Light pens were the extravagant thing on most microcomputers of that time. It’s easy to see in hindsight why they never caught on, but at the time they were the pointing device of choice.
IIRC mice were basically only on Macs and some high end workstations in the early 80s.
Except artificial scarcity means "supply" is often sat at the start line rotting away (or becoming obsolete), waiting for those making all the money while they manipulate the markets to increase their own profit..
Anytime people start talking about supply and demand, I can’t help but think of the lines from The Grapes of Wrath:
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains…
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Amazing how in eight decades and some change, that sentiment has not budged an inch. The only real difference is, in addition to the food wasted and the dumpsters locked to keep out the homeless, they’re dumping shit like Funko Pops in the millions. All this plastic tat that’s literally killing the planet, that nobody in their right mind would want in a million years if the sickness of capitalism didn’t tell them it was precious.
I got a mod salty by announcing that the content has gone to shit. They were like, ‘why don’t you make something better’? My response was ‘my content would be shit too, that’s why you don’t see me posting it’.
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