> By and by, the MOD decided that all the PCs were underpowered > anyway, and staff were able to buy their kit at a knockdown price and took > them home -- where the PCs were promptly used in useful activities such as > setting up community web sites, buying books from Amazon and the like.
And, more importantly, their kids started using the machines. Computers, to be used at capacity, require, IMO, a 'different' kind of thinking, and kids have been better able to embrace it, with the entree of computer games that require lightening fast thinking and digital dexterity. Private companies have had their difficulties as well. I remember that back in the late 70s I introduced into the company I worked for what was then the largest email system in a US coporation -- 67 accounts(!), many of them shared, spread all over the world. We gave all the execs, subsidiaries and departments terminals. The senior VP refused to use his; as he eventually said to me, typing was for secretaries. He had a certificate on his wall from a handwriting school, as a joke, but it was a telling one... So I used some organizational judo: I moved what had been a weekly hard copy memorandum setting key attendance-imperative meetings onto our email system, and 'forgot' that the senior VP still needed his in hard copy. After a couple of weeks, he came storming into my office and asked why he hadn't been getting the meeting info -- he had missed some critical ones. I apologized abjectly, saying that I had forgotten that he wasn't accessing his email, and then kept on 'forgetting. After a couple more confrontations, he realized that I was going, in my business and preoccupation with other things, to keep on forgetting, and he began using the email system. He went on to become proficient, to the point that one day, on the road, I had a flurry of exchanged emails with him, until after a dozen or so, I mentioned that I was in a hotel out of town--and it turned out that he was about four doors down the hall. One of the drivers of desktop computers was taking away the secretaries. I think that one of the things holding back the computer dissemination was the horrible Microsoft DOS operating software. Macs ran into much readier acceptance and users (and do still today). If Jobs and Apple had been better at the business end of things, I think Macs would be the global standard, that a mammoth amount of anti-computer frustration would have been avoided, and that dissemination would have been far quicker. Lawry
