Illustration by Eric Hanson

Over the decades, as computers have become less scarce, they have been put to less and less valuable use. (I confess I have caught myself adding three numbers in Excel.) Computers were once used only for the most complex and important tasks, and the hurdle for getting access to one was high. Some Technology Review readers can remember the days of punch cards--the careful preparation, the waiting, and the cost of making a mistake. I'm of a later generation, but I grew up under Communism, which wasn't known for its abundance of computing power. I have vivid memories of participating in secondary-school programming competitions in the mid-1980s in Bulgaria, where there weren't enough computers in any given school district to pair machines with students. On the morning of a competition, students would study one or more problems, develop algorithms to solve them, write code on paper, and then painstakingly write down variable traces of the code on sample data. During a lunch break, judges would pore over the mostly incomprehensible algorithms and try to figure out which kids had a chance of getting a program to work. In the afternoon, a select few would then be chosen to use the few available computers.

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