Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose, as they say in France. Although, in France, they use those funny upside-down 5 symbols under some of the letters. I don't know which ones.

Computers are much more powerful than they were in 1983, but the price has remained fairly constant. In 1983 £1,735 would have bought you a pretty powerful machine, and that is still true today. The machine would be immeasurably more powerful, but you still rise at the sound of a bell. Why is that?

"With a minimum of instruction-book reading, anyone should be able to operate a machine effectively."

And indeed this is also true; the computers of 1983 were not all that hard to use (you switched them on, loaded Wordstar or what-have-you, and biff! there you were). The software itself was a bastard, though. People who complain about nested menus and inconsistent interface paradigms when confronted with the latest version of Word would agree that we are closer now to perfection than in the days when the 'interface' was a single line with AL [RC] MN ST LD SA LC 14,235 written on it, and you selected text by pressing CMD-M and then moving to the end of the bar and pressing CMD-E and so on.

The sound card in my PC is more powerful, and has more memory, than the 'Epson on the facing page'. But I am no more advanced than I was in 1983.