I am not he, but I may be able to offer some history/perspective.

There was a real fear of computers back then, much like the fear of AI today. They worried that the 'big brain' would put people out of work and take over the world. Multiple movies were made where the computer was the antagonist, including the famous 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The first computer I ever touched was called a calculator and I've heard a couple of reasons for this. The official reason was that people expected computers to be big and the HP 9100A wasn't very big by standards of the day. The second, and unofficial reason, was that it came out in the late 1960s, which was at a time when people had a real fear of computers.

If you're curious, I believe the model I used was the 9100B. It supported magnetic strip cards and punch cards to store your algorithm. You'd load it into the memory by swiping the card or inserting the punch card. It would output to a TV and there was a plotter option that functioned pretty much like a modern plotter. There was also a dot-matrix printer included that was like what was on the older POS systems for receipt printing.

Anyhow, they called it a calculator instead of a computer. People had notions of what a computer was supposed to be and this was not that.

At the time, I didn't really appreciate it for what it was. I think my first exposure was in 1971 and it was used almost exclusively in the physics and astronomy labs. It wouldn't be used in the astronomy labs until later, after the observatory was completed and the telescope put in.

This was all at Kents Hill, no apostrophe, if you'd like to learn more about it. It's a boarding prep school located in Central Maine. As I was leaving, we got a mainframe connection to Dartmouth, which was a 'real' computer, though I never played with it.

So, largely people didn't seem to envision much for the future of computing, at least not at the personal level. There were exceptions, some visionaries who saw the potential, but the idea of a personal computer wouldn't really exist until later in the decade. Frankly, nobody saw much use for one. Computers were pretty useless without a great deal of domain knowledge. To use one, you were almost required to know how to program one. Specialty software was the norm and interaction was limited without knowing how to program.

For the most part, games were also limited to hardware specific devices and were console format or, eventually, arcade games that were not general purpose computers. People really didn't have much use for one in their homes and, as mentioned above, there was a real fear of computers.

YouTube has a copy of the HP 9100 promotional video. I can dig it out, if you want. It was pretty remarkable but I wasn't nearly as impressed by it as I should have been. So, I don't really think that the future of computing was obvious to everyone. In fact, I'd say the opposite was true and that it was only obvious to a very limited set of visionaries.

Edited to clean up some verbiage and add a wee bit more information about the 9100.

Edit again. If you have 21 spare minutes and would like to learn about the HP 9100, you can click this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki1Inux1_wU

(I figure some folks might actually be curious about the tech of the day. That was pretty state-of-the-art back then and far more compute power than most people would be exposed to for the next decade and a half, if not longer.)