subject: The Machine Stops? Or Not, As Things Turned Out [print this page] Some readers, particularly the older ones, may be familiar with a book by E.M. Forster entitled The Machine Stops. This short but powerful science fiction novel featured a world dependent entirely upon a machine, to which the whole of humanity plugged itself in and upon which everybody depended to fulfil their every need.
Considering that nobody had any inkling of the Internet revolution that would engulf the world nearly ninety years later, it was a chilling and prophetic story indeed. If the Internet were to close down tomorrow, commerce would grind to a halt and Facebookers everywhere would be left entirely bereft.
Difficult though it would now seem to credit, many households quite deliberately waited until the turn of the twenty-first century before joining the Internet age, concerned by the hype and publicity surrounding the so-called Millennium Bug. For the benefit of those who cannot remember that far back, this was the time when aeroplanes were going to drop out of the sky and the world was going to stop working because the global superhighway would fail to recognise the year 00.
It didnt happen, of course and so here we are, steaming our way relentlessly towards the twenty-second century, using handhelds and laptops with several times, in some cases several hundred times, the power and the memory of the quaint old machines that we all used to depend upon not very many years ago.
What is more, they come at a fraction of the price.
Digital technology has always been that way. Just as battery operated calculators would sometimes sell at over a hundred pounds apiece when they first hit the streets yet now all but arrive free in a cornflakes packet, so the economies of scale involved with almost every household owning at least one computer have in turn rendered the technology more affordable.
And yet curiously, one thing that remains prohibitively costly in spite of increasing demand is printer ink. Indeed we have reached the absurd situation where ink cartridges can and frequently do cost more than the printer in which they are housed.
In the face of this anomaly it was inevitable that somebody would seek to break the monopoly enjoyed by the big manufacturers and provide a product that was affordable and within the expectations and budgets of computer users today.
Compatible ink cartridges imitate the real thing in every detail except the price. Sometimes they can be cheaper than the established brands to the power of several.
For those seeking economy in their work compatible ink cartridges are a very attractive option.
