Well put. I wasn't even born then, but things have changed so little that the first thing thing that comes to mind is that I really need to see Tron someday. I doubt computers will ever learn to talk humna, rather, as we all see more and more every day, humans are going to have to learn to talk computer.
I was born in 1973 and by the 1980s a lot of people were convinced intelligent machines and nearly general purpose AI was just around the corner. There was tons of university and military funding going into projects to achieve this.
Of course, now the idea of that sort of blue-sky research is almost universally dead and the most advanced machine learning will likely be developed at Google as a side effect of much effort put into placing more relevant ads in front of us, which is kind of hilarious.
We will get there. It is just taking a lot longer than initially anticipated. I for one am not looking forward to trans-humanity, but I see it as inevitable.
Intelligent machine learning is 5 to 10 years off, just as it has been since the early 1980s.