Word: fad
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...both the Apple Computer advertisement and the Las Vegas circus indicate, the enduring American love affairs with the automobile and the television set are now being transformed into a giddy passion for the personal computer. This passion is partly fad, partly a sense of how life could be made better, partly a gigantic sales campaign. Above all, it is the end result of a technological revolution that has been in the making for four decades and is now, quite literally, hitting home...
This most visible aspect of the computer revolution, the video game, is its least significant. But even if the buzz and clang of the arcades is largely a teen-age fad, doomed to go the way of Rubik's Cube and the Hula Hoop, it is nonetheless a remarkable phenomenon. About 20 corporations are selling some 250 different game cassettes for roughly $2 billion this year. According to some estimates, more than half of all the personal computers bought for home use are devoted mainly to games...
Brooks was the first, but since 1977 the new technique has become something of a legislative fad in the West. In addition to Texas, neighboring Oklahoma and New Mexico have nearly identical laws, as does Idaho; in Washington, the condemned have a choice: lethal injection or hanging. A dozen other states have rejected similar changes, but Massachusetts is now close to adopting such a provision. "Technology has come a long way since the electric chair," says State Senator Edward Kirby. "Because an injection is less painful and less offensive it would be foolish...
Pinup Calendars featuring college students as models are the rage these days, and it was only a matter of time until the fad hit the Ivy League...
...Grace's restaurant group: "You have to look at all these subtleties. It's critical in some places, particularly the Midwest." Soliman predicts that Mexican restaurants will double their business by 1985. Many others are bullish as well. "I don't think it's a fad," says Drexel Burnham's Greditor. "Is pizza a fad?" Says William Trainer, a restaurant analyst for Merrill Lynch: "I think Mexican restaurants have lots of room to grow." Regardless, the onrushing Mexican-food chains have already made tostadas, burritos and the like as familiar and as American...