India, Oct. 10 -- Those of us who have lived through the steady democratization of computers. recall that the sharpest turning point came in 1984. That's when Apple introduced an affordable personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI), the Macintosh. Before that time, home computers were difficult and tedious to use. Their monitors displayed twenty-four rows of eighty characters each, and their operating systems required textual commands like "rmdir c:foobar" whose syntax had to be memorized and which could fail with an errant keystroke.

Early adopters of Apple's alternative were dazzled by the windows, icons, menus, and mouse which today we take for granted. Richard Dawkins marveled at the time: "I have been an intensive prog...