A man stopped by a computer store where he'd recently purchased a personal computer. "I have a question about a computer I bought here the other day," he said to a salesman who greeted him enthusiastically.

"What kind did you buy?" the salesman asked.

"A Crimean Extravaganza 1900," said the customer.

"Wow! That's a nice computer," exclaimed the salesman. "It has a 100 megahertz pentium processor, 16 megabytes of ram, a 256 kilobyte pipeline burst cache. It has PCI 64-bit video and a 1.2 gigabyte hard drive. What more could you possibly want in a computer? Do you need some add-ons? More memory? An accelerator board?"

"Actually," explained the customer, "I just need to know how to turn the fool thing on!"

Those of us who are not computer nerds can sympathize with that poor customer, can…