Extensive cable and satellite television systems provide one route for that information into the average home. The other major route is the personal computer. In 1972, Norman Macrae, an editor of The Economist, speculated prophetically about a time in the future: The prospect is, after all, that we are going to enter an age when any duffer sitting at a computer terminal in his laboratory or office or public library or home can delve through unimaginable increased mountains of information in mass-assembly data banks with mechanical powers of concentration and calculation that will be greater by
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