When I bought one of these small, cheap, old-fashioned cathode-ray TV sets on sale to watch while on my exercise machine, I had no idea how high-tech and computerized even these obsolete sets had become.

Nor was this a blessing. I could not even turn the set on and get a channel without reading a 60-page instruction book. If the truth be known, I could not do it even after trying to make some sense out of the instructions.

The next time my computer guru came over to help me with my computer problems, I asked him to set up the TV set so that I could turn it on.

After he went through the instruction book and waded through all the high-tech options -- none of which interested me in the slightest -- he set up the TV so that I could do something as elementary as turn on the set and choose a channel to watch.

Unfortunately, this was not an unusual experience. All kinds of computerized products -- cameras, cell phones, even car radios -- have had the same problem.

There must be some blind spot that computer engineers have which prevents them from seeing that (1) most people are not computer engineers, (2) there is no point making simple things complicated, and (3) not everyone is looking for a zillion features to have to wade through to do simple things.

Let's start at square one. What is the first thing you want to do with any computerized product? Turn it on.

Why should that be a problem when people were turning things off and on for generations before there were personal computers?Yet computer engineers seem determined to avoid the very words "off" and "on."

Apparently they feel a need to coin new terms for everything, no matter how simple or well-known those things may be. For computers, the word is "start," which you have to go to for either turning the computer off or on.

With our microwave oven, the word is "power." For my car radio and cell phone, there is no word at all.

For other things, there is the same coining of new words for things people already understand by old words. Printers can be set for "landscape" or "portrait," as if people had never heard of horizontal and vertical.

When I had to have a new radio put into my old car, I told the man who installed it, "I didn't go to M.I.T" and wanted the simplest radio to use that he had. Continued...