VERBOCHIP 96, OR HOW TO KEEP PACE WITH BILL GATES

Abstract Once upon a time in the dark ages of CALL, in 1992 that was, Didascalia developed Verbochip, a CALL program for learning the use and formation of English verbs and tenses. Verbochip ran under DOS, at the time a widespread operating system used by most schools and individual PC users. And then came the princess in disguise, Windows. We had seen her come, she was both attractive and intelligent, even more so when, after a while, Princess Windows sought the company of powerful 486 and Pentium multimedia machinery. Schools, teachers and students, people in general, no longer liked the DOS environment. And yet, the CALL developers at Didascalia were a little hesitant; they believed that old stepmother DOS, dumb as she was and non‐graphic as she looked, could still be rather effective for certain teaching and learning tasks. The problem, however, was that the market had already turned its back on her...