Retro Scan of the Week: “How to Make Your Computer Even More Boring”

May 22nd, 2006 by Benj Edwards
Boring Computer

Sounds awesome! Where do I sign up?

No, this is not a Photoshop job. Midwest Scientific Instruments really wanted to make your computer more boring, presumably by making you have to do less work to load a program into system memory. If this is the standard of “boring,” then I suppose my current computer is about 2000% more boring than the average computer in 1977. In fact, according to Moore’s Law of Boredom, this trend should continue well into the future. Moore famously postulated in 1968 that the Integral Boredom Factor (IBF) of computing devices will double every 12-24 months. So far his postulate has impressively held true. Only time will tell if bloated software companies such as Microsoft can complicate things enough to reverse the trend.

[Scanned by VC&G from Byte Magazine, February 1977]

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