I believe a look back will show that I said: "'Way back in the 60s, when personal computers were just creeping into the colleges …"

Although some of the youngsters here may not believe that anything useful existed before they got their first "gameboy," to some of us who watched it all develop "personal computer" does not mean exclusively an IBM PC.

In the middle part of the 1960s there were some few people "building their own" and writing their own "operating systems." Since there was a lot of handwork to setting up a program that took only a few minutes to run, a computer shared within a small group, as within a university department could be considered "personal" if it belonged to those who used it rather than to a separate organization whose only concern was keeping it running for others to use.

The big jump in numbers of academics with access to computing power can probably be said to have come with the March 22, 1965 official introduction of the DEC PDP-8, but progress in "microcomputers" (not "PCs," but still to a degree "personal" within academia) followed fairly rapidly.

The articles to which I made reference were probably from somewhere between about 1968 and 1974, but might have been a very few years later. Most of the contributors cited their computer methods in testing their theories. Efforts to find the articles again ca. 1986 were unsuccessful because I couldn't find an accessible archive that went back far enough.

JiK, isn't that divorced from reality, when in the real world most political elections are two-horse races?

I dunno about that. When's the last time we had an election when Nader didn't run?

Obviously a minority candidate has to have enough followers to have a measurable effect, but the point is that he/she can be a "spoiler" even without making a big dent in the numbers. A vote for a candidate who has no chance of winning takes your vote away from the viable candidate who would most likely have been your "next choice." It is thus effectively a vote for the one you least like.

And my impression is that elections worldwide are about evenly divided between "three or more candidates" and "only one."

John