The reason I couldn’t imagine what use it would be to me was that I had a very limited idea of what a computer actually was—as did we all. I thought it was a kind of elaborate adding machine. And that is exactly how “personal” computers (a misleading term as applied to almost any machine we’ve seen so far) were for a while developed—as super adding machines with a long feature list.

Then, as our ability to manipulate numbers with these machines became more sophisticated, we wondered what might happen if we made the numbers stand for something else, like for instance the letters of the alphabet.

Bingo! An extraordinary, world-changing breakthrough! We realised we had been myopically shortsighted to think this thing was just an adding machine. It was something far more exciting. It was a typewriter!

So we began to develop it as a super typewriter. With a long and increasingly incomprehensible feature list. Users of Microsoft Word will know what I’m talking about.

The next breakthrough came when we started to make these numbers, which were now flying round inside these machines at insane speeds, stand for the picture elements of a graphic display. Pixels.

Aha! we thought. This machine turns out to be much more exciting even than a typewriter. It’s a television! With a typewriter stuck in front of it!

And now we have the World Wide Web (the only thing I know of whose shortened form—www—takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for) and we have yet another exciting new model. It’s a brochure. A huge, all-singing, all-dancing, hopping, beeping, flash-ridden brochure.

Of course, the computer isn’t any of these things. These are all things we were previously familiar with from the real world, which we have modelled in the computer so that we can use the damn thing.

Which should tell us something interesting.

The computer is actually a modelling device.

Once we see that, we ought to realise that we can model anything in it. Not just things we are used to doing in the real world, but the things the real world actually prevents us from doing.

What does a brochure prevent us from doing?