Many a writer on technol- ogy has been struck in a

moment of pause be-
tween sentences or an
hour of distraction be-
tween paragraphs by the extraordinariness of ordinary things. The push-button telephone, the electronic cal- culator, and the very computer on which these words are being processed are among the more sophisticated things we use, and they awe into silence those of us who are not electrical engineers. By contrast, low- tech objects such as pins, thumb tacks, and paper clips a...