One summer very, very long ago I was sent to camp Shangri-La. The owners and operators of the camp owed money to my aunt Bessie the fishmonger and there wasn’t much chance of collecting same. Aunt Bessie liked the proprietors of Camp Shangri-La anyway, so in lieu of money she sent her son and one of her nephews to camp. This squared the bill and also produced a very nice summer for everyone concerned. At camp, we lived in bungalows, which were called bunkhouses because of the exaggerated description of the camp’s facilities in its advertising. There were as many as a dozen of these shacks. I honestly can’t remember.

Wet bed

Each had kids of about the same age, and there were as many as four groups of kids, some groups so big they needed two bunkhouses. And the number of bunkhouses was twice what you might expect because Camp Shangri-La consisted of two divisions, one for boys, the other for girls. Every bunkhouse had at least one camper who had a hard time adjusting. This poor camper would wake up at odd hours, sometimes with a wet bed. He (or she) would demand attention, either by crying or by loudly whispering things like Pssst! Louis? Are you awake? It’s Stanley. I can’t sleep until plenty of people were awake. This obnoxious kid got a lot of cold showers in the middle of the night, spent a lot of time looking for possessions hidden by the other kids and became the subject of conversations that reflected the full measure of creativity, cruelty and criminality that more or less universal among young children, political dictators and advertising agencies. I dare you to take a crap in Stanley’s shoes, is an example. Everyone (except, presumably, Stanley) thought this was a great idea but nobody would do it, because Stanley would complain and there’d be demerits for sure.

By Hesh Wiener

Nobody wanted to bring demerits on himself and, worse, the rest of the bunkhouse. But Stanley, if you’re out there, let me tell you one thing: it was awfully close. IBM has just invented a computer that wakes up at odd hours and expects you to talk to it. I could have made this up, but I didn’t have to. I read it in the Wall Street Journal. The computer is called Aptiva, which is a word that was probably made up by an advertising agency, but it might have come from a political dictator. Most young children would know better. Even if they might want to make up a word like Aptiva, most kids couldn’t pronounce it. We have three cousins who have trouble sleeping even without an Aptiva. They suffer from sleep apnoea. In order to get some rest, each must wear a bizarre apparatus. It is not called an Aptiva; it is called a nose hose.

Nose hose

A nose hose consists of a small respirator with a lightweight face mask. The two components are connected by steel-reinforced plastic tubing. The contraption resembles a small vacuum cleaner. Now my cousins sleep well and they are no longer Pickwickian – they don’t doze off whenever they are inactive and they don’t wake their families up at odd hours. I don’t think IBM will be able to sell anyone with apnoea an Aptiva. But IBM might spend $30m trying. That is how much the Wall Street Journal says IBM spent trying to sell the PS/1, its last attempt at a home computer, and if the $30m PS/1 campaign wasn’t a colossal waste of money, there wouldn’t be an Aptiva. Why, you might ask if you thought it made any sense to talk to a newsletter, doesn’t IBM just call the thing the IBM Home Computer? Would you put your name on something that wakes up at odd hours and expects you to talk to it? Outside of your family, that is.(C) 1994 Technology News Ltd.