We feared it might be a dreadful mistake to draw everyone’s attention to the virtual fish tank from that Tokyo company 9003 Inc (CI No 2,483): we now have an entire office demanding vastly upgraded colour personal computers so that they can run the thing alongside the WordStar 3 word processor (in WordStar 4, the brilliant facility to lower or up the case of the on-screen text is removed, dammit). The tecchies are impatient to get their hands on the next release of Aquazone – the networked one – so that they can get it on the server (perhaps we’d get a lot more modem usage of the Computergram database that way) – and all this without anyone ever having actually seen the thing it’s not widely available outside Japan, and the developer doesn’t seem to realise what a monster bubbling under worldwide hit he has on his hands. But judging by the numbers of geraniums that go unwatered, windows left open, computers and printers not switched off every night, we fear that after two or three weeks, the office would be rank with dead fish, and, like the teenage recipients of the insistent and demanding microprocessor-based infant, would be only too glad to hand the thing back. And if IBM Corp really wants to make the PowerPC-based Power Personal a runaway success, it must rush to buy rights to the program and bundle it with every machine.
