I'd wish I'd had a Fairlight when I was learning music.
I'd wish I'd had a Fairlight when I was learning music but its price back then was astronomical (for me anyway).
This was one of Australia's great ideas (and I remember following its progress through in a local mag, 'Electronics Today'); as always we hardly ever follow through and go on to second or third-generation development. Invariably, such developments are underfunded, or can't be capitalised because local investors consider it too risky or the ideas are sold off to overseas interests who then make the moolah. Tragically it's almost always been that way.
After WWII, Australia, had the infrastructure, potential and population base to eventually go high-tech a la Korea, Taiwan or even Finland, but like the current NBN fiasco, as always, we fucked it big-time.
Instead, like an ostrich breathing in sand, we've settled back into doing what we do best, which is very little except to argue with you Poms over cricket and to sell our mineral wealth to the Chinese only to buy it back 'processed' with the money they initially paid us. Heaven help us when it all runs out.
Sooner or later, it seems inevitable that Malaysia's Lee Kuan Yew's prophecy of us becoming the "great white trash of Asia" will be proven to be true.
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[El Reg: Reckon it mightn't be a good idea to keep referring to 'something being the Rolls Royce of whatever'. The last few times I've done this on the Net I've had perplexed Americans come back to me and asked me what the hell I was talking about. Oh how times have changed!]