鈥淪hall we need a computer?鈥� You鈥檙e unlikely to hear that question, or indeed that grammar, today, but in 1959 it was pressing enough for in the 12 February edition of The 快猫短视频 just to ask it. In a reserved style and wordage unimaginable in contemporary media, E.M.I. offered to advise company movers and shakers struggling with the questions raised by a technology that was then barely a decade old. As proof of its good intentions, the ad has a footnote explaining that the use of transistors 鈥渃uts installation costs, saves space, increases working life, minimises cooling and maintenance problems鈥�. Surely there should have been a catch, but as we now know there wasn鈥檛.
By 1974, advertisers like the tech pioneer Digital were far more confident that all businesses would need computers, and their copywriters had developed more attitude 鈥� 鈥淢any manufacturers offer low-priced CPUs. Digital included鈥� 鈥� and we at 快猫短视频 had lost a word from our title. Digital鈥檚 appeared in our 31 January edition. 鈥淗ere鈥檚 what you get,鈥� the company announced: 鈥淎 new 16-bit CPU with 16K of 980 nanosecond core memory.鈥� There was also a cassette with 150,000 bytes of storage. Admittedly, this was in the cheapest model, but even that would set you back 拢11,840 鈥� more than 拢100,000 today. All an operator needed was to learn BASIC and Fortran, and make space for a machine the size of a fridge.
Twenty-five years later and it wasn鈥檛 enough for companies to own computers. With the dawn of the internet age every cool corporation had to have a website. Our 15 February 1997 issue carried an advert for 快猫短视频鈥榮 award-winning , the ancestor of this website. That was also the era of Netropolitan, our weekly column educating readers of paper about what was out there on the internet.
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The 22 February Netropolitan helped readers find their way to a live video about astronauts fixing the Hubble Space Telescope. It鈥檚 sad to reflect that few probably knew or cared about the properties of transistors.
