Asteroids were typing BASIC code into a Commodore 64 just to make a triangle bounce around a screen. It was just what you did on a rainy afternoon. But it planted something. A whole generation learned that a machine would do exactly what you told it and nothing more, no better, no worse. That lesson never left us.

Dial-up and the first real miracle

By the time I was 21, the internet was just becoming a “thing,” and I mean that literally. Most people had never heard the word. You could download a new browser called Netscape, and if you wanted to get online at the office, you did what I did: you bumped the fax machine off the phone line and connected through a modem running at something like 24 kilobits a second. For anyone who’s never lived it, that’s slower than it takes to say the sentence “that’s slow.”

None of that mattered once the page loaded. My mind was blown. I could search, read, explore, and pull down information from somewhere else on earth and have it sitting on my screen in a matter of seconds, or minutes, depending on how the modem was behaving that day. It felt like somebody had quietly installed a library, a newsroom, and a town square inside a beige box on my desk, and I hadn’t even asked for it.

The pocket computer nobody saw coming

Fast forward through broadband, through the dial-up tone fading into memory, through the dot-com bust and rebuild, and you land on 2007, the year Apple put a phone, an iPod, and a full internet browser into a single slab of glass and called it the iPhone. That device changed daily human behavior faster than almost anything before it. Within a few years, the thing in your pocket carried more computing power than the room-sized machines that once put men on the moon, and we were using it to argue about restaurant recommendations.

Social media rode in right behind it: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter. Within a decade, nearly everyone on earth with a signal could publish and broadcast to the whole world from their hand. The entire structure of information and attention got rewired in about ten years.

Where we are now

And here we are. The tool on my desk today reasons through information, drafts with it, and builds with it. Generative AI showed up in force around 2022 and changed what “software” even means, the same way Pong once changed what a television was for. I’ve watched this loop enough times now to see the pattern: something shows up looking like a toy, a handful of people take it seriously while everyone else laughs, and five years later it’s something the whole world runs on.

Pong looked like a toy. The internet looked like a novelty for a while. The iPhone looked like an expensive gadget nobody needed. AI looks like a toy to plenty of smart people right now. History says otherwise.

I’ve spent my career on the side of that pattern that pays attention early, helping businesses figure out what a new piece of technology is actually good for before the hype either overpromises or undersells it. That’s what happens when you grow up watching a dot bounce across a black-and-white TV and never quite lose the curiosity about what comes next.

Illustration of a woman in white standing on a huge heap of old computers, TVs, phones and gadgets on a green field, pointing ahead

The highlight reel

Fifty-some years is a lot of ground to cover in one story, so here’s the fuller version, including a few that most people, even the tech crowd, have quietly forgotten about:

Every one of those looked like a toy, a hobbyist’s science project, or a novelty nobody needed the week it showed up. None of them stayed that way.

Why it matters

New technology has always carried two feelings at once: it’s exciting, and it’s a little bit scary. That was true of Pong, and it’s true of whatever AI does next. But here’s the part that gets lost in the fear. None of what you just read happened because somebody kept it locked in a closet. We took it apart. We pushed it past what the manual said it could do. We asked what else it might be good for, long before anyone had an answer. That instinct, more than any single invention on that list, is the real thread running through all fifty-some years of it.

Here’s the part I don’t want to skip past, though. All that time spent chasing a dot on a screen, or waiting on a floppy disk to decide my fate, was a small slice of an actual childhood. Most of it happened away from any screen: finding a new spot to duck behind after you’d thrown a snowball at a passing car, or working up the nerve to slow dance with a girl you liked at your sixth grade graduation party. That stuff mattered just as much, maybe more.

I still feel that pull today. Some of my best hours aren’t spent in front of a laptop chasing the next tool. They’re outside, away from a signal entirely, using what might be the most impressive piece of technology any of us will ever get our hands on: the earth itself, still running the same way it has for a few billion years without a single update or patch.

Fifty-some years in, the skill worth building is holding the analog and the digital in the same hand, and knowing when to set one of them down.

By Brad Ruiter, UX/CX Strategist and founding partner at EKKO Studio

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