Instrumentation and techniques have changed considerably, however, in the intervening twenty years, engendered by the revolution in distributed computing heralded by the advent of the personal computer. In the Fall of 1973, for example, I ran BASIC programs from one of many teletypes connected to a single PDP-8 computer with 8 Bytes of memory. I recently came across loan papers from 1984 for my personal computer (256 Bytes RAM, no hard drive). Analyses which required graphical solution before computers or very astute programming in the first digital decades now can be done using spreadsheets packaged with word processing software; the earlier approaches are no longer of interest, except perhaps to historians. - Pearson
