"Pro football isn't what it used to be and it never was."

Don Meredith

The solution to the leveling sales trend, announced the breathless vice-president of engineering, was to upgrade the entire product line. Daedalus, he said, had within its grasp the opportunity to become the first firm ever to offer a fully microprocessor-controlled model airplane containing a laser command link, a miniature gas turbine engine, and internal fiber-optic communication paths between a distributed network of adaptive digital controllers. The Board of Directors (which by now had grown to three bankers, a professor, five lawyers, the head of a local PR firm, the two founders, and the chairman's brother-in-law) listened with intense excitement. Yet there was a degree of skepticism to this sudden new proposal. This concern was finally laid to rest when it was explained that electronics was the wave of the future. One of the older board members told a story about a bear who, displaying a $5 bill, had entered a bar and ordered a beer and how the owner of the bar had directed the bartender to give the bear the beer, saying that since the bear didn't look very smart to only give...