Word: users
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...still more features. By next year, such companies as GE, Sony and Zenith will be selling so-called digital TVs. These revolutionary devices contain microcomputers that translate conventional, wavelike TV signals into visual and audio information that the viewer can fine-tune on the screen. On some models, the user will be able to zoom in on Liberace's diamond rings, for example, or freeze Pete Rose in mid-swat. Digital technology can also increase picture clarity up to 100% and would make the images on home TV as clear as those in a good 35-mm slide...
From its introduction, SelectaVision was fatally upstaged by an electronic relative, the videocassette recorder, which had come out six years earlier. Most consumers prefer VCRs because the machines can record broadcasts as well as play prerecorded tapes. SelectaVision machines, by contrast, allow the user to play only prerecorded discs. Says Arthur Morowitz, president of New York's Video Shack chain: "It was a dinosaur from the beginning. There was never a really strong need...
Even though SelectaVision is dead, videodisc technology will probably continue to grow. Such firms as Pioneer and Magnavox, which sell disc machines that use a more advanced system based on lasers, are expected to continue making machines. These devices, which assign a number to each image, allow the user to call up an individual frame almost instantly. Priced at about $700, the laser players are often used in education and industry. Several firms are developing ways to use video discs as data-storage devices for computers...
...Chico, Calif, this software package offers individuals with a simple estate a quick way to draw up a will without an attorney's help. The program poses questions in plain English (sample: "Do you wish to leave any part of your estate to your college?"), waits until the user types in the answers and then leads him through the process of drawing up the document. Written by a lawyer who specializes in wills, the program satisfies the probate requirements of every state except Louisiana, which has a legal system based on the ancient Napoleonic Code...
...simply a group of stories sharing a common protagonist? Is its leading man, John Everett, a modern knight errant sacrificing himself to obsolete notions of romantic love? Or is he merely a maundering hick, caroming off women who easily recognize the traits of a user? Is his creator, Robert Hemenway, an artist of light-meter sensitivity? Or is he simply a construction worker employing the worn materials of bromides and reveries...