Escapism And Virtual Reality

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breakthrough now taking less than ten years to become accepted
(recent examples include facsimile machines, video recorders and microwave
ovens).

One of the most recent, and hence most rapidly absorbed periods, has been that
of the computer. The Age of Computing began with Charles Babbage in the late
19th century Babbage , grew in the calculating machines between the wars
EarlyIBM , continued during the cryptanalysis efforts of World War II
Turing,Bletchley and finally blossomed in the late 1970's with mass market
applications in the developed countries (e.g. JapanSord ). Computers have
gone through several `generations' of development in the last fifty years and
their rate of change fits neatly to exponential curves Graphs , suggesting that
the length of each generation will become shorter and shorter, decreasing until
some unforeseen limit is reached. This pattern agrees with the more general
decrease of length between other technological periods.

The great ...

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but
without the ability to modify the way they are configured, only a tiny
proportion of their flexibility is actually used. The word `computer' is now
defined as machines with a microprocessor, a keyboard and a visual display unit
(VDU), which permit modification by the user of the way that the microprocessor
is used.

Computers in this sense are used to handle more complex information than that
with which microprocessors deal, for example, text, pictures and large amounts
of information in databases. They are almost as widespread as the
microprocessors described above, having displaced the typewriter as the standard
writing tool in many offices and supplanted company books as the ...

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