S I M P L I C I T Y   A N D   C O M P U T I N G  This is an
e-mail response I wrote to a mailing list recently, when a
discussion of how computers will have to change in the future
came up. It was intended to be a short response with a couple of
my thoughts, but somehow turned into this article.  On Wed, 3
Feb 1999, Blaine Cook wrote:  One of the points that Dr.
Raduchel stressed was that computers must become as intuitive as
telephones or televisions for them to become commodity devices,
and truly become an everyday part of people's lives....  I've
thought about this for a bit, and I've come to the conclusion
that this has already happened.  I came to this conclusion while
talking to a non-computer person who had seen the first couple
of episodes of a series on the history of microcomputers on
Knowledge Network (the one by Robert Cringley, of PBS fame). She
was rather shocked at the rate of change in the microcomputer
industry compared to other industries, and that's when I
realised that most people haven't