8. What kinds of computers are you planning to hook up? The WEB as of

mid-1984 was running only with Kaypros. But a version for IBMs was in the works. One advantage of a big-name network, however, is that it _may_ more easily get machines of different brands on speaking terms. That could count if you’re planning to trade in your old micros soon. There’s a caveat. Some networks may work with many machines but may not be as powerful as those dedicated to one brand. So Apples and IBMs might both share the same hard disk but might not be able to read each other’s files without costly add-ons. How Fast Do You Want the Network to Transfer Information? It’ll depend largely on the type of network—a topic covered later in this chapter. Wangnet will zip information over the wires many times faster than will The WEB; it’s a boon for those who need that capability but a frill for those who don’t. Mind you, a network itself isn’t necessarily the main determinant of the speed with which files zip back and forth between machines. The speed of your computers’ floppies in many cases will count more than the network’s transmission rate, and that’s true to a lesser extent of Winchester hard disks. Different networks, of course, may work faster or slower when teamed up with the same computer. Also, some networks seem fast when you don’t have many users. But then, with a large number, rival networks are faster. How Much of a Load Do You Want to Put On Your Network—and Can It Handle It? How many computers do you want hooked in? And how much of a strain will they place on the network before it crashes or slows down to a bothersome extent? If people are running data-base programs on colleagues’ files, a network might only work with a few users, but if they’re just occasionally swapping electronic files, the same system may accommodate hundreds of computers. That’s especially true, say, if you’re a publishing house with many writers but few editors. The writers may not communicate much between themselves, so that the handful of editors are the only ones really taxing the system. And since they’re not running other people’s programs, even the editors won’t be that much of a burden. The same principle might apply to an educational network in which one teacher is overseeing many students. Is the Network Reliable in Other Ways? Are the wires and connectors strong enough mechanically, for instance? How much does the network tolerate mistakes—how crashproof is it? And what about the software? Suppose two people at once are calling up a directory to find out what’s on a common disk. Will the director accurately list _every_ file? Does the network perform well not only with the directory program but with other utility-style software in CP/M, MS-DOS, or whatever operating system you’re using? How Easy Must the Network be to Use? The WEB is easy but not for the _untrained_ novice. Using the Kaypro version, you need to know at least the basic CP/M commands. But once you do, you’re just about home free. Take the PIP command, which, among other things, lets you transfer files from one disk to another on a machine by itself. To switch a file named TEST from drive A to drive B, you’d load a PIP program into your computers temporary memory. Then you might type =B:=A:TEST=. Via The WEB, though, how do you try to reach someone else’s drive? Well, you could issue a similar command. Only, instead of saying you wanted to reach drive B, you might ask for drive H—which is how the other person’s drive might be electronically known around the office. That’s with The WEB set up the simplest way. Even with The WEB in a more complex form, however, the procedure wouldn’t be much harder. On the other hand, The WEB isn’t the system for you if you’re hoping just to press one or two buttons to send information on its way. What Special Features Do You Need? Ask, ask, ask the sales reps about what’s available. Remember, some networks won’t let you share printers or modems or even send files to another computer. Also, will printing take longer to set up remotely than with all the equipment by your side? How easy is it? Also, does the network have =queuing=? If user A and user B both send out files to be printed on the same machine, will a disk hold user B’s file until A is done? If there’s queuing, have you given up something in return? Find out, too, if the network is =interrupt driven=? Let’s say someone’s getting information off one of your computer’s disks while you’re typing. Where should your computer concentrate its processing power? On the network? Or on your screen and keyboard? Better make it the screen and keyboard, since you want your machine to record _all_ the keystrokes you’re putting in. And on an interrupt-driven system, this can happen. So there’s less chance of “Now is the time for all good men to ...” coming out as “Nwi thetme fr all good mn....” Is error checking in use? Will the computers ask if the others received the signal okay? Will they start again if they didn’t? Also, what about machine A using its software to work with the contents of machine B’s disks? And can you use your pet word-processing software to print an electronic file on someone else’s printer without getting in the way of the program he’s running at the time? What about electronic mail and equivalents of The WEB’s “flash” command? Can you easily open your electronic mailbox to see what messages are awaiting you? Will your computer even tell you on screen when you have a “letter”? Will it beep at you? If there’s a flash-style arrangement for short messages to appear on screen, can you turn it off? Not that E-Mail and “flash” are pure delights. You may not be at the screen to receive your electronic message; with a phone message or an intercom, on the other hand, the other person would know immediately that you weren’t. Then again, with E-Mail or a flash-type arrangement, you can help soften the effects of telephone tag.[78] Footnote 78: Telephone tag occurs when person A returns B’s call, but now _B_ isn’t available. With an E-Mail arrangement, A and B could exchange messages without the other being available at the same time. Also, how about =file locking=, which keeps user A out of a file that user B is working on? That’s probably a “must.” You can’t have someone changing numbers at the same time you are and see the results add up wrong for both of you. Another question arises. Do you want people from field offices to be able to dial in via modems? This dial-up experience—along with the general-network kind—might help you eventually make the transition to telecommuting. Obviously, however, modems may mean security problems. Local area networks, of course, just like multiuser systems, have security risks even without modems. You’ll perhaps want to set up the network with passwords and =user-privilege levels= so that only you can get into every nook and cranny of the system—and no one can read _every_ electronic file. It’s a question of management style. In fact, in respecting people’s privacy, you might even arrange for only them to be able to read some information stored on their hard disks. At any rate, do investigate the security capability of a system very carefully before buying. Don’t let a network’s technical failings complicate office politics. Needless to say, too, make sure that no one can find his way to the payroll data base to give himself an unofficial raise. What Kind of Protocol Does the Network Use? “Protocol” is just a set of rules telling how computerlike gizmos speak to each other. By the way, networks can share a protocol but still not be on speaking terms. The WEB uses Ethernet’s basic protocol but can’t hook up to it, since Ethernet transmits information faster across the network. Wait. There’s one other complication. Different Ethernet-style systems—from different manufacturers—speak different dialects. “Assume nothing,” says Bigelow on the issue of whether different networks or machines will work with each other. “Nothing’s obvious.” Before buying, insist if possible that the sales rep set up his hardware and _show_ you the “compatibility” he’s been claiming. How Easy Is the Network to Install? A WEB-type network might be a nightmare for the lazy and sloppy. It requires hooking printed circuit boards up to the right leads of chips in the Kaypro. And you must also solder the telephone-style sockets into which your computer’s network cord plugs.[79] Footnote 79: Bigelow plans a more rugged version of The WEB transmission line in the future to make installation less tricky. But a good data-processing department shouldn’t have any problems, according to The WEB’s makers. What about small businesses without data-processing people? They might buy both their computers and the network from a systems house if possible—a company that will do more than the average computer store in getting various machines to work well together. But you’ve already bought your computer? And a good computer store or systems house isn’t nearby? And the network maker can’t vouch for any technicians near you? Then you might avoid the networks that need soldering and other grubby work. Even if a well-regarded store or systems house does sell you the network, see if the technicians will get it running _before_ they set it up at your business and you officially take delivery. Better still, see if they’ll do that before you officially accept delivery. How Much Support Will the Manufacturer Give You? Often, if software comes with a computer, the software house will buck you back to the computer manufacturer if you have a question or problem. And that may or may not be true with network systems. If the network is built into the computer, you might want to see if you can also get direct support from the company responsible for the networking system. It works the other way, too. If you buy a network from an independent manufacturer, is the firm familiar enough with your computer to make sure the system works well with it? Know exactly who will do the servicing and consider a service contract, which usually costs 1-2 percent of the hardware costs per month. In shopping around, you shouldn’t worry about jargon so much as you do about the performance of the network as _you_ perceive it. Below, however, are some necessary terms to master. We’ll begin with three kinds of =topology=—the word for the way a network is laid out: A Bus A cable hooks up a bus network’s computers in parallel in the manner of lights on some Christmas trees. A bus network may offer advantages in office layouts. You don’t have to clutter things up with a whole series of wires running back to fancy equipment in a central location. You just lay one main wire with sockets that the individual micros plug into. Other equipment needs _may_ be simple. The WEB, a bus network, requires printed circuit boards for all computers, installed in the machines themselves. That’s about it other than the software and the wire. Fancier systems using a bus—like most versions of Ethernet and Corvus Systems’ popular micro network called Omninet—need a =file server=. A file server can be a computer minus the keyboard and screen but with extra communications ports to help signals get in and out in a hurry. It’s connected to the hard disk, which stores and relays the electronic files that people send it. In some networks a file server can also be a regular computer simply assigned to the job. With a server arrangement you’re always sharing files with the server rather than directly with other members of the network. The hard disk is between you and the machine you’re trying to reach. By the way, _if_ everyone must use software from the server, that means a very, very busy hard disk—and potentially slower running programs. A Star In star topology, the individual computers are at the points of a starlike layout of cables radiating from a file server. If the server conks out, everyone in the network is out of luck. But then that could also happen in rare cases if a printed circuit board in a bus network became mischievous in the worst way. Normally, computers on a star network can’t be more than perhaps 200 feet apart, and perhaps much less. Corvus’s Constellation network uses the star. Most multiuser systems—which I won’t call true networks—use the star arrangement to hook up the dumb terminals to their central brain. A Ring Messages zip along a circle in one direction until they reach the right computer. If the ring’s broken, the network crashes. Also, distance may be limited to less than a few hundred feet without costly repeaters. With the right equipment and enough money, however, you can go much farther. One beauty of a ring arrangement is that in small networks the speeds can be very fast. Larger networks slow it down. A ring network often uses =token passing=. Think of the children’s game where, when you’re caught with a ball or other object, you’re “it.” The kids try not to be.[80] Footnote 80: Thanks to Ed Bigelow for the children’s game metaphor for the ring network. The kids try not to be. In token passing, though, the computers don’t mind being “it” at all. Getting the “ball” means they have the okay to send to another machine through the ring. If you as a computer get the ball, you get the privilege of replacing it with the message you want to send. You “hold” the ball until the message you’ve sent comes back to you through the ring. Then you send the ball on its way to the next computer. The whole process, of course, is almost instantaneous. Some people say it may be easier to design software for a ring, since the token passing means there’s no chance of signals colliding. Radio Shack’s Arcnet uses token passing. You also may end up grappling with different wiring styles. Telephone Style WEB-style networks mostly use a cable somewhat like the kind between the outside of your house and your phone jack. This cable has four =conductors=—individual wires within it. Commonly, two “hot” conductors carry computer signals. Between them, often, are two =ground wires= attached to the computers. You need good, solid ground connections for the networks to work right. Twisted Pair A twisted-pair network is what it sounds like—one normally using a pair of wires that twist around each other to form a long spiral. The twisting makes the cable less sensitive to electrical interference from radio transmitters, air conditioners, or other appliances. Shielded Wire You could also guard the twisted wires from electrical interference by enclosing it in woven copper or metal shielding. =Coaxial cable= is a common form of shielded wire. It’s costly—it may sell for more than $1 a foot. Coaxial cable could be four times or more the cost of a twisted pair. It consists of one or more thin wires buried in plastic-type insulation under the shielding. “Coax,” as the pros say for short, is the kind that’s normally black outside and looks like a thin snake that stretches on forever. (The pronunciation is “co-ax.”) Not that the color’s important. “We use powder blue,” says a man with one network company. Ethernet and Wangnet both use coax; so do cable-TV installations. In fact, some cable companies have transmitted computer signals. A TV cable doesn’t care if you use it for carrying a gangster movie or a bank payroll. But just because Ethernet uses coax doesn’t mean it’s normally good enough to carry most TV-like signals. It is just =baseband= in capacity. You’d normally use Ethernet simply for computerlike messages or maybe some telephone; it’s like a single, high-speed highway. Wangnet, however, is =broadband= and can carry TV. It resembles a whole transportation network—a highway, air corridors, and a river. You have many well-separated channels. In fact, Wangnet is piping along signals at radio and TV frequencies. And the right gadgetry can separate them just as easily as a good television does. You can go for miles with Wangnet—much farther than with Ethernet, which may need signal boosters after several thousand feet. People at Wang, Xerox, and the others can get truculent and maybe even paranoid about their pet networks versus their rivals’. “There is no light at the end of the tunnel yet,” said a friend of mine who’s a systems analyst. “Everyone is looking over everyone else’s shoulder to see what they’re doing.” And it isn’t just the computer industry. The PBX[81] makers, the switchboard manufacturers, want their shares of the action, too. This works the other way, too. IBM in 1984 said it would make Rolm—a major PBX maker—part of the Big Blue empire. Footnote 81: PBX stands for private branch exchange. Room exists, of course, for many styles of networks—even in the same companies in some cases. Bigelow aptly likens networks to word processors. We don’t all use WordStar; why should we all be on Ethernet? With the right hardware, in fact, a twisted pair or maybe even a bus network might merge with the baseband and broadband ones. Networked second- or even third- or fourth-hand micros might speak to mainframes. The state of West Virginia in 1984 planned to buy hundreds of IBM computers. Many reportedly would be on Omninets. As of mid-1984 an Omninet could have only sixty-three micros on it—but why not link many Omninets to big-time networks? A man at Corvus assured me that’s exactly what his company was working on for customers like West Virginia. AT&T may have had the right idea. It planned a network to work with Ethernet and Corvus, plus the RS-232-style arrangement that you already use to hook up computers with printers and modems. That could be just the solution for some large companies that feel they’re just innocent civilians in the network wars. Meanwhile, if you’re with a small company like Carsonville Metal Products, home in on your immediate needs. Again, don’t worry about high-powered networks designed for the Fortune 500 crowd. Maybe all computers someday will work with Ethernet, say, and perhaps it’ll be just as cheap for you as a WEB-style net, but it isn’t now. Meanwhile, if an Ethernet-equipped firm wants to talk to your computers today, there’s already a network in place with fairly common technical standards: the telephone system. Everything still sound scary? Well, just forget the jargon and simply pin down the sales reps to make sure that the network will do what _you_ want. Hire a consultant if need be. And follow the normal rule of computer shopping and check with existing customers to see if they’re happy. Wise network shopping, as indicated earlier, can pay off. In mid-1984, Madden, taking advantage of The WEB, was putting the finishing touches on some software modifications. With them, whenever Carsonville made new sales or bought new supplies, he could instantly see the results on the companies’ general ledger; and just as important, he and his colleagues could easily keep up with the costs of their existing contracts. They could compile a historical record, too, a big help in planning new bids. Now that Carsonville’s computers were talking, the humans might be talking more—about the new business that the sociable machines could help bring their way. 14 ❑ As The Jungle Thickens (AKA the Great Modeming) This was to be my future chapter, the one about microcomputers in the year 2001. I at first wanted it short. So often the micro future prematurely becomes the micro past; and why devote too much space to making a fool of myself? And why not spread the risks? Arthur C. Clarke seemed a better prophet.[82] Footnote 82: For some of Clarke’s own writing on the future, readers might turn to _1984: Spring—A Choice of Futures_, published by Ballantine Books, New York, 1984. Several months earlier, in fact, he’d agreed to an interview via modems and the satellite links between Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Alexandria, Virginia. So now I’d show that my little Kaypro, with a free software program and a $150 modem, could talk almost instantly to a stranger’s computer on the other side of the planet for perhaps a fraction of the cost of a telex. It seemed fitting. Clarke, after all, had written _2010_ with WordStar and decades ago had practically invented the idea of communications satellites. And if I failed to catch up with Clarke by computer? Well, I supposed it would be like a train journey to Outer Mongolia; I at least could write of the experience of _trying_ to get there and of the people I met along the way. I’d cop out in one more respect. Rather than ask Clarke the usual reporterish questions, I would turn the job over to others. The first was Eric Meyer, twelve years old, who was learning assembly language, a feat at any age, and who planned to start a software company called New Technologies.[83] The second was a Fortune 500 man named Jerry terHorst, head of Ford Motor’s public affairs office in Washington, D.C., and former press secretary to Gerald Ford. The third was Margaret Phanes, assistant to David Kay, vice-president of the company that had made my computer; the fourth, Seymour Rubinstein, a science-fiction fan and the developer of WordStar. The fifth was Rob Barnaby, the WordStar writer. The sixth was James Watt, co-owner of the Haunted Book Shop in Annapolis, Maryland, and a descendant of the eighteenth-century Scottish inventor. The seventh, Lynn Wilson, a former railroad telegrapher, had taught me some amateur radio theory when I was twelve. Footnote 83: Eric later decided to change the name of his company to EMCo. Computer Consulting. Eric himself had just passed his novice examination for an amateur license, and over the phone, with a push button, I tapped out my idea in international Morse code. “How,” I inquired, “would you like to ask Arthur Clarke some questions?” “Who’s Arthur Clarke?” Eric replied by voice. It was a pardonable response. Clarke’s _2001_—the book and movie for which he’s most famous—had come out several years before Eric’s birth. And yet as much as anything, Eric’s reply showed where we were headed in this age of specialization. He might someday be programming the future equivalents of HAL, developing new forms of artificial intelligence, and yet he apparently had not heard of HAL’s creator. I told Eric who Clarke was. “No, thanks,” Eric tapped. “But he’s the most famous science-fiction writer in the world,” I said, and explained the kind of issues that he might ask about. Eric, however, still wasn’t completely impressed. “Does he understand technical things?” I assured Eric that Arthur Clarke was technical enough to be worth his time. “We’re going to do this by computers over the phone lines,” I said. “In fact, I’d like you to send your questions to me by computer. Then I’ll store them inside mine. And then I’ll shoot them by computer to Arthur Clarke there in Sri Lanka. You’ll be communicating machine to machine, sort of.” “Where’s Sri Lanka?” “It’s an island in the Indian Ocean.” “Would you use my communications program?” Eric asked. Eric wasn’t talking about software he’d bought. It was what he had _written_. “No,” I said. “I’m going to use MODEM7, because I’m familiar with it.” “Couldn’t you say you used a communications program written by Eric Meyer, age twelve?” he asked. It wasn’t the worst twist in the world—good for the book, good for Eric, who, as a reporter’s son, showed a precocious public relations sense. “I won’t use it to reach Clarke,” I said, “but you can use it to send your file to me.” “All right.” “Read _2001_,” I said. Eric readily agreed. “I remember the title,” he said later, “but I was out when one of the kids in my class gave a report on it.” “I’ll want your reaction.” “Okay.” We also attended to another matter. Eric didn’t own an amateur radio rig yet, and I offered to lend him my Heathkit, a little five-watt transmitter-receiver stashed away in the closet of my efficiency apartment. “Is it digital?” Eric asked. Did it have, in other words, a “non-dial” like those newfangled watches? “No.” “I was hoping it was.” “It’s transistorized.” That was good enough for me. Who needed a radio without a dial? Eric took me up on my offer, which included the gift of some old chassis and capacitors and other parts, forgotten until now in the crawl space of my parents’ home. And I was pleased that Eric accepted, for I liked the symmetry of it all. Two decades earlier Lynn Wilson had given me some of the very equipment I’d be passing on to Eric. And so I visited my parents’ basement that weekend and reentered the past, not only my own but also that of electronics, including computers in a sense; for perhaps this is how the micro age had _truly_ begun—hobbyists swapping parts back and forth until someone accumulated enough to build a system that actually worked.[84] Footnote 84: The actual beginnings of the micro age, less romantically, go back to the invention of the microprocessor—a central processing unit on one chip—in 1970. It happened at Intel, an electronics company in Santa Clara, California, and was the idea of a young Stanford University grad named Ted Hoff. Lynn Wilson was all over the crawl space. I picked up a 6146 transmitter tube on which he had playfully magic markered, “For David, K4DIG, DX King.” DX was the amateur radio jargon for long-distance communications. I lingered in that basement, thinking that somehow, examining the past, I might better understand the future. There were no new clues, however, nothing but bulky transformers and spaghettilike wires and resistors and capacitors and the other odds and ends of my youth. But what a record my junk pile was of the American electronics industry. Half gutted, near the 6146, reposed a silvery ARC-5, a war-surplus receiver. Had it flown? ARC-5s were what American bombers carried during the Second World War. Had a B-17 crew kept in touch with England with my ARC-5 while pummeling the Third Reich? Had my receiver seen action over Tokyo? Scrapping it, had I inadvertently defiled History? Near the ARC-5 I saw a giant condenser for a transmitter. With row after row of plates on a metal shaft, it looked like an electronic potato slicer. I thought of fingernail-sized chips in computers today; the big potato slicer might as well be an artifact from another species. There in the crawl space the 1950s showed up in little vacuum tubes the size of pill bottles. They were a reminder of the short-sightedness of the U.S. electronics executives who had stayed years too long with vacuum-tube technology. Just what did this mean to American computer makers facing similar challenges? There was an object lesson here. Many portable computers from U.S. companies had flat screens, for example, but most of the display designs came from the laboratories of Japan. Although IBM would prosper—even if half of the innards of its PCs came from the Orient—many of the smaller American manufacturers might die. And even the larger domestic companies could suffer in the price ranges where computers were mere commodities; with flat displays and better memory chips, Nippon might again make us relive the transistor fiasco. I groped, poked, and wandered some more. And there in a dim corner I found the 1960s, too—in the form of a Nuvistor, another pygmy vacuum tube, another refinement of the obsolete. By the 1970s Heathkit was finally offering transistorized ham transmitters like the one I’d lend Eric. Heath still sold quite a few updated versions of the little HW-7. But now the amateur radio magazines seemed half filled by ads for solid-state equipment from Japan. How long until computer magazines looked the same? I went upstairs. My parents, who for years had been patiently awaiting the removal of the clutter from the crawl space, had second thoughts. What if I injured my back dragging the equipment to my car? Why couldn’t Eric and his father come for the tubes and chassis? A passage from a novel—the name escaped me—came to mind. It was almost as if, by removing my old childhood toys, I were aging both myself and my parents. I left the equipment at Eric’s after a meeting of the Kaypro writers group to which he and his father belonged. They lived in a white house in a greeny neighborhood high above most of Washington: a good location for an antenna, a great “QTH,” as Lynn Wilson would have put it in ham talk. The Meyers had filled the house with the paraphernalia of their obsessions. Downstairs Rima Meyer was at her spinning wheel; a huge loom dominated what normally would have been the dining room; and upstairs was the book-packed den where Gene, a _Washington Post_ staffer, had been working on a long history of Maryland.[85] No one spoke of the odd juxtaposition—a Kaypro used to write of hogsheads and sailing ships. Footnote 85: Gene’s book should appear under the title _Maryland Lost and Found: People and Places from Chesapeake to Appalachia_. The publisher is Johns Hopkins University Press. Eric, a small, curly-haired boy, helped lug the radio gear into his bedroom nearby. Then we soldered up the Heathkit’s connectors and began hearing international Morse code and Spanish babble on the 15-meter band. He was amazed. I could make sense of the dots and dashes at twenty words per minute; he could copy at only a quarter of that speed. “Hey, don’t worry. You’ll learn it much faster than I did,” I said. “You learned BASIC. I haven’t the mind for it. Anyone who can program will be a whiz at code.” And how much more useful computer skills would be. Take communications; 20 words per minute was one-thirtieth the speed of my dot-matrix printer. And yet I was dismayed to hear Eric speaking so enthusiastically of the day when he could transmit in voice. To Lynn Wilson and me, ham radio didn’t exist without code. We were like the old man at my newspaper back in Ohio who couldn’t stand a city room bereft of typewriters. Computers, in fact, had even violated the sanctity of code. A micro’s video display could flash out the letters summing up the holy dots and dashes—the ones I’d so painfully learned in my youth. I felt like a sailboater tipped over by the wake of a motorized yacht. I snapped off the Heathkit. Eric and I went downstairs where Rima, a tiny woman named after the bird-girl in _Green Mansions_, was still at her spinning wheel. She dreamily looked up at us and proclaimed herself an anachronism. Children like Eric, she said, would be different from those before them—would think more abstractly in this video-game era. She wrote poetry; she heard voices; would the computer children do the same? I thought of Rob Barnaby, the WordStar writer, who had said he heard “a voice from the back of my head”; it wasn’t the same back-of-the-head voice as a poet’s, but it was there, anyhow. Someday Eric might be another Barnaby. Later that evening I demonstrated WordStar for the Meyers. Father and son agreed: WordStar moved words around faster than did Select, the word processor with which our Kaypros had originally come. I turned to Rima. “Computers are supposed to be very good for poets,” I said. “You can consider the possibilities. You can learn what words look like before you commit yourself to paper.” Rima listened politely, but I thought I might as well be showing off an electric guitar to a mandolin player. Gene and I discussed the Arthur Clarke connection. It was iffy. The telephone lines might not work; Clarke might be away on a business trip. Gene wouldn’t ghostwrite Eric’s questions for Clarke, but he did have one he hoped would make the list. “At the writer’s group,” Gene said, “this businessman was telling me how he fired his secretary when he got his computer.” How did Clarke feel about such situations? It was a common but acceptable question, I felt—one just as reasonable as any that science-fiction writers and philosophers might raise about the origin of the universe. Two weeks later I rang Clarke, around eleven in the morning, Virginia time. A little sleepily, he answered. He was tired after a trip promoting the _2010_ novel in the United States, and right now he could not recall me. “Remember,” I said, “we talked several months ago, and you said we could get together on the modem.” Clarke had phoned late one evening after I’d written him questions about WordStar, and in a sense we were now even; for my mind had drawn an absolute blank when this stranger had begun in a British accent, “David, you’ll never guess who this is.” Well, I asked now, could we still get together on the modem? We’d run a test to be ready for the questions from Eric and others a few days later. “Call my computer store,” Clarke said. He was using BSTAM, alas, a communications program that didn’t work with my MODEM7 software. Imagine my disappointment. I’d been hoping for quick computer-to-computer contact, over 8,900 miles, with the inventor of the communications satellite; and now a mundane problem confronted us—a simple lack of software compatibility. BSTAM in some ways was a Rolls of a communications program, excellent for transmitting large blocks of data over long distances. In fact, Clarke had used it to send his New York publisher some changes in _2010_. And yet, for communicating with me, his BSTAM disk was nothing but a worthless piece of plastic, because it snubbed MODEM7-style programs—perhaps the most common among micro users. It was as if Clarke were a lonely billionaire in a chauffeured Rolls. His ride might be velvety, but he would never meet the commoners in the Chevy in the next lane. After calling around the country, I finally located a review copy of BSTAM. Eric helped me test it out over the phone. “May I come over and watch you talk to Clarke?” he asked. I hesitated. Hadn’t Eric already modemed his questions to me? His being in my apartment seemed redundant. Then, however, I remembered my youth, when Lynn Wilson would invite me to his attic for DX sessions. It was like angling. Lynn might not snag those stations in New Zealand or Morocco, but it was still the electronic equivalent of treating a boy to a morning of trout fishing in a mountain stream. Now Arthur Clarke would be the new DX. Of course, the Rothman-Wilson analogy didn’t absolutely hold, for Eric knew more about computers than I did. “Sure, Eric,” I said at last, “sure you can come.” With Eric and his mother watching a few days later, I punched the “0” and confidently said I wanted such-and-such number in Colombo, Sri Lanka. A tape-recorded voice soon came on with a New Yawkish accent, announcing that all circuits to Sri Lanka were busy. Well, what did I expect? Sri Lanka wasn’t one of the great centers of global communications. And yet it still seemed vaguely bizarre. Why shouldn’t Sri Lanka enjoy instant contact all the time with the whole world? Why not? _Arthur Clarke_ lived there. Perhaps on my tenth try I finally heard the musical tone of Clarke’s number ringing. “Eureka!” I yelled. Once more Clarke himself answered. He warned me that he was rushing through a movie project and some books and was months behind in his correspondence; the most I could hope for in reply to the questions would be a series of “Yeses,” “Nos,” and “Maybes.” That irked me. For my enterprise I deserved a response ahead of the other letter writers; in fact, you might say I wasn’t even a letter writer—I was a _modemer_. I glanced at Eric. He could tell the general direction of the conversation, and he looked just as downcast as I must have. Eric was even hoping—quite unrealistically, I believed—that Clarke might call him at home. “I am starting my own computer software company (R & D),” Eric had said in a preface to his questions, “and I hope to profit in this venture. I am enjoying your book _2001_ and want to get _2010_. I am also a novice-class ‘Ham.’ If you ever need any software or just want to chat, my home and work number is.... I also have interests in ROBOTICS and COMPUTER HARDWARE, and ELECTRONICS (etc.).” I’d reminded Eric that the technology might fail in my quest for answers to his questions; I hadn’t been so emphatic in warning that Clarke himself might fail us. “I’m going to need to test the modem, anyway,” Clarke said after a pause, however. He wanted to exchange ideas with an MGM/UA director for the movie sequel to _2001_. He gave me the number of his telephone with a modem hooked up, and then, several times, I again suffered the vagaries of global phone communications before a line finally opened up and I heard the familiar tone of a modem. I reached for my own modem, a slim blue box, and switched over from “TALK” to “DATA.” Then I hit the return key on my Kaypro, firing up the BSTAM program. My screen flashed word that the connection was in progress, and I was about to slap Eric on the back, but I waited, and quite rightly, for as the seconds wore on, the connection was _still_ progressing. Something was amiss. By voice Clarke said my transmission hadn’t registered in his computer memory—not even the mere existence of my electronic file. I called Michael Scott, a technician at Business Computing International, Clarke’s New York computer store. He sent a Telex to Clarke. Was Clarke using the normal 300-baud modem speed matching mine? I learned a day or so later that he was. “Well,” I asked Michael, “how long has it been since Clarke last communicated with you [the store] through the modem?” “Months.” “Okay,” I said, “maybe he needs a refresher on how to set up the modem program.” Patiently, Michael ran through the procedures. Half an hour later I again was braving surly operators and busy signals to place another call to Sri Lanka. “What you want to do,” I told Clarke, “is type RXN B:ODYCORR.TXT, then a carriage return, then select ANSWER when you see the prompt.” Clarke, however, hadn’t been doing it that way. We tried again, and for the next ten minutes my screen kept flashing dozens of confirmations of the connection. Then our computer link broke. I called Clarke back. Surely at least the start of the electronic file had shown up on the B disk, the one on which he was to store my questions. “No,” he said, “I don’t see it.” Clarke, it seems, had forgotten to put a floppy disk in his B drive. It was a very excusable mistake—this whole modeming procedure was still a novelty to him—and we failed yet another time even with Scott’s instructions followed exactly.[86] Footnote 86: Clarke’s forgetting to insert the disk in the B drive should underscore a truism: _all computer users can commit idiocies_. Once I owned a printer that I couldn’t use without unplugging my modem. Things worked the other way around, too—as some people discovered when they tried to communicate with me over the phone but couldn’t because I’d forgotten to yank out the printer cable and put in the modem’s. So a few days later I settled on another tack: getting Clarke a free Kaypro II. Why not? Kaypro itself had once suggested that to me. It could do worse than to be able to say that Clarke and an MGM/UA director had used Kaypros to communicate during the creation of the _2010_ film. I, in turn, might reach Clarke more easily if he was tapping away on a machine like mine. Besides, he eventually could give his Kaypro to the new Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies. The center was to promote high tech in the Third World, and Joseph Pelton, who was rounding up U.S. backers for the organization, liked the Kaypro idea. So did Clarke. And so did Peter Hyams at MGM/UA. Hyams wasn’t just a well-known director with such credits as _Capricorn One_ and _The Star Chamber_. He was the kind of person for whom I was writing this book—he had a problem open to possible solution by computer. The problem was the need to consult closely with Clarke during the adaptation of the _2010_ novel; how to overcome the time difference between Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Culver City, California? “Some things work brilliantly when read but aren’t well suited to the screen,” Hyams said, and as a conscientious scriptwriter he didn’t want to make arbitrary changes to Clarke’s story. “I was interested in finding out what the author was thinking when he wrote certain things. And secondly I thought it was very, very important that Arthur C. Clarke be made to feel an important part of the making of this movie.” With rapport might come a greater understanding of the man and his books. Hearing of Hyams’s proposal to work together via computer, however, Clarke was skeptical. I could imagine why. Hyams would need a dependable link, not just the capability to exchange occasional messages. It might be 1983, satellites might be old hat by now, but the quality of the phone transmissions didn’t belie the fact that Clarke was on an island in the Indian Ocean. Could computers deal _reliably_ with the electronic echoes, with the delays from the signal traveling more than 45,000 miles on earth and in space? What about Sri Lanka’s primitive phone system? And yet Clarke’s location—some 9,350 miles from Culver City—also helped the struggle seem all the more worthwhile. “Because he’s twelve or thirteen hours away in time, it almost makes normal conversation impossible,” Hyams said. “Someone is always going to be speaking at a very inconvenient hour for them. And there are some times when you don’t want to talk, and sometimes when you’re asking somebody for something, you want to think about something. It requires more than a quick answer.” Letters, though, just wouldn’t do: “I’ve gotten mail from him that’s almost a month old.” Hyams might have used telex or a similar system, but the costs would still be greater than a direct computer-to-computer link. Ideally, he could tap out memos on a computer, then whisk them to Clarke without a secretary taking the time to type them into another machine. Hyams was already comfortable with a Xerox 860 word processor. Like me, however, he realized that the link had more chance of succeeding with the two ends using the same computer systems—Kaypros in this case. Two hardworking Kaypro employees, Margaret Phanes and Clifford Odendhal, pushed through the project at their company. Within a week or so a Kaypro II was on the way to Clarke, and the company installed another in Hyams’s office; at long last, the Great Modeming seemed at hand. Then, however, rioting broke out in Sri Lanka: fighting between two ethnic groups, the Singhalese and the minority Tamils, who were seeking a separate state. Somehow Clarke’s Kaypro reached the airport. But he couldn’t pick it up because of the rioting, during which an arsonist burned down the house of one of his technical assistants. “They’re swinging the jawbone again,” said an acquaintance of mine, alluding to a scene in _2001_ where a man-ape kills another with the high tech of his era. It was not a slur on Sri Lanka—just general disgust over violence of any kind. News stories appeared, then stories about the island trying to censor reporters so there wouldn’t be any more stories. Just when every circumstance seemed to be conspiring against me, I enjoyed a miraculous fluke. Arthur Clarke’s neighbor Susan Hayes, the wife of an American official in Colombo, was visiting Washington and would return to Sri Lanka soon; and through a member of the Kaypro writers group, Marcia Tyson, I passed on to her the written questions for Clarke to answer by phone if need be. I wasn’t cheating. It was perfectly in line with both the Marco Polo tradition and the spirit of this book; don’t ever shy away from paper backups. I also supplied Clarke a disk of MODEM7, the public-domain program that I used—so that we needn’t worry about software differences if my program didn’t work with the one that Kaypro gave him. Kaypro, in fact, did provide Clarke with MODEM7-compatible software—a company program—but it wouldn’t run acceptably on Peter Hyams’s computer. So both men instead received a commercial program called MITE. There was a problem, though, as Peter and I prepared for the Great Modeming—I couldn’t be Arthur C. Clarke. My MODEM7 could talk to Peter’s MITE, but it wasn’t really the same. With MODEM7 you couldn’t leave your computer unattended and have a machine thousands of miles away call you up and choose from dozens of electronic files on your disk. With MITE you could.[87] And Peter, true to the perfectionism of a top director, wanted his rehearsals to be as realistic as possible. “I’d like to be Arthur Clarke,” I told a kindly software dealer, who gave me a review copy. MITE, however, locked up on my machine. On the screen it stubbornly kept saying I was receiving signals from another computer—even before I turned on the modem. Footnote 87: MITE’s auto-answer feature won’t work without an appropriate modem. My own modem was manually activated, meaning that I couldn’t take advantage of this wrinkle. I could, however, switch on the modem when Peter called. And for him, that would realistically duplicate the experience of reaching Clarke’s computer. So I visited a hacker I’d heard of. He was a little technobully, who, bare chested in the August heat, worked sullenly on my software, making rude noises whenever I asked a question. MITE seemingly succumbed to his efforts. He berated me for not using the right number of data bits, the right stop bit, the right everything else in computerese. Chastened, I returned home, only to find that the program still wasn’t working reliably. I took my Kaypro and software to a friend, a systems analyst, an intelligent, learned man fond of aphorisms like “Even kings must obey the rules of mathematics.” Unfairly, cruelly, MITE still wasn’t running after five hours of his toil. My friend played by the rules; he’d based his whole career on following instruction manuals; he was the perfect man to help run the computer system of a hospital or bank. I was just the opposite. When it came to the laws of math or computer manuals, I was willing to turn criminal. In fact, that’s how I undeservedly succeeded at last—by flouting MITE’s instructions on connecting my computer and modem. It was the first time in years that I’d used a soldering iron. I didn’t own a vise, even, so I placed the RS-232 connectors on an aluminum pie plate on the wooden floor of my apartment and breathed lead-poisoned fumes. The work was hot. It was also murder on my eyes, hardly the joy I recalled from amateur radio—a task fit for robots, not people. Squinting away, I hoped that beneficent HALs would soon multiply in the world’s factories. Then I remembered my friend Lynn Wilson, a telephone-company retiree who had soldered for decades, who loved it, and who had lost his service job to computers. With MITE running at last—and with me as a more Clarke-like imitator—I began another series of rehearsals with Peter Hyams. The program was excellent; the instructions were bewildering in places. Peter called a MITE distributor and traded insults. It was outrageous. We were not ordinary end users. Peter was a movie director trying to communicate with a famous novelist-scientist; and I, if an obscurity, was at least around to chronicle whatever abuse Peter suffered. What would average computer users have done? Without other MITE owners to share their problems, they would have been up the creek. The whole ordeal was a potent argument for user groups; in fact, you might say that Clarke, Peter, and I were a three-member one. Clarke, meanwhile, was reportedly suffering a disk-drive problem. He may have enjoyed sympathy, however, from another user—nearby; an American in Sri Lanka owned a Kaypro. Of course, the ordeal was still another argument for easier-to-master software. Finally, it happened: the Great Modeming—more than six months after Clarke had first phoned me from Sri Lanka. Hyams and Clarke started typing messages to each other, and I knew my own Great Modeming would succeed. But a problem lingered even now. Colombo and Culver City couldn’t send already-typed material to each other’s unattended machines. So one of Clarke’s first messages to the MGM/UA Kaypro wasn’t exactly “What hath God wrought?” It was something in the spirit of “Tell **** to fix that software or I’m going to throw the computer in a river. And tell **** that Sri Lanka has many rivers.” A furious Hyams and Rothman phoned Odendhal, who promptly contacted the distributor. Contrite, the MITE man apologized and gave Hyams the guidance he needed. The Clarke-Hyams link was now in place. It hadn’t been easy. The two men were each using a $1,595 computer, a modem selling for several hundred dollars, and a communications program listing for more than $175, and Peter’s new printer cost several hundred; and those expenses normally would have been only the beginning. Kaypro had set up the software and offered other consultant-style services; Clarke used his own technician. If Average Company, Inc., had duplicated the computer link on both sides of the Pacific, the project might have exceeded $5,000. And yet clearly the technical hurdles seemed surmountable and the rewards worthwhile. Two weeks into the link Hyams had only one complaint—the difficulty of reaching an international operator at times to place calls. And in future years that problem would lessen as special computer links let Telenet spread into the world’s poorer countries. An attachment to make the Sri Lankan phone system compatible would cost the government several thousand dollars. And the expense to Clarke and Hyams would be perhaps $60 an hour—no great barrier, considering that they could transmit 1,000-word computer files in a fraction of that cost using 300-baud modems. With faster modems they might end up spending still less. More important to Hyams right now, however, was the friendship he was building with Clarke—so important to the success of the film. “I think we’re kind of linked in a strange way,” Peter said. “He’s written some lovely and sweet things. It’s strangely intimate. You’re just getting daily mail. It has some really wonderful advantages that letters have over telephone conversations. “The kinds of questions that I’m asking him and the kinds of things I’m saying are things you don’t really say off the top of your head. You know, ‘What do you think about so-and-so?’ and you sit down and compose the answer and you write it back. Some of the stuff is purely personal. Some of it is not. I want him to experience the making of this movie. There are a lot of logistical details. I’ve spoken to some people that Arthur’s recommended I speak to. There are things to do with everything, from marketing to plans I have, to changes I want to make, to What does he think of certain things? to technical areas of the film that he can be enormous help with.”[88] Footnote 88: A Ballantine paperback titled _The Odyssey File_, records much of the computer dialogue between Clarke and Hyams. Very briefly Clarke also writes of the link in _Ascent to Orbit: The Technical Writings of Arthur C. Clarke_, released by John Wiley & Sons, New York, in 1984. Clarke, using British spelling, modemed to me that the “connextion” with Peter Hyams was “invaluable. We are on exactly the other side of the clock, so I leave my machine on ANSWER with a file for him when I go to bed, which is about the time he goes to MGM, and when I get down to breakfast, there’s his answer on the disk.” If Peter worked late at night, the two men might save their “conversation” on computer disk so “there will be a complete record of our collaboration. It’s truly fantastic, like WordStar. I just can’t imagine how I ever managed without it. My big worry is that as more and more of my friends get plugged in, I’ll never be able to get away from the keyboard.” A few days before Clarke sent his written answers for Eric Meyer and the others, he phoned him just as Eric had hoped. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint the boy,” Clarke said later. The Clarke-Meyer conversation was brief—words to the effect that Clarke would be in Washington in 1984 and he wished Eric luck in the future—but it served its purpose. “It’s the first time I’ve ever had an international call,” Eric said. “My first phone DX!” My computer DX reached me one Saturday morning at nine, an uneventful occurrence except for a broken telephone connection when I dialed Clarke back to start the modeming. Our two Kaypros clicked the next try. I received a prepared file from Clarke of about one thousand words, and afterwards we tapped out some 250 words: Q. When will you be coming to Washington so I can tell Eric, who naturally will want to attend your speech? A. I am afraid it will be a very private affair, as it takes place in the White House! But I expect to be in Washington in late April.[89] Q. I am planning to call my ergonomics chapter “The Hal Syndrome,” and if you’ve used that phrase before, I’d like to give you credit. A. I don’t recall ever using the term, but it’s a good idea, and you’re welcome, anyway. Footnote 89: President Reagan’s campaign schedule and trip to China forced him to cancel his April 1984 meeting with Clarke. That’s part of the conversation with the typos cleaned up—on-line typing isn’t for the vain. Clarke was brisk at the keyboard. There wasn’t any doubt I was “talking” to a professional author. Hyams was fast, too, reaching maybe eighty or ninety per minute on good days; and yet as Peter pointed out, typing speed didn’t matter that much, since you normally would compose at leisure, then squirt out your prepared file.[90] Footnote 90: In the postscript of _Ascent to Orbit_, Clarke described himself and Hyams as “lousy typists.” They may be in terms of accuracy but not speed—and, of course, with a computer, you can correct mistakes so easily that accuracy becomes secondary to speed. The Clarke-Rothman connection ran just fourteen minutes and cost $25.11 on my phone bill—a good case for the economy of global computer communications. I didn’t know what Clarke’s rates might be. But if I’d given a thousand words to a Telex service in Washington, D.C., a one-way message to Sri Lanka would have totaled some $125. And if I could have afforded my own Telex machine? Well, the connect charges alone still would have exceeded $60. Moreover, my $25.11 charge was for a 300-baud connection, a slowpoke one by some business computer standards. With a 1,200-baud link—a strong possibility since the connection had proved so reliable for Clarke and Hyams at 300 baud—my phone bill might have been well under $15 even on a weekday. And with everything sent already typed, it might have been between $5 and $10. Imagine the thousands of dollars a company could save using micros instead of Telex for regular communications with faraway offices. In one of the questions sent there Marco Polo fashion, Eric asked if computers someday would replace secretaries who took dictation. Could the machines display the words on their screens and electronically police spelling and grammar? “We will certainly get computers that can take dictation,” Clarke replied by modem, “and this may lead to two desirable results—better elocution and rationalisation of spelling.” Yes, yes. Maybe someday American and British computers could even spell alike. Although Eric’s question was a very good one, it was passé in many technical circles, as he himself must have known. Articles were already appearing in micro magazines about low-cost computers that could recognize simple commands like SAVE (to preserve material on a disk). One of the big problems with speech recognition was usability with different voices. But I had no doubt that practical machines with a vocabulary fit for the business world would be taking dictation by 2001. The keyboard would remain, however. Not everyone would want to dictate; I suspected even two decades from now I’d still prefer the pleasure of letting my fingers linger over the keys. Then again, how did I know? Just a few years ago I could have seen myself at only a _typewriter_ keyboard. As for spelling checkers—well, there again the basic technology was already around. I myself would be proofing this chapter with The WORD Plus, a 45,000-word electronic dictionary that would flag the places where my spellings contradicted it. Not that The WORD Plus would ever replace proofreaders at The _New Yorker_. It would let you use “his” when you meant “this”; it was absolutely incapable of considering spellings in context. Even by 2001 the checkers might lack that capability. But eventually they would respond perfectly to context, as would grammar checkers. That might require artificial intelligence, the ability of computers to reason independently without their humans laying out the machines’ tasks in detail. But the day would come. Of course even the best prophets could err. In his 1945 article entitled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” Clarke predicted communications satellites but missed by a mile in another area. “It seems unlikely that we will have to wait as much as twenty years,” he said then, “before atomic-powered rockets are developed....” Still, I appreciated Clarke’s general philosophy of prediction: Experts are more often wrong in saying something _can’t_ be done than in saying that it _can_. “Do you think there will ever be a HAL?” Eric asked Clarke. “Yes,” Clarke said, “HAL will arrive—but not by 2001!” I agreed. But confusingly, HAL wouldn’t necessarily be a pure-bred silicon creation; I could see him as a hybrid of silicon chips and biochips, or maybe just the latter. Created by an organic process, the biochips might have complexity and power far beyond those of old-fashioned machines with silicon.[91] Footnote 91: In the early 1960s Clarke himself wrote in _Profiles of the Future_ that “the first genuine thinking machines may be _grown_ rather than constructed; already some crude but very stimulating experiments have been carried out along these lines. Several artificial organisms have been built that are capable of rewiring themselves to adapt to changing circumstances.” What’s more, instead of a machine acting like a man, scientists might help join men with machines, with everyone receiving brain implants at birth. Men might turn into Hal before Hal became a man. For years science-fiction writers had been predicting cyborgs, man-machine unions. In some ways, humans might forever defy emulation. “Even with computers’ vast memories, I’m skeptical as to whether a machine could give judgments based on ethics,” said another of the questioners, Jerry terHorst. “How can executives live with this limitation? Might computers have a way of taking the sharp edge off ethical questions? Quite often you can put things in a machine or say things to a machine, but maybe—because of the way it operates—you must conform to its system. You can’t very well couch an ethical question for the machine, because I don’t think a computer can weigh it ethically. It can certainly weigh it procedurally, but whether it can weigh it ethically is another question. I’m wondering whether computers might get in the way of having to make some of the ethical decisions that businesses are always required to make.” Clarke replied, “It will certainly be some time before computers understand ethics (not too many humans do, for that matter), but _in the long run_ it is impossible to rule out any aspect of human activity which cannot be reproduced or at least imitated by computer to any desired degree of precision. Of course, some things will be too complicated to be worth doing.” Elsewhere in the response Clarke did say: “I know nothing about corporate or any other form of management, but obviously in principle computers can assist decision making greatly. However—GIGO!” Garbage in, garbage out! Already electronic decision programs were available for businessmen, helping them consider financial factors—but in most cases, not very much more. Besides, the people who most needed guidance from “ethical” software would be the least likely to use it. Imagine Richard Nixon booting up a disk to ponder if he should cover up Watergate. All this wasn’t an abstraction for terHorst. He himself had resigned as press secretary in a disagreement with Gerald Ford over the Nixon pardon. Now he worked as Washington public-affairs director for another Ford, the car company. It undoubtedly had banks of computers, and like any other automakers’, they must be toting up the costs of adding various safety precautions to cars. Critics of the auto industry charged that manufacturers considered only their ledgers—the cost of the precautions versus that of lawsuits. Would software someday weigh the ethical issues along with the numbers, and _should_ it? That was hardly a question just for the auto industry. What about a construction company evaluating building materials of different strengths? Or a book publisher weighing its profitability against the menace to public health that would result from publication of a fad diet book. I was reactionary enough to consider those final decisions forever beyond the realm of even computers as sophisticated as HAL. In the future, though, how many executives would feel that way? Jerry terHorst’s ethics question was easily my favorite. He also asked, “What about the general issue of trust among people communicating by computer? Can people make policy, sign contracts, settle multimillion questions without shaking hands? You can have two people with computers in different locations calling up the same statistics from the same memory bank. Yet isn’t it possible that the necessary trust may not occur until the two get together in person?” “Your point that people must meet to establish trust is one theme of my novel _Imperial Earth_,” Clarke replied. “After that, they can work together through telecommunications. “I had unexpected confirmation of this idea from a visiting reader who happened to be the Russian ambassador-at-large in charge of the Indian Ocean. He said, ‘You’re quite right. You have to look into the other fellow’s eyes before you can negotiate.’” In _Imperial Earth_ a man from a moon of Saturn visits Washington in 2276 to celebrate the U.S. quincentennial and cultivate his family’s terrestrial political contacts. Wreckers have razed the original Watergate complex—over the objections of the Democrats, who wanted it saved as a national monument—but in many ways politicians and statesmen are the same as in the darkest twentieth century. They seek personal contact with each other. “Only after that contact, with its inevitable character evaluation, had been made, and the subtle links of mutual understanding and common interest established,” writes Clarke, “could one do business by long-distance communication with any degree of confidence.” A booster of telecommuting might nod. He’d insisted that we meet _face-to-face_, and I suspected I could have enjoyed slightly better cooperation from a few other interviewees for this book if we had been in the same rooms. Wires and satellites could never eliminate travel. Granted, some researchers might say the next year that people tended to use stronger words in computer conferences, perhaps to make up for the lack of body language and other visual clues. Reportedly, the decisions from such conferences tended to be more radical—involving much more risk or not enough—than those made face-to-face. Just the same, computer “meetings” could greatly reduce travel once the people at the various ends had established the basic trust. Clarke had written two decades ago, “The business lunch of the future could be conducted perfectly well with the two halves of the table ten thousand miles apart; all that would be missing would be the handshakes and exchange of cigars.”[92] Footnote 92: Clarke’s conjecture about the business lunch of the future appears in _Profiles of the Future_, Harper & Row, New York, 1962, p. 194. That might or not be with television contact. The absence of it, however, wouldn’t be the ultimate disaster. In concentrating on the other person’s _message_, you might be less vulnerable to misleading clues from facial expression, body movement, or clothing. Clarke himself enjoyed creating different personae for different audiences; once his sarong had shaken up an IBM convention. A Washington reporter described him at another time as “a paunchy fellow” with thinning hair, “math-teacher glasses, discreet hearing aid ... red velvet slippers and unbelted pants” who looked “like some kind of GS-12 from the Bureau of Poultry Audits. And he wants you to see his Kermit the Frog doll.”[93] Yet this same man could don dark suits for book jackets and deliver august speeches to statesmen. Footnote 93: The “Bureau of Poultry” description of Clarke comes from Curt Suplee’s _Washington Post_ article of November 16, 1982. Suplee also saw Clarke in nonbureaucratic attire—the sarong. Beyond reducing the opportunity for visual distractions, long-distance contact by phone or computer offered another advantage in my opinion. You could reach more people in a given time to confirm their facts; you weren’t twiddling your thumbs in cabs and airport lobbies or wearily working the horn locally from a hotel room with a bed fit for a steel-spined dwarf. That still left the question of what kind of office you would talk to the world from. Margaret Phanes of Kaypro wanted to know. The week Margaret asked about the office of 2001, she said she was in the middle of reading Clarke’s novel _Rendezvous with Rama_. In her opinion, Clarke brought about “synchronicity.” He himself, in fact, had once told of “preposterous” coincidences in his own life, and he’d peopled _Imperial Earth_ with characters like “George Washington,” a twenty-third-century Virginian who lived on a museum’s plantation named Mt. Vernon. If “synchronicity” or other coincidences had worked for Dickens, then why not Clarke and Phanes? Or Rothman? Trying to puzzle out some technical details of my computer-to-computer link with Clarke, I’d run into two noncelebrities who had met him. And what about his neighbor—visiting Washington—through whom I’d passed the questions from Margaret and the others? Coincidence needn’t be mystical. I was happy enough for it simply to be useful. Replying to Margaret’s questions about what the office would be like in 2001, Clarke had a problem. For decades he had been working at home. “My ‘office,’ if you can call it that—it looks like a snake-pit with all the cables on the floor—is just ten feet from my bedroom. I can appreciate your questions are very important, but they’re outside my frame of reference.” Clarke may have replied in a limited way to Phanes, however, when he answered a question from Seymour Rubinstein. He’d asked Clarke about the possibility of briefcase computer tapping into worldwide networks to do complicated processing of information. Just how would that affect people? Years ago Clarke had said a business eventually wouldn’t even need “an address or a central office—only the equivalent of a telephone number. For its files and records will be space rented in the memory units of computers that could be located anywhere on earth. The information stored in them could read off on high-speed printers whenever any of the firm’s offices needed it.”[94] And now Clarke was predicting little portables capable of using the giant networks and memory banks. “It seems to me that as computers become more and more portable and networks more universal (and systems standardised—a MUST!) there may no longer be any question of ‘micros in the office.’ The office will be in the micro—and _that_ will be in an attaché case.” Rubinstein himself already knew that Epson was about to market its little lap-size machine with WordStar built into the read-only memory. Footnote 94: Clarke’s prediction of a business having “only the equivalent of a telephone number” is from _Profiles of the Future_, p. 194. Rob Barnaby, the WordStar programmer, asked a slightly overlapping question covered by the same answer. There was something else for them from Clarke, however—his thanks. “I am happy to greet the geniuses who made me a born-again writer,” he said. “Having announced my retirement in 1978, I now have six books in the works and two portables—all through WordStar.”[95] Footnote 95: Discussing WordStar, Clarke was careful to point out that he had “never used or even seen any other word-processing system” and had “no frame of reference,” but found “only a few small nits to pick with my version. (Release 3 of 1981, WU644275C).” Among other things he repeated a complaint I myself have against WordStar 3.0. “I do wish one could see the printed instructions actually operating on the screen text,” Clarke said, “so it wasn’t messed up by those ugly control characters. That would also have the enormous benefit of preventing the sort of boob I made for the first few weeks—not closing the print instruction, with horrid results, e.g., underlining to the end of the manuscript!!” James Watt, the descendant of the Scottish inventor, also figured to an extent in Clarke’s work, in the sense that the Haunted Book Shop sold it. “A computer disk the size of a phonograph record can hold about 54,000 frames of pictures,” Watt observed in his questions, “enough for a large encyclopedia. Does that mean we’ll see the end of going into a bookstore and buying a best-seller? Are we going to lose the printed word as we know it today? Will ‘book’ buying become a computerized activity? Will I call up XYZ computer firm and then peruse disks at my leisure?” “Nothing will ever replace books,” Clarke reassured him. “They can’t be matched for convenience, random access, nonvolatile memory (unless dropped in the bath), low power consumption, portability, etc. “But information networks will supplement them and replace whole categories, e.g., encyclopedias and telephone directories (as is being planned in France).” Clarke was more sanguine about Watts’s fear that computerized shopping might “dehumanize us” and clerks might vanish. He said, “I believe personal service will become more and more important and hopefully more and more available as older occupations disappear. We’ll ‘window-shop’ through home terminals but will still discuss important products with salesmen, even if they’re hundreds of kilometers away!” The seventh questioner, Lynn Wilson, had worked several decades for the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, only to see computers do away with the rotary switches he had so lovingly attended. “They’ve sent all my equipment to the smelter’s to reclaim the metal,” he said. “I don’t know if anyone’s still in the building. Maybe a few times a week someone goes by. The equipment tests itself twenty-four hours a day and flashes a red light for the serviceman next time he’s there.” Just a few boxes had replaced the long rows of devices that connected the dial phones in the area of Alexandria, Virginia. But Lynn didn’t feel any futility. The telephone and teletype themselves had superseded another invention he used—the Morse Code telegraph. He’d pounded out messages at up to forty words per minute for the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad, and he still recalled an old saying reflecting his pride in his craft: “If a telegram takes more than twenty-four hours to be delivered, it has whiskers.” My friend had a feel for the scraps of history. For years he’d kept a Teletype message announcing the Third Reich’s surrender, and I asked about the ARC-5 receiver that he’d given me: could it really have flown over Germany? “Go to the Air and Space Museum in Washington,” Lynn said, “and you’ll see a cockpit with an ARC-5. I’ve even seen an ARC-5 with a .50-caliber bullet hole right through it.” Lynn was hardly a foe of every piece of post-ARC-5 technology. In late 1983 he hoped to be among the hams talking on the two-meter wavelength to an astronaut aboard the space shuttle.[96] Just the same, Lynn feared the years ahead—not so much his own fate as other people’s. Footnote 96: Alas, Lynn tried but did not successfully make radio contact with the space shuttle. “Aren’t computers turning people into useless objects against their will?” Lynn asked Clarke. Gene Meyer, Eric’s father, of course had wanted Eric to ask a somewhat similar question. But it meant more coming from Lynn. “Computers eliminate people, who take vacations, sick leave, and retirement,” he said. “I myself haven’t suffered. I took voluntary retirement at full pension at sixty-two. But computers were why I left then instead of sixty-five. I would have had to go to school for three years, and by then I would have been ready for regular retirement. So it didn’t make sense for me to stay. But not everyone can retire at full pension when the new technology takes over. What do you do about the people being forced out? What’s the answer?” “Anyone who can be turned into a useless object against his/her will _is_ one!” Clarke said. “You obviously weren’t.” That was too pat an answer for me. The other day I’d talked to my old state editor, who’d visited Lorain, Ohio, west of Cleveland on Lake Erie. He feared that Lorain might become a husk of a town. A decade ago, when I’d been a reporter there, more than eight thousand had worked at the U.S. Steel mills, and Dick worried that the company might pull out of Lorain except for a bare-bones plant employing just a few hundred. Downtown, he’d seen dozens of shattered store windows. Oddly, however, the newspaper enjoyed some new subscribers—Dick said some of his friends could afford to do little more than watch television and read. Were Dick’s friends to be shrugged off as “useless objects”? In _Imperial Earth_ Clarke had told of stringent population control, of an American Midwest replanted with forests, of steel mills neatly preserved as museums; but three centuries earlier, Lorain untidily abounded with angry, idle men. Cheap steel imports were one threat to them. So, perhaps, was the eagerness of many steel-company officers to pour their capital into more profitable industries. But computers and other high tech also had helped deprive Lorain of some steel jobs. In the future, however, couldn’t even a factory technician telecommute—overseeing robots from home and using them to turn out custom-crafted products requiring a human “touch”? Ideally, America in 2001 would be producing something besides “information,” Big Macs, and look-alike toasters. And ideally, too, average workers could afford to enjoy the cornucopia. In fact, widespread genetic enhancement of IQs might _eventually_ make everyone capable of appreciating high tech at a high level, so that “workers” in the old sense disappeared. Huxley’s _Brave New World_ hierarchy might never exist, and in the twenty-second century we might all be Alphas smarter than any of today’s computer wizards. Robots would be our real Epsilons. Meanwhile, regardless of the traumas of society at large, some of the most unlikely people could befriend new machines. Jack LaVriha—the cigar-chomping newspaperman in Chapter 8 who dated back almost to the _Front Page_ days—had done fine in the Lorain _Journal_’s electronic city room. Even Rima Meyer, the weaver, had made peace with the family Kaypro. Just a few months ago Eric’s mother had given me the impression that she wouldn’t use the computer for a long time if at all. But now Gene had nearly finished his Maryland book—freeing up the Kaypro for her to practice on. “I use it for personal correspondence and for the fliers for the weaving classes I teach—anything that requires good, clean copy,” she said. The Meyers, in fact, didn’t even have a working typewriter in the house. Well, I thought, so much for all my blather about mandolin players and electric guitars. To be sure, computerization would rarely be as worry-free and blissful as the advertisements depicted it. There would be computer crime, disk crashes, all the other high-tech woes. Few people would take to computers as naturally as had Charlie Bowie, with his playful, Hawkeye-Pierce attitude toward his little Zenith. And how many could save their companies $200,000 a year like Alan Scharf? Or experience the exhilaration of Peter Hyams when Arthur Clarke’s letters flashed across his green screen? Or the satisfaction that Rob Barnaby received by writing a software classic like WordStar? But if computer users not only chose their machines and software well but _used_ them well, if they formed users groups rather than trust peripatetic sales reps, if they avoided technobullies and hired consultants carefully, if they trained employees in a nonintimidating way, if they computerized humanely as well as efficiently, if they safeguarded their data security, if they prepared for the future through telecommuting when appropriate, if they showed persistence and sense, enough rewards were there, and they’d find the Silicon Jungle to be not only survivable but friendly. ❑ Afterword It’s November 1984 now, and I’ve sold my Kaypro. Business computers are production tools, not family heirlooms; when I found that the Kaypro’s screen and storage capacity were becoming inadequate for my needs, I unsentimentally ran want ads. The new owner—a church magazine using the Kaypro for lighter-duty work such as letter writing—couldn’t be happier. The Kaypro’s replacement was a sleek Victor 9000. I was growing accustomed to it when a writer friend, Stephen Banker, called with news of an auction at a shut-down computer store a few miles from my apartment. A year and one-half ago the store’s managers and I had argued about the Kaypro’s merits versus the Osborne’s. They’d gambled on the wrong machine, the Osborne. Micro sales in general were growing, but this business had perished in the Silicon Jungle. Now I returned to the store and saw the debris of the micro revolution. Spread out haphazardly on long tables, treated like dead fish, were the computers that I’d seen glamorized on the covers of the micro magazines just months before. The auction had begun on a Thursday and would last over the Labor Day weekend through Monday. The first day the prices were reduced 30 percent, and they would keep declining, until on Monday you could buy most of the machines for 80 percent off. It was now Friday. The machine I wanted, a hard-disk version of my Victor 9000, would be $2,400 Sunday—40 percent of the original list price of $6,000. “Don’t buy it Sunday,” said Steve. “If God intends you to have a hard disk, He’ll let you get it for $1,200 Monday.” There were two hard-disk Victors, one new, one used, both selling for the same. So far only one other person seemed to be showing the amount of interest that I did, a husky, gray-haired man in a T-shirt. He was trying the used machine. I wondered if he’d seen the new one and was trying to distract me from it. This could be the stuff of nightmares: _A whistle blows that Monday. T-shirt pushes a frail young auction staffer aside and races toward the new Victor. I overtake him, however. Just as I’m about to lay hands on the machine, T-shirt throws a punch toward me. I duck. T-shirt grabs the Victor monitor._ _“Listen,” I say, “that computer isn’t yours unless you get the main part. The monitor won’t do.”_ _An auction staffer nods._ _I unplug the main machine from an AC extension cord. T-shirt, however, sets the monitor down and moves closer, as if to grab the part with the disk drives and the central processing unit._ _“Look,” I tell the auction staffer, “it’s my machine.”_ _“First come, first serve,” he says. “First to the counter gets the computer.”_ _T-shirt flexes his biceps. “You and me got some fighting to do.”_ _“Hell, no,” I say. “I already have my computer.”_ “My _computer,” T-shirt growls. I hug the Victor more tightly. My back is aching. T-shirt laughs at my discomfort._ “My _computer,” he repeats. “Gimme!” The auction staffer watches calmly. I don’t. That’s $6,000 worth of machinery we’re fighting over. Suppose I drop—_ _T-shirt rushes in. The computer’s plastic case smacks against the floor and shatters. Simultaneously, one of us brushes against the monitor. It, too, falls; and the CRT makes a horrible sound as the air rushes into the vacuum. The Victor, however well built, isn’t a machine to be fought over, barroom-brawl fashion. On the floor I see tiny computer chips and spaghettilike clumps of wire. God knows how, but the hard disk has spilled out of the Victor and is rolling down the aisle of the store._ _The auction staffer makes clucking noises. I glare at T-shirt. “You saw it all,” I tell the staffer. “He’s the one who’s going to have to make good.”_ _“Hey, boss,” the staffer yells toward the counter, “we got ourselves a little accident here.”_ _The chief auctioneer rushes over and looks over the Victor’s remains._ _“He smashed it,” I say, frowning again at T-shirt._ _“But you let it drop,” T-shirt snaps._ _“The price was only $1,200 on the last day,” I remind everyone. A lump is forming in my throat. Inflation notwithstanding, I’ll never feel right putting “only” in front of “$1,200.”_ _“Well, it was still worth six thou,” says the head auctioneer. “See you both in court.”_ _“Both?” T-shirt and I ask at the same time._ _“Both,” says the auctioneer, “unless you want to pay now. That’ll be $3,000 each. Cash or certified check?”_ Hoping that T-shirt wouldn’t notice me, I put the new Victor through its paces as much as I could. It wasn’t set up to run WordStar, the program I wanted to test it with. I’d be taking a chance. Still, if I bought the Victor for $1,200, I’d have enough money left over for even massive repairs—assuming someone didn’t beat me to the machine. “Maybe I’ll buy it myself,” said a sales rep, out of either cruelty or a desire to increase my interest still more, assuming that was possible. “Maybe I’ll sell it for scrap.” He himself was a good six foot four inches, perhaps three hundred pounds, but some Victor enthusiasts might have thrown a few punches, anyway, at the source of such sacrilege. The Victor, unlike most of the other micros there, wasn’t the computer equivalent of a dead fish. With the built-in hard disk I could keep every syllable of _The Silicon Jungle_ ready for editing without jockeying around the floppies. I silently thanked “Big Blue” IBM for the bargain that might await me. Through its normal marketing muscle, including a massive ad campaign featuring a Charlie Chaplin look-alike, IBM had overwhelmed the competition. People shunned “obscure” brands, especially if they couldn’t use IBM PC-DOS IBM software. The Victor didn’t have Charlie on its side. Some bozos at the company even _charged_ dealers for promotional literature.[97] But what a micro! The Victor was a 16-bit, MS-DOS machine and ran WordStar 3.3 and the CrossTalk communications program, the software I used in my work. The screen was noticeably sharper than the IBM’s; the keyboard was closer to a Selectric’s; the light brown plastic cabinet was sleeker, and it didn’t take up as much desk space as an IBM PC would. And the floppies could store an amazing 1.2 megabytes of information or three times as much space as the usual IBM disk. How lamentable that IBM rather than Victor had set the standard for the personal computer industry. Victor had gone into