Have you noticed how things have accelerated as we jump into the 256K RAM era? Many different technologies, hard and soft, seem to be groping together towards a synthesis that may be as revolutionary as the cinema or recorded sound.

For instance, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) machines like the Workless Station from DEST Corporation that can read a sheet of type straight into a micro's memory and onto its screen in 15 seconds through an RS232C port are now priced around $7,000. More advanced OCR devices, priced in the mainframe range of course, can chug through a Bible's worth of print in an hour. A much cruder $500 unit called Omni-Reader from Oberon International of Texas brings OCR technology to bigger micros like the IBM PC XT.

VidLink from Digital Research (issue 72) consists of a cable and software package to link a Panasonic video disk player, Commodore 64 and television. In addition, the noises emanating from the video disk world have the Trumpets of Glory about them lately. A micro on a disk, anyone?

And then there was US Patent 4460958, granted to three RCA workers for a micro system that will go into a top-of-the-line TV and store incoming signals, separate them into a number of components, and remove interference and noise. The system will also allow refinements like freeze frame and has the potential for interfacing to micros.

As the NCC in Las Vegas recently, Interstate Voice Products of Orange, California, introduced the $1,650 Vocalink speech recognition board for the IBM PC. The board uses an Intel 80186 chip and an ASA-16 Audio Spectrum Analyser chip which translate sound waves into digital code. This system still requires a $200 microphone and a pause of 120 milliseconds between each spoken word but a cheaper speech board is promised for the end of the year.

Down on the Sun Belt, where mechanical bulls used to send them flying in the urban honky-tonks, there is a new act in town right out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Warner Leisure Inc is installing fully-animated lounge singers, usually called Sammy Sands, which sit behind pot pianos and run through different 15-minute medleys of jokes and Country and Western songs throughout the evening. Sammy is moulded in larger-than-life glass-fibre with a silver lame jacket and he winks at the audience at the conclusion of each joke. This echoes the Audio-Animatronics show at Disneyland and is the first adult outgrowth of the Family Restaurant business like Warner's eight 'gadget restaurants' where robot Daffy Ducks and Bugs Bunnies entertain the kids over burgers and pizzas.

Charles Platt, science-fiction writer and author of The Whole Truth Home Computer Handbook, predicts that humans might wind up preferring to canoodle with robots programmed to cater for their special needs just as soon as the robots are mature enough to handle it.

Certainly we can expect interactive smut in the next few years. And we can assume that by 1988 the Republican Party Interactive Political Fireside Chat with the President will be on its way to market. There it is; why argue among yourselves when you can talk it out directly with the Pres on your own TV?

Fortunately, the Democratic Party will not adapt as easily to such devices. Despite the appearance of a multitude of computer monitors at the Democrats' convention in San Francisco the word is that many of the delegates never touched the things. The organisers, of course, wore their terminals down to the key connectors.

But the delegates' attitude to the white heat of technology was perhaps pointed up by the contrasting interest in two rival coach tours on the same day - one set of buses travelled south to Silicon Valley, the other north to Napa Valley. The score? Silicon Valley, one delegate, Napa Valley 2,200 delegates. Conclusion: the Democrats had heard that those wealthy vine-growing winery owners in the Napa were all dyed-in-the-wool Republicans and they had to try to convert them...