ABSTRACT
I am extremely grateful to my friend and colleague Bob Eadie for the preceding chapter, which I was simply inequipped to write. I do not have the requisite knowledge, experience or understanding. I use a wordprocessor; I am familiar with one or two systems and a certain number of software packages; and that’s about it. Like many of my generation I’ve dragged myself into computer semi-literacy, but I shall never get even close to the professional mastery of Bob and his kind. So where does such an amateur get off, writing his own chapter on the subject? Who do I think I am? Well, I’m like Patrick above. I value mechanical appliances and gadgets for what they make possible, not for themselves. Moreover, although I’m not for a moment implying that Bob resembles Graham in the same quotation, I was amused by his reference to hi-fi as the ‘rage’ of our time at university, since virtually all the Wattage-freaks I came across had one rather disturbing characteristic:
they had the most awful records/taste in music!
