1. products arecomprised ofcomponents whoseindividual reliabilities have been improving atarate ofabout 15 to 20 percent per year for nearly two decades. Further, with size decreasing dramatically and the aggregate cost of integrated circuits consistently decreasing since 1963alonga 75percentlearningcurve,itshouldbepossibleto achieve extraordinary system reliability through careful component selection and built-in redundancy, and thus toeliminate what has beenoneofthemosttroublesomeproblemsforelectronic equipment users for many years: unreliability.
2. Thomas Paine summed it all up in the 1790swhen he counseled, "The more simple anything is, the less liable it is to be disordered, andtheeasier repaired when disordered." Sadly,ithasbecome commonplace to view high technology and simplicity as contradictory terms.Thetwoarenot,infact ifnot inpractice, antonyms.Thechallenge is to use technology in a fashion which engenders simplicity. Who could argue, for example, that today's pocket calculators are lessreliable than their 18,000vacuum tubepredecessor, theENIAC, which completely filled aroom as recently as the 1940s.
3. 1940 1950 1960 1970 1975 1980 Number of Pages in Users Manual