Howard Bromberg, an impatient member of the committee in charge of creating COBOL, had this tombstone made out of fear that the language had no future. However, COBOL has survived to this day.

Papert emphasized creative exploration over memorization of facts: "People give lip service to learning to learn, but if you look at curriculum in schools, most of it is about dates, fractions, and science facts; very little of it is about learning. I like to think of learning as an expertise that every one of us can acquire."

Kapor, who received his bachelor's degree in an individually designed cybernetics major from Yale University in 1971, started Lotus Development Corp. to market his spreadsheet and served as its president and CEO from 1982 to 1986. He also has worked to develop policies that maximize openness and competitiveness in the computer industry.

Chuck Geschke of Adobe Systems Inc., a company formed in 1994 by the merger of Adobe and Aldus, remembered: "John Sculley, a young fellow at Apple, got three groups together - Aldus, Adobe, and Apple - and out of that came the concept of desktop publishing. Paul Brainerd of Aldus is probably the person who first uttered the phrase. All three companies then took everybody who could tie a tie and speak two sentences in a row and put them on the road, meeting with people in the printing and publishing industry and selling them on this concept. The net result was that it turned around not only the laser printer but, candidly, Apple Computer. It really turned around that whole business."

Stroustrup wrote in the preface to "The C++ Programming Language": "C++ is a general purpose programming language designed to make programming more enjoyable for the serious programmer. Except for minor details, C++ is a superset of the C programming language. In addition to the facilities provided by C, C++ provides flexible and efficient facilities for defining new types.... The key concept in C++ is class. A class is a user-defined type. Classes provide data hiding, guaranteed initialization of data, implicit type conversion for user-defined types, dynamic typing, user-controlled memory management, and mechanisms for overloading operators.... C++ retains C's ability to deal efficiently with the fundamental objects of the hardware (bits, bytes, words, addresses, etc.). This allows the user-defined types to be implemented with a pleasing degree of efficiency."

Hypercard users could look through existing HyperCard stacks as well as add to or edit the stacks. As a stack author, a programmer employed various tools to create his own stacks, linked together as a sort of slide show. At the lowest level, the program linked cards sequentially in chronological ordered, but the HyperTalk programming language allowed more sophisticated links.

In SimCity, a player starts with an untouched earth. As the mayor of a city or city planner, he creates a landscape and then constructs buildings, roads, and waterways. As the city grows, the mayor must provide basic services like health care and education, as well as making decisions about where to direct money and how to build a revenue base. Challenges come in the form of natural disasters, airplane crashes, and monster attacks.

Howard Rheingold described, "shared and objectively present like the physical world, composable like a work of art, and as unlimited and harmless as a dream." First practical for accomplishing such tasks as flight simulation, virtual reality soon spread much further, promising new ground in video games, education, and travel. Computer users are placed into the virtual environment in a variety of ways, from a large monitor to a head-mounted display or a glove.

Microsoft released Windows amid a $10 million publicity blitz. In addition to making sure consumers knew about the product, Microsoft lined up a number of other applications ahead of time that ran under Windows 3.0, including versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. As a result, PCs moved toward the user-friendly concepts of the Macintosh, making IBM and IBM-compatible computers more popular.