telephone

Bill Scherlis taught me the telephone operator principle: when the telephone system was first being built Bell hired lots of women as telephone operators. as the system grew, and as people used it more, Bell hired more and more people. when management projected the number of operators required into the future, they saw that in not so many years, they would have to hire everyone in the country! ridiculous? in fact it happened: now we all dial our own numbers.

we can see a similar thing happening if we look at the number of programmers. of course, not everyone is going to sit down and code in C, but I believe some level of automation will enable everyone to program...