nology and hardware to deal with in the real time of production lighting? (A problem better solved. incidentally. with harnessed rigs in rock and road shows than in the legitimate theatre on Broadway or the regional and educational theatres.) Are there too many sheer logistics of hanging. focusing, and coloring upwards of five hundred or more lighting units. much less attempting the intensity balance of those same units a hundred or so times during the real time and in the real space of the production? This. I think is a pertinent question we must ask our lighting designers. Are we in fact attempting to be too bright. too colorful. creating a lack of contrast. attempting too much movement, too many varieties of angles; too much confusion, too many options. too much bookkeeping? A random thought struck me last summer when Harold Schoenberg blasted away in the pages of the Nelli York Times at theatrical sound in ew York's legit theatre from a theatre goer's point of view - too loud. artificial direction. lack of clarity. lack of artistry. Are we asking too much of theatrical lighting design? Theatrical lighting as playwright and director and scenographer may be a slight exaggeration. or is it? The technology which has made this new volume of light available. though. has affected lighting control almost entirely. Progress in control. dependent on micro electronics. has been very rapid indeed: but progress in fixtures, being essentially light source dependent, currently consists of a little repackaging. combined with a considerable amount of shove by the marketing department. (Of course. that is a e . since those repackaging attempts are expensive to the companies that commit to them. and some very worthwhile goals have at least been attempted and perhaps even partially attained.) Most of the progress in our industry over the past twenty years has been made in the field of lighting control specifically intensity control. Practically every part of this field has been revolutionized since 1959 with the commercial introduction of SCR dimmers. and in the mid-1960's with the first applications of electronic computer technology to the lighting control desk. And. revolutionary as the present developments have been in this area of technology, major new developments now occur almost every year and anything USITT Fall. 1982 five years or older becomes (potentially) technologically. obsolete. This is a great challenge to my firm. We have consciously endeavored that the systems we produce do not become operarionally obsolete. Today's new products - dimmer per light systems. racking of highdensity dimmer banks. and satellite dimmers may all become technologically obsolete as power transistors mounted in or adjacent to each fixture take their multiplexed command signals from a data highway superimposed on the power distribution system. This area of technology is moving very rapidly. [n spite of accelerating research and development costs in our industry, users are getting better and better values on purchases in the power handling equipment of lighting. that is. what we presently call a dimmer. It is. however. as regards the "front end" - what is today called the "lighting control memory system" that we run into a controversy. [n a recent conference in Canada [ showed slides of well over 100 different lighting control memory systems that have been offered for sale in the past ten years. Some forty or fifty of those systems are no longer made. Currently some thirty-five or more manufacturers worldwide offer perhaps as many as sixty different types of systems. [t is a reasonable bet that if Theatre Design & Technology 7