Micro Circuits

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 w
ould 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.

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(c) Ashley Pomeroy 2001