“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the
best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out
the year.”
— The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
Even the smartest people suffer from myopia once in a while. That is the curse of memory: we base our visions on what we have already seen. But realistically, the only failed idea is the one you have never tried. Here at Logical Expressions, we’ve tried out a lot of ideas over the last two months. We’ve taken Computor Companion to stores, coffee shops, doctor’s offices, and the computer show in Spokane. And the results are in: everyone seems to like it. But there’s a catch—people like it so much that they want more.
When we started this magazine, we planned to focus just on North Idaho. However, the demand has been so great that we’re already expanding. In this issue, we doubled the circulation and expanded our distribution area to
include the entire Inland Northwest. We learned from talking to a whole lot of people that North Idaho, the Spokane Valley, and Western Montana are economically and socially interdependent. Businesses and individuals in these areas all want the same thing: to bring more technology-based businesses to the Inland Northwest.
With the loss of resource-dependent jobs over the last twenty years, technology is the key to improving the economy throughout our area. And for that to happen, we need more and better educational resources. As it
turns out, our free magazine is a good first step in that direction. The more people begin to understand that computers are a tool that can free them from low-paying, dead-end jobs, the more they will want to learn about them and the better it is for the economy. Just in this one issue, for example, people can find out how to get more out of e-mail and their Internet browser, manage their files more effectively, reduce their credit card debt, buy an
inexpensive scanner, and find local training classes. Sure, it’s bold to suggest that a magazine can be a catalyst for economic change, but knowledge is a powerful thing. There’s an old Chinese proverb that states, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
So here’s hoping that you can make the computer on your desk change your life!