This article was written between March 1980 and sometime in 1982. It was given as a lecture at a conference sponsored by IBM in Germany and published in Textverarbeitung und Burosysteme, edited by Albert Endres and Jurgen Reetz. I should have published it in America, but I hoped to improve it and then forgot about it. I think its main contentions have been confirmed by experience with personal computers, but some of what it advocates hasn't been realized even yet, e.g. a worldwide file naming system, email based on pc to pc phone calls, and a file description language.
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