In Praise of the Pencil
NJ PC News
October, 1984
The war of the integrated hardware/software packages is over. Actually it was over before it began. This means the requiem for Symphony, the ungluing of Framework, the disabling of Enable and the stewing of Jack2. The new packaged, developed and marketed by Dixon, graphite hardware specialists, is called TICONDEROGA. Mine is release 2.5. It is portable and powerful and uses very little energy, but best of all, it has been beta-tested for the equivalent of several trillion man-years.
What can it do? Word processing, spreadsheet analysis, database management, graphics, communications...in fact it is the ultimate tool for the mind and hand. It uses a special mouse-like Pyramidal Online Input Nuance Tracer (POINT), and an Escaping Rewrite ASCII Static Eradicating Remainder (ERASER) protocol to aid the user in all text, math and graphics I/O.
But wait, the best news of all – its operating system is entirely transparent to the user!! (That’s you!). What’s more, it comes complete without documentation. No more worrying about entering the proper commands, no more making sure that your filespec has a drive specifier. No more unforgiving error messages. In fact, its use is so intuitive, you won’t have to spend all of your evenings and weekends learning how to use it. You can go back to playing tennis and watching HBO. (There isn’t even a TICONDEROGA SIG group.). It is especially useful in situations where you need a hand-held device.
The idea for this kind of tool has been around a very long time, but now with the shakedown in the industry, TICONDEROGA’s time has come. It shatters the myths of the day. Dreaming of the paperless office? Ask yourself this: What has happened to your paper throughput since you “automated” your work with a PC? Do you find yourself up to your eyeballs in perfory* and paper? It’s guaranteed that with TICONDEROGA you will cut down your paper consumption tremendously.
LATE BREAKING NEWS: A rival firm, Eberhard Faber, has just released a competitor: MONGOL 2.0, and it looks to be a real beauty. Hardware wars go on. Next Month: The BIC Operating System.
*Perfory (noun, Origin: NPR, 1984), Strips of that noxious perforated tear-off stuff. You know what I mean.
