For years, the bold entrepreneurs who built the personal computer industry have envisaged - even promised - a day when we'd see a PC on every desk in every workplace, every home. It hasn't happened yet, of course; the general population of the United States is far from being on-line.
Scientists can't be blamed for this, however. Indeed, given its density of PCs, the science community probably ranks right up there with banking and a few other commercial sectors as contributing most to the fulfillment of the one person/one machine dream.
Most scientists have personal computers of some kind in their homes as well as their labs and offices; they've welcomed these machines as powerful tools that greatly facilitate a wide range of tasks, pertaining not only to the gathering and manipulation of research data, but also to writing papers and a host of administrative chores, such as the tracking ...
