Dashboard Lights — Dickeson

Well, what’s a “Dashboard?” Some new computer gizmo you’ve gotta have that’ll solve all your problems and make you rich? No way. You know what the dashboard is in your car. It’s the place you look when you hear a siren behind you so you can tap the brakes.

Curley was proud of the genuine leather dashboard in his “Surrey With the Fringe on the Top” in the musical Oklahoma. But, like in the ancient maps of the unknown, “There be dragons here” in that “Dashboard” named software metaphor. We tend to think of a dashboard as it is in our car or in a Boeing 747: an array of instruments providing instant information that enables corrective course decisions.