Electronic Life

It is difficult today to remember how intimidating computers were for non-technical people in the early 1980s. In previous decades, the machines had been corralled into computer departments at universities and large businesses, and were the responsibility of trained personnel. However, in the early 1980s, people who might have been perfectly happy never getting closer to a computer than a Star Trek re-run were told that personal computers would be soon be on their desks at work. This created demand for books that introduced computers, defined basic jargon, and reassured American readers that they could master the machine when it inevitably arrived. The panic probably reached a peak in 1983, as did the response. In 1983, Time Magazine called the personal computer Man of the Year ("Machine of the Year" under the circumstances). In 1983, The Soul of a New Machine won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1983, Michael Crichton published Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers. Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers author Michael Crichton pages 209 publisher Ballantine Books rating 4 reviewer stern ISBN 0394534069 summary May be worth thumbing through for a glance of what the future was supposed to have been.

Crichton was already successful as a novelist, having published The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, Congo, and other books. Several of these had already been made made into movies. Of course he would become vastly more famous later, with Jurassic Park and the television show E.R.

Electronic Life is written as a glossary, with entries like "Afraid of Computers (everybody is)" "Buying a Computer" "Computer Crime," and so forth. The book shows signs of being hurridly written, as few of the entries reflect any research. The computer crime entry, for example, is three pages long and contains only four hard facts -- specifically, that institutions were then losing $5 billion to $30 billion a year on computer crime, that Citibank processed $30 billion a day in customer transactions using computers, that American banks as a whole were moving $400 billion a year in the U.S., and that the Stanford public key code (not otherwise described) was broken in 1982. No examples of computer crime are given, though by 1983 such accounts were appearing in the mainstream press, and dedicated books on the topic had been around for at least a decade (I own one British example dating to 1973). Detailed descriptions of such capers make for good reading, so Crichton's failure to include any tells us that he did not take the time to visit the library when he wrote this book.

Electronic Life is of interest to modern readers in only two respects: first, Crichton's descriptions of then-current technology provide an amusing reminder of how far we have come. Second, and more significantly, Crichton's predictions for the future are worth comparing with what has actually developed.

As an example of the first sort of passage, on page 140 he points out that if you ask your computer to compute 5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06+20.07-200.08+300.09/1.10, there will be a noticable delay as it works out the answer. Later he suggests that a user would do well to buy a CP/M based system, because of all the excellent applications for that platform.

Crichton writes science fiction, and he knew very well that computers would soon do more than was possible in 1983. Such predictions are largely absent from this book, but a few entries do let us see what he expected for the future (other resurrecting dinosaurs, I mean). First, Crichton correctly expected that computer networks would increase in importance. He saw this as a matter of convenience -- computers can share pictures, which you can't do with a verbal phone call, and computer networks can operate asynchronously, so you can leave information for somebody and have have them pick it up at their convenience.

He also makes predictions for computer games, first explaining that there are several types of games:

1. Arcade Games (which are in turn split into 'invader games', 'defender games', and 'eating games'.)
2. Strategy Games (chess, backgammon, etc.)
3. Adventure Games (text-based interactive fiction)

Crichton dismisses computer games as "the hula hoops of the '80s", saying "already there are indications that the mania for twitch games may be fading." He thinks that parents should not worry about their children playing games because, "it's a way of making friends with the machine." (that's not how I think about Tomb Raider 3, but to each his own). He was wrong here, of course, and missed entirely how games would eventually drive the high end of the home computer market.

Most interestingly in his predictions, Crichton clearly expected that computers would soon be as normal as home appliances like washing machines. He never anticipated that, through vastly increased numbers and reduced cost, they would become omnipresent and perhaps invisible.

The book is little more than a collection of off-the-cuff musings, and as such the most interesting entry is probably "Microprocessors, or how I flunked biostatistics at Harvard" in which Crichton lashes out at a medical school teacher who had given him a 'D' fifteen years earlier.

This book is a curiosity, not worth buying at a garage sale unless you are a Crichton completist.

Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Nostalgia

[Slashdotess]

This brings back memories of the old days when I was a UNIX sysadmin. Back when we used to write pacman for the terminals and run it in 2 in the morning.
I read Michael Crichton's book a few years ago and I'd just like to share my memories.

Re:Nostalgia

[ackthpt]

Back when we used to write pacman for the terminals and run it in 2 in the morning.

I recall playing VT100 invaders on a PDP 11/50, which was pretty darn cool. Among other games, all we lacked was 3D and third dimension thinking. The logic behind the games still remains pretty much the same. (The fellow who wrote NBA JAM originally cut his teeth writing squash and tennis games to play on VT52 terminals)

Still, those behemoth VAXen, PDP, System 370s, etc. did introduce those of us to tried, to writing multiplayer/multi access applications.

Re:Nostalgia

[Gropo]

dang! You just brought forth great memories of visiting Pop's office at DEC in the early 80's and playing VT invaders... I'd totally forgotten about that ;)

Re:Nostalgia

[Malcolm MacArthur]

I've still got a VAX version of it, and play it occasionally on the unused but still running MicroVAX at work. ;-)

Problem is, the thing depends on the hard-coded speed limits of a genuine VT100. It's just playable on a VT300, and completely unplayable over TELNET :(.

I dunno

[Reality Master 101]

As an example of the first sort of passage, on page 140 he points out that if you ask your computer to compute 5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06+20.07-200.08+300.09 /1.10, there will be a noticable delay as it works out the answer.

Considering I got my first computer in 1980 (A 4Mhz Z80-based TRS-80), I think I can say with some credibility that there would not have been a delay computing that, even using interpreted Basic.

On the other hand, those systems were amusingly slow by todays standards. As evidence, I submit that under interpreted Basic, I had memorized how to produce a 1 second delay loop:

FOR I = 1 TO 500:NEXT I

Yes, 500 empty loops took 1 second.

Re:I dunno

[dubstop]

FOR I = 1 TO 500:NEXT I

Yes, 500 empty loops took 1 second.

With most of the old basic interpreters, FOR/NEXT loops were slightly faster if the loop variable wasn't given after the NEXT statement. Therefore, if your code had looked like this:

FOR I = 1 TO 500:NEXT

You might have been able to squeeze a 1 second delay into 0.9 seconds.

Re:I dunno

[suitti]

BASIC... FOR I = 1 TO 500:NEXT I
500 empty loops took 1 second.

A modern Palm OS machine running Cbasic computes this loop about 20 times faster (10,000 loops per second). On a 1 GHz desktop, the C compiled loop

i = 1000000000;
do {
} while (--i);

executes in one second.

Byte magazine ran an April 1st article where they predicted that by 2000, PC's would be 107 MHz, switch selectable to 4.77 MHz. The joke part was the switch selectable feature, which was used to allow games that depended on the original PC's performance to continue to run. Naturally, a 486 clocked at 4.77 MHz was still much faster than an 8088 clocked at 4.77, so the switch was already an anachronism. But by 2000, a cheap PC was much faster than predicted.

An interesting question is what performance is enough? In 1981, we'd run 30+ users on a 1 MIPS machine with 4 MB RAM. 1 MIPS is enough to do word processing and surf the web, but not enough to do full screen video. A PII/350 is enough to do full screen video. Is it enough to cope with current bloatware?

Most of my cycles go to search for aliens.

Re:I dunno

[default luser]

You're making a false assertion.

This operation contains floating-point arithmetic. On just about all computers of the day, FP units were emulated.

Now, think about how many dozens of cycles a FP divide STILL takes us today with pipelined FP units. Now, consider that these processors run at 1/10000 the processing power of today's chips, and FP numbers have to be emulated by the ALU.

We're talking TENS OF THOUSANDS if not HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of cycles for a single FP divide.

The FP multiplications also take a sizeable amount of time, but nowhere near the time the divide takes. All the addition/subtraction also require emulated FP. Considering a speed of only 4MHz, the above would definitely take a noticable chunk of a second, maybe even more than a second if my efficiency guesses are much worse.

Re:I dunno

[markh1967]

Considering I got my first computer in 1980 (A 4Mhz Z80-based TRS-80), I think I can say with some credibility that there would not have been a delay computing that, even using interpreted Basic.

Yes well, those of us using more modest and affordable kit rather than the veritable supercomputer you were using can verify the delay and prove it.

I was using a Sinclair ZX80 in 1981 and it was painfully slow. I don't know of any ZX80 emulators out there, but here are some ZX81 emulators for various systems, so you can see for yourself:

Palm Pilot

Dos/Windows

Java

Re:I dunno

[Anonymous Coward]

We're talking TENS OF THOUSANDS if not HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of cycles for a single FP divide.

No, we're talking LESS THAN A THOUSAND cycles for a single FP divide.

Here, on page 99. Yes, I know it's for a different architecture, but come on, don't make wild exaggerations like that.

Re:I dunno

[mccrew]

> Yes, 500 empty loops took 1 second.

Sounds about right. You're talking about Java, right?

Oh, BASIC.

Nevermind...

Re:I dunno

[Reality Master 101]

We're talking TENS OF THOUSANDS if not HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of cycles for a single FP divide.

What the hell are you talking about? It's not done using repeated subtraction, you know. As someone who has written a floating point package, I can say with certainty that it's not even near that (I can't give you a number because it depends heavily on what the assembly language has for operations).

Put it his way: does it take you thousands of steps to do a long division? No? Then what makes you think a computer needs thousands of steps?

Hint: it's a matter of shifting and subtracting. What makes it slower than multiplication is that you have to do test-and-borrow stuff.

Hell, my little FOR loop above is doing 1000 floating point add/subtracts per second on top of the overhead of the Basic interpreter (which is by far the most significant), although adds/subtracts are obviously faster than multiple/divides.

Re:I dunno

[Anonymous Coward]

But only if you remember to turn off all optimization for your compiler. Of course GCC might not even be that smart, but that's beside the point.

Re:I dunno

[default luser]

I know how to emulate FP subtraction. Don't patronize me because your Basic interpreter has left you feeling 1337.

The point is you're comparing apples to oranges. I don't care what your modern processor can do. A 4MHZ Z80 didn't even approach .5 MIPs. YES, thats LESS THAN 500,000 IPS. They didn't have fancy things like barrel shifters or fast ALUs. Your basic instruction took multiple cycles.

Then, when you actually come down off your cloud and THINK, you realize how a 8-bit processor can easily choke on 32-bit emulated FP. Remember, if you're faced with irrational numbers ( like the example above ), it's going to cost you a lot more cycles using shifts and adds to take it out to the full 24 bits of precision.

All those "easy" shifts and adds take multiple clock cycles each. Tens of thousands of cycles with the overhead from a BASIC interpreter is easy to imagine. Add that to the OS overhead, and suddenly it takes the OS almost a second to parse, caluculate, and cough up the answer ( the hundreds of thousands comment I made ). Sounds small, but it's realy a huge chunk of that 500k IPS.

Re:I dunno

[Reality Master 101]

A 4MHZ Z80 didn't even approach .5 MIPs.

Have you programmed in assembly for a Z80? I have. At least do some research before spouting off bullshit. If you would care to look at the Z80 instruction set, you'll notice that the number of cycles for most instructions is -- one or two. The longest is typically 4, although some are 5.

Remember, if you're faced with irrational numbers ( like the example above ), it's going to cost you a lot more cycles using shifts and adds to take it out to the full 24 bits of precision.

Huh?? Whether a number is irrational or not is totally irrelevent. It's just bits to the FP package. The only thing that can somewhat affect performance (although not much for multiplication, somewhat more for division) is the difference in magnitude of the exponent. Even that's not a huge deal, though.

All those "easy" shifts and adds take multiple clock cycles each.

Shifts are two cycles, adds are 1 cycle.

Add that to the OS overhead, and suddenly it takes the OS almost a second to parse, caluculate, and cough up the answer

Look, I used the bloody machine for years. I wrote a floating point package for a Z80. You don't know what you're talking about. 1 second to execute that line is absolutely absurd.

You're making me want to break out my old TRS-80 just for the hell of it.

Remember when...

[hermescom]

Yeah, I remember back in the day, our computers were powered by squirrels, and you had to keep feeding them every five minutes, and every other monday we would send somebody to the market to buy new squirrels. (Squirresl were 5 for $4.99 back then).

Also, our computer only had three bits of memory, so we really had to write everything down on little bits of paper, which was a problem because our wpare squirrels kept carrying them away and hiding them.

THOSE were the days...

Re:Remember when...

[Anonymous Coward]

5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06+20.07-200.08+300.09 /1.10= -126.79217967914438502673796791444 via M$ Calc on an AMD K7 1.2Ghz + 512Mb RAM + 6Gb of Ultra160 SCSI .

Possibly due to M$ calc: copy,paste and calc took about 1.5 sec (total entry and calc time, +-.25 sec)

I think I need to invest in some more Squirrels, maybe some 3Ghz ones with bigger heads (1GB of RAM should be enough for anybody..,) Or maybe I should go back to using my Penguins.

Re:Remember when...

[Anonymous Coward]

I got into computers around the time of this book, when computers were still coal powered. Yes, the good ol' days: shovel a little coal into the hopper, then try to get that frog across that damn highway. Or take the chopper out for a spin and go collect some of the world's slowest running hostages.

And then there were the whole squirrel vs. coal wars. Don't get me started...

Re:Remember when...

[ethereal]

I'm going to get multi-headed squirrels for my next box. Possibly with a clear case cover and blinkenlights (so you can see the squirrels at work).

Re:Remember when...

[Anonymous Coward]

WARNING: Your comment brings common sense into a slashdot discussion. Common sense on slashdot goes against several RFCs.Your karma will be appropriately decimated.

Thank you,

The Editors

Cult: (n) a small, unpopular religion.
Religion: (n) a large, popular cult.
I don't reply to ACs

Re:Remember when...

[Anonymous Coward]

TECHNOLOGY IS A MORE POWERFUL SOCIAL FORCE THAN THE ASPIRATION FOR FREEDOM
125. It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises. Imagine the case of two neighbors, each of whom at the outset owns the same amount of land, but one of whom is more powerful than the other. The powerful one demands a piece of the other's land. The weak one refuses. The powerful one says, "OK, let's compromise. Give me half of what I asked." The weak one has little choice but to give in. Some time later the powerful neighbor demands another piece of land, again there is a compromise, and so forth. By forcing a long series of compromises on the weaker man, the powerful one eventually gets all of his land. So it goes in the conflict between technology and freedom.

126. Let us explain why technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom.

127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man's freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn't want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster than the walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man's freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one's own pace one's movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker's freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop and wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note the important point we have illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)

Re:Remember when...

[Anonymous Coward]

On mine, the chassis kept falling apart.

The squirrels kept pinching the nuts.

Re:Remember when...

[Arnold_Crenshaw]

They never pinched my nuts. You must have had homosexual squirrels. They were the cause of many reversed bits.

On the death of video games...

[lamz]

I can understand why Crichton predicted that video games were a fad. Around that time, Intel had lost pots of money on Intellivision, Coleco was on its way to going broke because of Colecovision, (and was only saved, incidentally, by the later success of Cabbage Patch dolls,) and Atari had started its long slide into the ground. Many arcades started to move the video games to the back and pinball machines to the front. Nintendo and Sega weren't on the radar yet, so it really seemed to a lot of people like video games were fading away. And as to PCs, it would be years before they had arcade-quality games which surpassed the Atari and Commodore lines of personal computers. PCs didn't typically have colour screens until the late 80s.

Re:On the death of video games...

[b1t r0t]

Intel had nothing to do with Intellivision. Mattel made it, based on a chipset made by (I think) GI. And Coleco wasn't going broke because of Colecovision, it was going broke because of Adam. It took Nintendo (the only company "stupid" enough to believe there was still a market for video games and sell one) to bring the market back to life.

As for Atari (Computer, not Games), if they hadn't shelved the 7800 for two years (it was manufactured and ready to ship, but they warehoused it at the last minute), or even if they hadn't refused the option on the NES, they might still be around today, and not just a name that changed owners twice so far.

Re:On the death of video games...

[Christopher_G_Lewis]

Oh, the irony...

Jurrasic Park :-)

Re:On the death of video games...

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel had lost pots of money on Intellivision

Bahaha!

Re:On the death of video games...

[theguru]

Can you provide links to more information on this NES option Atari refused? I've never heard this before.

Re:On the death of video games...

[liquidzero4]

Intellivision was not made Intel. It was developed andd Manufcatured by Mattel. The name Intellivison had nothing to do with company Intel. Intellivision = Intelligent Television.

Re:On the death of video games...

[zonker]

here's info on the gi chips for intellivision...

atari and nintendo stuff...

Re:On the death of video games...

[Grab]

However, Clive Sinclair had shipped the ZX81, Commodore had its PET going and the VIC20 was just on its way in, and small 8-bit home computers were multiplying like rabbits! And the primary use of all of these was to play games.

Sure, hardware where the only means interaction was a joystick were well on their way out - it's only in the relatively recent past that consoles have made a return. The 80s and 90s were absolutely the realm of the home computer (as defined by including a keyboard), due to the fact that a few hackers could program them, and the rest of the world could play the games they created. The keyboard was less important for the many, but without it, the few couldn't produce the stuff that the many used.

With that in mind, Crichton's guess was pretty short-sighted even at the time.

It's rather the same way that after the crashes of Pets.com and other similar crap ideas, ppl spouted a load of nonsense about "the web is bad for business". The problem isn't the medium, the problem is that a bunch of business majors went hog-wild, didn't think the problem through, and consequently cratered their companies. Early-80s consoles had exactly the same problem due to the management of the various companies all doing *really* dumb things.

Grab.

my office co-workers

[Anonymous Coward]

It is difficult today to remember how intimidating computers were for non-technical people in the early 1980s

I guess my office is stuck in the 1980s...

Crichton & Timeline

[Dugsmyname]

It's not supprising that Crichton did his homework before writing the novel "Timeline". Timeline is a great novel that involves the mechanics of quantum computing. He does a great job of breaking down how a quantum computer (of more than 5 atoms) could work. It's also worth a read.

Re:Crichton & Timeline

[Anonymous Coward]

Shoosh!

Re:Crichton & Timeline

[Cipster]

And Timeline was turned ito a really bad game (mmmm jumping puzzles). I guess what he meat was that he had no future in gaming.

Re:Crichton & Timeline

[Jaysyn]

I've read it as well. It was a great book.

Jaysyn

**Were** intimidating?

[krinsh]

I know several 'non-technical' people, and dozens more technical and not with computers on their desks and they are still intimidated by them. That is one of the prime reasons [desktop] tech support people have some job security; and why most of the industry rag's "job market predictions" claim that tech support is the way to go if you want to keep feeding your kids with an IT-related salary. On the other hand, this book reminded me of the video game display I saw in the Baltimore Science Center (Museum?) at the Inner Harbor [my wife and I used to frequently trek there for weekend mini-vacations if we didn't have time for AC with her parents]. They had all sorts of old cabinets beginning with a copy of the original Pong; and of course history and some video on how a lot of these were developed, and a few transparent ones so that you could see the boards and ROM and so forth. I wish I remembered the name or they had a book to go with that.

Re:**Were** intimidating?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember a science fair I was in in 1980something-or-other. A guy had a computer as part of his disply and taped to the monitor was a piece of paper stating that if you touched the computer - it would BLOW UP. No kidding. No one ever did touch it.

Not technically just, but interesting

[j_kenpo]

As the poster notes, this may not be a technically sound book, may not be worth owning, and shows signs of little research and quick writing but I think its still worth it. To compare and contrast predictions and attitudes from the past to the now is always interesting. It could have been anyone and it still would have been interesting. I remember my thoughts about computers at that time. I was fascinated by them, yet everyone was so paranoid because of the high cost noone wanted to touch them. I always got the impression of "We need to have a PC, but dont touch it, its too expensive". Id be interested to read it just to see what others thought at that time about PCs. Itd make an even more interesting read though if it included that, and then his opinions today on PCs.

Congo

[Doctor Faustus]

That's scary that Chrichton wrote a book about computers in 1983. In 1980, he wrote Congo (of his books, only Sphere is better, and Jurassic Park is about on par), which is a great book, but it demonstrated he didn't really understand computers terribly well.

The expedition team in in the Congo in Africa, using satellite communication to the United States. Because bandwidth was so limited, their messages were abbreviated to IM-Speak and beyond ("HLO. HW R U DOIN? MY NAM IS MKL CRITN.", etc.). Makes sense, I supposed. Along with this, though, they needed to do digital cleanup of a moss-covered wall, so they took digital video of the wall, sent it via satellite to the U.S. where it ws processed, and received the results back in Africa, in real time. Right.

Re:Congo

[UrGeek]

I have read the book, _Congo_, but I do have to say that the movie is one of the worst either made. It contains every jungle cliche known to lifekind and is alway as bad as "Plan 9 from Outer Space", but not as bad as "Courntey and Kurt".

Prediction from 1983

[baldass_newbie]

A little OT, but this was around the same time (1983) that my dad said they'd never get disk drives that would be comparable (speed, amount of data, access times) to the storage capabilites of tape. All while playing around with an IBM PCjr with no hard drive and a whopping 128 colors!

Re:Prediction from 1983

[Anonymous Coward]

They still don't! HD is faster, but you still can't beat tape for mass removable data storage.

Re:Prediction from 1983

[Anonymous Coward]

True. I think it was a market penetration thing, though.

Re:Prediction from 1983

[Anonymous Coward]

It's cheaper to buy another harddrive and back up to it than it is to buy tapes.

The other prediction !

[azizlumiere]

Also, you forgot the passage where he talk about Al Gore inventing the internet.

In regards to the games references...

[craenor]

When will people realize that as a society and a species, we are driven by our need to entertain ourselves?

News, TV, Movies, Sports, Games...most all consumer products in some way pander to our need to make ourselves happy and distract us from the day to day.

Face it folks...immersive games are here to stay. They are the electronic crack of the 21st century.

Re:In regards to the games references...

[kin_korn_karn]

As animals we are driven by our need to reproduce. Games are one method of deferring that need into another accomplishment structure. I play a LOT fewer games when I have a girlfriend. And before you make the obvious joke, this isn't THAT rare of an occurence for geeks.

Re:In regards to the games references...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hm. I had a gf awhile ago, but the relationship took up too much of my time that I didn't want to give up, and I wouldn't have it that way. It's not like I played games much or anything, but I was always busy at work or at home, and prefer being alone for a goodly amount of the day.

Re:In regards to the games references...

[user flynn]

I play a lot more games when I have a girlfriend. :p

Re:In regards to the games references...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am afraid that you, my friend, are a loser.

Re:In regards to the games references...

[BoBaBrain]

These fads come and go. During the renaissance, curiosity and culture drove people. Before that, the Greeks were inventing hedonism. Still further back arts, crafts and skills were all important.

The "Don't worry, be happy" phase we're going through now will eventually turn around.

Intimidating Computers

[The Grassy Knoll]

>It is difficult today to remember how intimidating computers were for non-technical people in the early 1980s

Hello? Computers are still pretty intimidating for non-technical people in the early 2000s!

That's why Code Red/[insert name of favourite virus here], etc. proliferated so widely. Most people don't understand computers even to the level where they know how (or why) to install security patches.

Re:Intimidating Computers

[{tele}machus_*1]

Security patches? I think you're shooting a little high. I doubt the technologically unitiated even understand what a security patch is. Most of those email viruses were easily avoided by simply using an email program besides Outlook Express. Unfortunately, most people don't understand computers even to the level of being able to install and run programs besides the ones that came on their machines.

Ah

[Anonymous Coward]

The old Type IIB Blue Boron Diamonds.
Where are they, anyway?

What do you mean you didnt have...

[Havoc'ing]

computers or VCR's for that matter. My 18 year old niece says to me. I'm feeling pretty old, but its fun to reminice and see how far things have come in such a short time.

Re:What do you mean you didnt have...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only going to get worse. In a short span of time, I've seen home computers rise from Commodore 64's to massive gigahertz-driven monstrosities.

We live in interesting times. Where other sciences have reached maturity, and breakthroughs come slow and are profound, computer science is still young. There's so much to learn, so many ideas that haven't even been touched upon. Our breakthroughs will not change the world overnight, but they have and will continue to come much quicker.

In a best case scenario, I've only lived a quarter of my life. And I'm astonished. I sit back after playing the latest game and think, "Man, I remember back when everything was all pixellized.. And we thought the graphics were so realistic!"

I look at Windows XP, and think, "We wouldn't have dreamed some of these things were possible back then, now we take them for granted."

On a tangent, I think that's one of the lures of Linux. People who missed the original revolution due to being too young/too technically inept/etc., can take part in building something from the ground up.

Anyway, ten years ago, who the hell would've dreamed we would be able to watch movies on our PC?

Staggering.

Re:What do you mean you didnt have...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember back when 128kB used to be a lot of memory, so I'm still fairly young.

Even though I consider that huge for some embedded applications. :)

Predictions...

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

"He was wrong here, of course, and missed entirely how games would eventually drive the high end of the home computer market.
Most interestingly in his predictions, Crichton clearly expected that computers would soon be as normal as home appliances like washing machines."

It's amusing to look back at how wrong he or others (Bill Gates with "nobody will ever need more than 64Kb" (paraphrase)) have been wrong about their predictions, but it all goes under the heading of "Hindsight is 20/20", and I don't think we can fault Crichton for that.

Re:Predictions...

[F2F]

I like an even better quote:

``I think there is a world market for maybe five computers''
Thomas Watson, IBM, 1943

an all Asimov books with their 'computers as big as a city'... those were the days...

Re:Predictions...

[WickedChicken]

I believe the quote was 640k (Gates later said that he never said it). 640k makes sense because that was the limit of memory a program could take (the rest of the 1 meg was reserved for the system and the BIOS if I recall).

Re:Predictions...

[pdboddy]

As mentioned in the replies above mine, Gates did say "640k ought to be enough for anybody". That and the chairman of IBM saying he couldn't see a market for more than 5 computers. I assume he meant one for each permanent member of the UN Security Council.

Hindsight may be 20/20, but it still amazes me that these "visionaries" had such dim views of the future.

Heh. "Their sound is off, and we think guitar music is on it's way out". That was said to the Beatles... hah, someone kicked themselves for that later.

Re:Predictions...

[gadfium]

I like an even better quote:

``I think there is a world market for maybe five computers''
Thomas Watson, IBM, 1943

That might have been true, for computers with the price/performance ratio of 1943.

Re:Predictions...

[Arnold_Crenshaw]

Perhaps, but the Beatles do suck anyway; no trolling!

Re:Predictions...

[pdboddy]

Heh, you may not like them, but what I was trying to point out is that they were hugely popular..

Just like we use more than 640k, and only a market for 5 computers was vastly under-rated.

Just goes to show, that no matter how narrowminded one person may be, there's someone out there willing to give anything a shot.

and were the responsibility of trained personnel.

[chunkwhite86]

Since when were computers in corporate data centers or universitys _not_ the responsibility of trained personnel???

I didn't think they hired just anyone off the street to run these things.

Oh wait... I forgot about those MCSE's.

Perhaps they DO just hire any bum off the streets afterall...

Reminds me of my grandma

[Elwood P Dowd]

My grandma suffers from a number of ailments that restrict her movement. For a while my dad kept suggesting that she get a mac to play around with. My mom's mom got one, and loved using it.

Anyway. My grandma's problem wasn't that she was scared of using a computer. She'd say, "You don't know what you're talking about. I used to *run* a computer. I know all *about* computers. What the hell do I need a computer for?"

She used to be the administrator in charge of the computer for the Grand Rapids Police Department. In the 1950s. Punch cards. Hehe. Old people are funny.

Re:Reminds me of my grandma

[{tele}machus_*1]

One question pops into my head after reading this: does your grandmother watch TV? If so, she must realize that what your dad is talking about is vastly different than what she remembers. At least your grandmother knows what a computer is. I haven't even tried to introduce my grandmother to a PC for fear that she will have an aneurysm trying to understand it (I am not being (completely) sarcastic).

Re:Reminds me of my grandma

[theguru]

My grandparents don't have a phone, cable tv, or even an ATM card. I couldn't imagine trying to explain what I do from day to day at work.

I imagine that someday my grandchildren will have jobs that I am unable to understand the need for.

Re:Reminds me of my grandma

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? My grandparents have 3 tvs, a cordless phone, an admittedly old computer with an internet connection, atm cards, etc. And they live in a bugdick mountain town, pop. 8000 probably.

Kinda funny. Stubborn they ain't.

Re:Reminds me of my grandma

[AppyPappy]

Punch cards. Hehe. Old people are funny.

Heh, heh......I ain't laughing. I still find rubber bands in my moving boxes from the days of punch cards.

Re:Reminds me of my grandma

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep refreshing cnn.com hoping that one day I'll see red text at the top reading "Breaking news: All the old people just mysteriously died."

Re:Reminds me of my grandma

[cgleba]

Its like my dad. . .he worked as a datacomm manager for 25 years and through that time worked on some amazing systems (for their periods: the 1401, Sytem/360, etc).

To this day he does all of his taxes with a pencil and accounting paper and when my mother bought him a calculator in the early 80s it collected dust as he said, "What do I need a calculator for? I have the most powerful calculator in the world on the top of my head!"

He says that today about PCs :).

Re:Reminds me of my grandma

[Arnold_Crenshaw]

Poop shovelers? (After the fall of civilization and such, you understand.)

Re:Reminds me of my grandma

[Arnold_Crenshaw]

You, sir, need to clean your things more often!

Re:Reminds me of my grandma

[BoBaBrain]

That's nothing. My great aunt used to hang a towel over the TV whenever anyone was getting dressed in the house.

There's wisdom in age, but there's a lot of madness too.

Re:Has no predictions?

[baryon351]

He talks about how programming, with it's rejection of the human element, was going to become something of a young, socially-inept boys's game

HA! Well we proved him wrong THERE.

didn't we...

didn't I... ?

funny book

[iocat]

I have the book; it's okay. It has a lot of BASIC listings in the back. I love the way older media on computers just assumed that you'd need to be able to program, and to know how a microprocessor works to get any value out of the machine: I only wish it was still like that today.

Re:funny book

[travail_jgd]

"I love the way older media on computers just assumed that you'd need to be able to program, and to know how a microprocessor works to get any value out of the machine: I only wish it was still like that today."

Why would you want that? Do you not remember how in the 80's, every brand of computer (Apple, Atari, Commodore, etc) was incompatible? Often older models weren't compatible with newer ones -- C64 and VIC-20, Apple 2 and GS, etc.

Even now architectures chage quickly -- look at the changes of video cards and CPUs over the past 5-10 years. If you write code for a specific graphics card or CPU, it would be "out of date" in just a few years. Consider this: in 20 years, we've gone from 8 bit CPUs on the desktop to 32 bit CPUs. AMD's Hammer has the potential to make 64-bit desktop computers common. For most people knowing the specifics about the CPU is more info than is needed -- let the compiler do the optimizations.

Re:funny book

[Com2Kid]

• . For most people knowing the specifics about the CPU is more info than is needed -- let the compiler do the optimizations

The smart people learn about the computer and are the ones paid to /write/ the compilers. :)

-126.79217967914438502588

[Anonymous Coward]

time echo "5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06+20.07-200.08+300.0 9 /1.10" | bc -l
-126.79217967914438502588

real 0m0.041s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.020s

Twitch Games

[Simon Hibbs]

>Crichton dismisses computer games as "the hula hoops of the '80s", saying "already
>there are indications that the mania for twitch games may be fading."

To be fair to Crichton, he was basicaly right for about 10 years. It wasn't untill Doom and the orriginal PLay Station that computer games were noticed by the mass market and became more than children's toys, or a specialist niche hobby.

I haven't read the book, but I'd like to know how long the reviewer thinks the book remained relevent? Anything over a decade would be pretty impressive.

Simon Hibbs

Re:Twitch Games

[erixtark]

Uhm, you obviously didn't have Commodore 64 back in the 80s, like the 6 million other owners of that machine.

Re:Twitch Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod the parent up. He's absolutely right.

Back in the 80's, no self-respecting adult would be caught playing with a NES. Well, maybe with the kids, but not by themselves.

Nowadays, it's quite a bit different. My guild on Dark Age of Camelot has a retired architect sending Hibernians scurrying back to their holes. We've people of all ages and walks of life.

I don't think this actually has anything to do with the gaming industry itself though. Rather, it has to do more with priorities. Recreation isn't seen as a terrible thing anymore in the world of business.

Re:Twitch Games

[CrazyJoel]

I don't know. During your dark age of gaming, the Amiga was one heck of a great games machine.

Re:Twitch Games

[Jhan]

To be fair to Crichton, he was basicaly right for about 10 years. It wasn't untill Doom and the orriginal PLay Station that computer games were noticed by the mass market [more]

I guess you are right, if you choose to completely ignore the millions of dollars that went into Amiga games. Thousands where made, some sold a million. In fact in the late 80's/early 90's the PC was the complete laughing stock of the gaming community (4096 color Amiga or 16 (fixed) color EGA PC?). It wasn't until Doom that people even started switching.

Re:Twitch Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Says you, probably an Amiga user back then. ;) Just kidding. Strangely enough, I've never known or met a single Amiga user in real life.

Re:Twitch Games

[Anonymous Coward]

The EGA palette wasn't fixed. You could change it.

See INT 10 - VIDEO - SET ALL PALETTE REGISTERS in the list.

Re:Twitch Games

[Anonymous Coward]

You probaly meet a lot of amiga users in your life. It's just that we keep quite because most of people refuse to accept the truth that Amiga had in 1985 what Windows had in 1995. Yes, the mass missed the real revolution by 10 years.

Re:Twitch Games

[Grab]

Eh?

Spectrum, C64, Amiga, Atari ST - they all had a totally mass market for games.

Then as now, the core market was the same - mostly teenage boys. Sure, there's plenty of adults today with PS2s and hardcore gaming rigs, but there were similar adults back then with the latest home computer (eg. the Amiga A2000). This is especially the case for the Amiga, which was *way* ahead of the PC but got slammed by Commodore screwing up and going bankrupt by investing in too many shit projects. For an example, StarGlider 2 was 5 years ahead of X-Wing, and conventional flight sims were ahead by a similar amount. The area which saw particularly impressive advances was the graphical adventure area, which was the precursor to all the Tomb Raider stuff - the Amiga and Atari ST were the prime movers in this.

Remember that Doom was a 2-D hack which just looked like 3-D. It wasn't until Quake that 3-D cards became required. The Amiga had 3-D games throughout though - the only thing that wasn't invented was the first-person shooter. Had some bright spark come up with that (and they certainly had platforms that'd support it!) then things would have been quite different. The only issue was that one type of game, it was nothing to do with the platform.

Grab.

on my P4 1.6GHz...

[Balerion]

ben@mojo ~/test$ time echo '5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06+20.07-200.08+300.0 9/1.10' | bc
-80.80

real 0m0.006s
user 0m0.010s
sys 0m0.000s

Re:on my P4 1.6GHz...

[suitti]

bc
5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06+20.07-200.08+30 0.0 9/1.10
-80.80
scale=5
5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06+ 20.07-200.08+300.0 9/1.10
-126.79155

It'd be nice to get something like the right answer.

Re:on my P4 1.6GHz...

[ak_hepcat]

Oh geeeze, and this is a p3-733 running cygwin under win2k at work:

$ time perl -e 'print 5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06+20.07-200.08+300.09 /1.10'
-126.79217967914
real 0m0.064s
user 0m0.040s
sys 0m0.030s

Re:on my P4 1.6GHz...

[BenV666]

It'd be nice to get something like the right answer.

Exactly, bc doesn't know the ' ' operator:

bc
5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06+20.07-200.08+30 0.0 9/1.10
(standard_in) 1: parse error

Re:on my P4 1.6GHz...

[zonker]

here's a little more precision through python...

-126.79217967914451

Now, it's the robots

[erixtark]

The development of robots is very similar to that of the personal computer in the 70s and the 80s. In 20 years we will remember this time as the last years without a robot assistant.

Re:Now, it's the robots

[Skidge]

Got to watch out for those robots. At least they sell .

Re:Now, it's the robots

[Skidge]

Hmmm. I guess they put that preview button there for a reason. Let's try this again:

Got to watch out for those robots. At least they sell Robot Insurance.

Pick on Crichton if you must...

[ackthpt]

Pick on Crichton if you must, but even Bill Gates failed to anticipate the impact of the internet in "The Road Ahead" They're not alone. The textbook I was assigned to buy for college classes, back in 1983, were as as fanciful and completely off target as Crichton and Gates.

A more enlightened approach would have been to observe what people were actually doing and how a vastly faster computer of small size might be useable to them, in ways other than balancing their checkbook.

Science fiction and some really old comic books are amazingly on target, frequently, although they still depicted computers as being massive things.

My generation was so lucky...

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

We were in high school in the early-mid 80s.
Just the perfect time for that expert blend of
1. Low self esteem
2. Teenage years
3. Dawn of the PC.
to bring us to where we are now...still dateless and coding.

Geek used to be a 4 letter word, now it's a six figure one.

Re:My generation was so lucky...

[mosschops]

Geek used to be a 4 letter word, now it's a six figure one.

Some of us have to settle with just four figures: 1337

*sighs*

Re:My generation was so lucky...

[0x0d0a]

4. Period of time when you could still get at the guts of the software. Apple IIs had a nice built in debugger, a programming environment, and you could see the source for a tremendous amount of programs. Same for similar computers of the time...

Now, there's so many layers that it's kind of intimidating to a new developer...

Ladybird for managers

[the bluebrain]

• It is difficult today to remember how intimidating computers were for non-technical people in the early 1980s [...]

... this reminds me of one of my favourite bits of "latter-day aracana": Back in the olden days, when small computers were bigger than large cars, Managers of large companies introducing the behemoths were on occasion given (children's) Ladybird books, specifically the one titled "The Computer" as a primer.
(Come to think of it - I wonder who had the means to put them through the embarassement ...)

Oh, the irony

[VikingBerserker]

20 years ago: Prepare now, for computers will become an important part of your life.

Today: Those of us who use computers most often today tend to have no life.

games won't last...

[circletimessquare]

games won't last... heh.

crichton's take on video games reminds me of what some futurists said around the birth of the television.

they said that the television was going to be a great instrument of education, and bring thousands into enlightenment.

yeah, right. -insert ironic tv laugh track here-

i guess crichton fell into the same trap as many futurists: technology as savior. a lot of us see new technology and envision how it will improve us all.

meanwhile, some guy somewhere is writing the first donkey kong game. somewhere there must be a graph comparing how many cpu cycles of all of the processors ever made have been spent playing games versus other computer-related exploits. it would be an interesting comparison. as a victim of civilization iii, i can attest to the fact that a lot of the good electronic life is spent taking a lot of digital crack. ;-P

Re:games won't last...

[pdboddy]

1984. The book that is. Orwell was right in so many ways (the fact that many people have a TV screen in their rooms, or computer screens), and wrong in others.

It's wierd reading scifi, and looking at real life, and you wonder, is life imitating art or the other way around?

As a victim of Civ3, CounterStrike, Diablo, online Chess, etc., etc., I'd have to agree to the digital crack comment. :)

Heh, the smiley face is 20 years old this year...

The real people with foresight

[Anonymous Coward]

A. W. Burks, H. H. Goldstine, and J. von Neumann, "Preliminary discussion of the logical design of an electronic computing instrument", Report to the U.S. Army Ordinance Department, 1946. This on-line version was downloaded from University of North Carolina. These guys got nearly everything right for today except floating point. This was written over 50 years ago!

Re:The real people with foresight

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.ece.purdue.edu/~yunglu/EE565-WWW/readin g/Burks46

Movies

[Amata]

All of the movie recreations of his books suck worse than most movie recreations of books. Somehow in JP2: The Lost World the black boy and the white girl got condensed into a black girl who has some relationship with Malcolm that I never fully understood because I was on a bus down to Fla when I was "watching" it.

Re Congo specifically: it has been said that the only way to enjoy that movie is, with a group of friends, have everyone pick a character. If your character survies, you "win". Win what, I don't know, but it at least keeps you paying attention.

All in all, I suppose this is why I own a crudload of books and about 5 movies, and the movies were gifts.

Re:Movies

[kalidasa]

The girl is Malcolm's daughter. I would assume that her mother (prolly one of Malcolm's many ex-wives) was A-A.

5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04...

[Christopher_G_Lewis]

Cut and paste it into CALC.exe (yes, windows),
press enter.

-126.79217967914438502673796791444

I love fast machines.
Cool :-)

Re:5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04...

[josh crawley]

Someones (MS or gnu) wrong here.....

I put the same into BC (feh, no calc.exe here).

# This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
# For details type `warranty'.
# 5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06+20.07-200.08+300.09 /1.10
# -80.80

???

Re:5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04...

[levendis]

Think about orders of precedence, and it will come to you...

Re:5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04...

[boyfoot_bear]

It bothered me that bc and windows did not match. So I looked into question. the -126.7... answer is correct so the bc calculation must be doing something strange. It is not carrying the precision through the entire calculation. BUT IT WILL if you ask it to:

sos:/bdfs/users/rdm2$ time echo '(5.01*5.02)-(5.03/2.04)*100.5+3.06+20.07-200.08+( 300.09/1.10)' |bc -l
-126.79217967914438502588

real 0m0.03s
user 0m0.00s
sys 0m0.04s
sos:/bdfs/users/rdm2$

bc is arbitrary precision but you need to tell it to do more (thus the -l option)

Re:5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04...

[Christopher_G_Lewis]

Get what you pay for?

I actually just love the fact that Calc will take something like this via cut and paste and do the math correctly.

Re:5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04...

[Anonymous Coward]

The extra parens aren't actually necessary. If you cut and paste the original equation into bc, you get the -80.80 result, but if you run bc with the -l argument, the answer comes out as -126.

I just assumed bc was right with the -80 result.... kinda scary when you can't trust your calculator!

Re:5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04...

[Anonymous Coward]

CALC must really suck ! That long thing reduces on my TI-89 to -14902986/116875, which is around -127.512179679, according to the TI-89 (-127.5121796791444 according to the calculator program in OS X, which can't do order of operations).

I could understand if CALC was off by a millionth or something...but it's off by nearly one. Quite a rounding error for a computer. And, it's doubly bad because CALC pretentiously shows off with a lot more digits displayed (-126.79217967914438502673796791444) than a TI-89 or OS X's calculator.

Re:Has no predictions?

[aiabx]

I sure did. I'm old!
-aiabx

Crichton on copyright reform

[mttlg]

Perhaps the most interesting part of this book is where Crichton discusses copyright. He takes the opinion that copyright will need serious reform as the amount of electronic content increases because of the simple fact that people want to copy (he cited the success of VHS over laserdisc to support this position). This jumped out at me because I read the book back when Napster was at its peak. Unfortunately, Crichton seems to have underestimated the power of the entertainment industry - the DMCA is almost the exact opposite of what he envisioned as the future of digital content. Maybe Crichton's next novel will be about a group of people who narrowly escape death while attempting to view copyrighted material they legally purchased...

you and the Red Cross and the United Way

[Anonymous Coward]

Now there's a bunch that's intimidated. Looking at the number of misconduct and thievery stories about them on the web, they can't even handle QuickBooks.

The RC in Houghton Michigan was disbanded after the director was accused of buying herself a snowblower and furniture out of agency funds, and the local keystone kops can't even determine if this was illegal, after a year of investigating.

Ain't there anybody what can keep books? Chrissakes, I don't even want to know how they track the in-kind donations? Friggin filecards?

Reasearch quality in Crichton books always high

[omnipotus]

I have not yet read Electronic Life, but I have always been impressed with the level of research Crichton's narratives display, and while this was one of his earlier works, I wouldn't be suprised if he decided not to include all the material his research revealed for the sake of readability.

Jurassic Park stands out in my mind as the most well researched work of Crichton's, so much so that most people I know who didn't enjoy reading it say it was because he dwelled on the science in favor of the narrative too often. I like Crichton's approach personally, because for me it grounds the story better in the science of today, and shows the reader how his world developed out of our own without fantastic leaps of science. Authors like Gibson, who write great narrative and have turned out to be prescient about technology but never dwelled on how their world came to be out of the one we live in, have always felt more like fantasy than science fiction to me. This is because I don't feel as connected to their world without them illustrating a plausible course of events that could lead society from where it is down a path to the world that they envision.

In any case, I was already planning to purchase Crichton's newest work, Prey, but now I 'll have to go grab this one as well.

Re:Reasearch quality in Crichton books always high

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh...Gibson does outline how the world of "Neuromancer" came from our own.

Science fiction????

[garyrich]

"Crichton writes science fiction"

He does? I've never seen any. He writes technological thrillers. From Andromeda Strain (a good one) to ER (a mediocre one).

Re:Science fiction????

[Negadecimal]

He does? I've never seen any. He writes technological thrillers. From Andromeda Strain (a good one) to ER (a mediocre one).

Eh? Most of Crichton's works are based on science that either doesn't exist yet, or hasn't been used in the ways he's conjuring it up... that's what defines science fiction.

Jurassic Park (dinosaurs haven't been cloned), Andromeda Strain (more back then, before we saw ebola), Sphere (alien object that can manifest our subconscious thoughts) - all great sci-fi works, even though they aren't set in a futuristic outer-space setting.

I kinda wish ER were sci-fi - it'd make it more interesting. "Patient is a three-year-old android, with possible faulty bios. Somebody get me some nanoprobes!"

Re:Science fiction????

[Valdrax]

Exactly what definition of science fiction are you using that does not include any of his most popular books?

Re:Science fiction????

[garyrich]

Well, veering off topic, but since two people asked:
His work usually has science or technology *in* it, but it takes more than just that before I'd call him a science fiction writer. It hard to write contemporary fiction that doesn't after all.

Jurrasic Park is a good example. It's related to science fiction but I dont' think it really is. It's King Kong updated with a some technospeak wrapped around to make it seem plausible. The fact that the technospeak is fairly good makes it a better giant monster movie, but not science fiction. The science/technology is there to support the giant monster story. A science fiction story would start the other way around. With a "suppose that you could harvest DNA from extinct species - what would happen?". There are lots of good science fiction stories that could come from that "what if", but none of them are Jurrasic Park. Going from zero to a giant dino amusement park in one go just doesn't make sense. By the time the tech was advanced enough for that it would have crept out and shown up in a million subtle and non-subtle ways through the society. A science fiction writer would have tried to deal with all those things. JP doesn't, because the author isn't interested - he's just trying to make a monster book/movie.

The science/tech is like Batman's utility belt on the old TV series - it just has whatever is needed to get out of the current plothole. I don't consider Batman to be science fiction either, or King Kong, or James Bond. Star Wars gets in, I guess becaue "everyone" considers it science fiction - even though it is devoid of science or the socal effects of science.

Further I don't think Crichton considers himself a science fiction writer. He writes mainstream fiction that tends to use current or very near future technology. If nothing else, he makes *far* too much money to be a science fiction writer :-)

Re:Science fiction????

[Negadecimal]

The fact that the technospeak is fairly good makes it a better giant monster movie, but not science fiction.

You're right: I think most of Crichton's works would fall more under the 'monster' genre, and I would never think of James Bond as sci-fi, despite the definition I gave. Just hadn't thought about that when I fired off my original post.

Re:and were the responsibility of trained personne

[Anonymous Coward]

Another guy who couldn't pass the MCSE exams

Re:lies, damn lies and trolls

[LMCBoy]

Please mod parent down. PhysicsGenius is a known troll; his ridiculous claims about the last chapter are too obviously flamebait.

and yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

we're one step closer to the mark of the beast becoming reality..

Re:Has no predictions?

[stanmann]

Of course we did, there are girl programmers too and they are also young and socially inept.

Jargon

[Insightfill]

defined basic jargon

When I was in mainframes in the early 80's, the mainframe repair guy had a good one.

He was on the phone talking to the refrigerator repair guy and told him:
Tech: "My refrigerator is down."
Repair Guy: (longish pause) "'Down?' where?"

Today, that probably wouldn't have been a big deal.

OTOH, that was also a job that had so conditioned me that I started to type a "9" to get an outside line on my home phone.

(good grief: I'm 34 and talking about the "good old days")

Re:Jargon

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Do the math. You were working on mainframes in Junior High?

Re:Jargon

[hondo77]

When I was in mainframes in the early 80's...

(good grief: I'm 34 and talking about the "good old days")

Good grief, you're referring to working on mainframes (when you were 14!) as the good ol' days :-).

Re:Jargon

[Anonymous Coward]

(AC as it's OT.)

you're referring to working on mainframes (when you were 14!)

A bit of a rounding error, there. Must've used that old Pentium processor.

I started in mainframe operations in summer of 1985 as tape jockey and Xerox high-speed laser operator (2 pages/sec). Friend of the family owned the company and figured I couldn't hurt anything!

Crichton has a bad track record for science &

[Jack William Bell]

It seems clear to me that Crichton's 'Non-fiction' on technical subjects is even worse than his 'Science Fiction' is when it comes to science.

Glenn Reynolds has been wondering just how much Crichton's new novel (on Nanotechnology) will get wrong or sensationalize. The worry being that Crichton could easily cause an anti-nano-science backlash by putting the phear of grey goo into Joe Sixpack...

Gotta credit Peter Norton

[Tri0de]

The first practical book on computers I ever saw: "Peter Norton's guide to DOS". I still remember his premise:
you show up to work one day and here is a computer sitting at your desk, you haven't seen one before, don't want one AND the boss is expecting you to become vastly MORE productive. now.

Anyway, that is the supposition he started the book from. Good book as I recall, no BS.So where some people saw panic, or hyped everything up others saw and siezed opportunity.

Crichton's errors

[bkontr]

I especially like where Crichton's fantasies give way to falsehoods when he is relating to current events. This is one of Crichton's failings that irritates me In his book "Rising Sun" he said that the microphotolithography equipment manufacturers (there was only one) were extinct in the US.....Bzzt wrong. OK, I know this because I used to work for the company he was relating to and although we were almost dead we wern't dead at the time his book was published.

Re:Crichton's errors

[susano_otter]

I watched the movie again last year. It struck me as being bigoted, xenophobic, pessimistic, and sensationalistic.

I remember reading the book some years ago (when I was much younger), and taking it pretty seriously. I'd try reading it again, just to see if the movie's misrepresented his point, but I'm terrified I'd only get about halfway through it before either the laughter or the embarassment killed me.

Other than A Case of Need and The Great Train Robbery, Crichton has certainly earned his place on the NYT Bestseller List. And that's not a compliment.

soon to be made into a $90 MM film...

[avi33]

...starring russell crowe as 'everyman' with special appearances by the tron's master controller, and an original soundtrack by thomas dolby...

war games.. hello..

[joeldg]

The movie Wargames came out in 82' so naturally in 83 there was quite a bit of furvor over "hacker kids" who could possibly bring about the end of the world by using a computer.. (82'? damn.. it has been twenty years.. okay.. feeling old). This of course freaked out every person, who was already then afraid of computers, even more.. I like to think sometimes about how I used to hear people talk of computers and then compare to how they talk now. So naturally we are going to have "hasitly" written books out on the subject, there was an intense demand.. Of course, I was off perusing the latest Ultima game from the Sherwood forest bbs about that time I think.. fun fun fun...

Re:war games.. hello..

[Anonymous Coward]

I still want a box that I can plug into my computer that'll read everything to me in that voice. /Would you like to play a game?/

We used circular slide rules to beat computers

[gelfling]

Digital - Feh Feh I say !!!!

We used to race computers to a solution using a circular slide rule. We won about half the time.

Oh did I mention it was mostly solid analytic geometry problems?

Eating Games...

[teknikl]

Well one can hardly contest his assertion that there would be a whole subgenre of 'eating games'

I'm about to launch my own MMOEG (Massively Multiplayer Online Eating Game) call Diner-Quest.

Don't people even end up 'eating' in the Sim's. Have you ever watched a good player in UT2003 - looks like he's busy 'eating' all those powerups isn't it.

Boy, talking about videogames makes me hungry!

Re:Eating Games...

[CoffeeJedi]

interesting Pac-Man/Unreal connection
was Pac-Man the first ever game with "powerups"?

...but go back and read McLuhan afterward.

[Interrobang]

Oddly enough, one of the few people I've read who was making an awful lot of future-oriented predictions about media, telecommunications, and the increasing importance of networks was Marshall McLuhan. It's really amazing how much McLuhan got right, considering that he died in 1980, and attained the height of his fame in the late 1960s. Good places to start for your elementary McLuhan education are Understanding Media and Counterblast, which seems gimmicky, but manages to reduce McLuhan's prolix yet lucid prose into catchy aphorisms and illustrative graphics (thanks to the design work of Harley Parker).

Relatedly, I have an issue of Amazing Stories with prognostications on "Life In The Year 2000." I'm still waiting for the 4-day, 20-hour, full-pay workweek, the spray-washable house, and the cheap energy. The moral of the story is, you may get some of it right some of the time, but you're never going to be 100% on the money.

We don't need no stinkin' research.

[Stinky Cheese Man]

The book shows signs of being hurridly written, as few of the entries reflect any research.

Research is not one of Crichton's strong points.

As I recall, one of his books placed an industrial park in Woodside, California. As anyone in the neighborhood knows, this semi-rural suburb of Silicon Valley is where you will find multimillion-dollar homes, horse farms, and various reclusive millionaires and former rock stars. Not an industrial park in sight.

In another place, the heroes of the book, while trapped in a building by hungry dinosaurs with a bad attitude, deduced that there was a tunnel beneath the building large enough for them to escape through. How did they determine this? Because the office where they were trapped contained a graphics terminal and there simply must have been a huge underground tunnel to contain the cables necessary to accommodate the huge bandwidth of this device.

That was enough to put me off Crichton for good.

Dude, you forgot Levy's "Hackers"

[meehawl]

My favourite book from this era is definitely Stephen Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution . Worth it for the hottub tales alone.

Re:Dude, you forgot Levy's "Hackers"

[invid]

I'll second that. I read that book when I started programming and I was hooked.

How can you forgot

[Anonymous Coward]

All good computers shops in the 80's had Amiga running impressive games for that time. It was 16-bit quality like Super Nintendo.

Congo was one of his best???

[jlusk4]

Surely you jest.

Have you read _Andromeda Strain_ or _The Great Train Robbery_?

Re:Congo was one of his best???

[Doctor Faustus]

Surely you jest.

Have you read _Andromeda Strain_ or _The Great Train Robbery_?


Yes, I have. The Andromeda Strain is one of two movies based on books where I thought the movie was better than the book (the other is Interview With a Vampire). The movie was pretty good, but the book seemed like a lab report masquerading as a novel.

The Great Train Robbery was decent, but nothing special. It was below average for Crichton.

Re:Congo was one of his best???

[Anonymous Coward]

Try "The Terminal Man". A man who suffers from violence-inducing seizures has a computer implanted with wires running to his brain. Trouble is, he believes that computers are trying to take over the world. Great book with some excellent bits about the computers.
(Has anyone noticed that in "Jurassic Park", when they are checking over Nedy's code, that he shows a bit of actual C code? There's some homework:-)

Re:Congo was one of his best???

[0x0d0a]

Congo was pretty bad compared to Andromeda Strain or Jurassic Park, IMHO.

Re:Has no predictions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tto round things out I'm young, socially inept, spend far too much time coding and drinking coffee, and I'm transsexual.

I know a couple of guys who were born female, and love to hermit themselves up and code, also.

Re:Sad news, Michael Chrichton found dead

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not appreciate you speaking about my loyal negro in that way.

Chrichton always screws up the tree for the forest

[Fear the Clam]

Disclosure is all about hammering out the problems in CD-ROM drive production, but meanwhile, the fact that the same company has solved virtual reality doesn't get a comment.

Jurassic Park: Yeah, we can re-create extinct animals and basically fuck with genetics all we want. So what do we do with it? Open a zoo.

Having "solved" time travel, in Timeline, what's it going to be used for? Stock market speculation? Changing history in a big land grab? No, an amusement park.

Chrichton stories are all about getting super powers, and then using them to order a pizza.

SORRY

[Christopher_G_Lewis]

that was supposed to be

<TROLL ON>
Get what you pay for?
</TROLL OFF>

as a joke...

friggin preview...

I WAS THERE!!

[krazykong]

The Videotopia was on tour there, and it was really great. The only thing I didn't like was the fact that my wife and I had to pay for IMAX movie tickets just to go upstairs and play (& pay to play) old video games. But it was great nonetheless. It had all the old classics, and some really cool stuff too. When we got there, it looked like they were putting together an old original SPRINT game (a crazy game that had a "well" shape where there were 8 steering wheels for 8 players surrounding a screen facing up. This relec must have been from the late 70's early 80's. It was neat, but it wasn't working at the time)

Anyway there's a book that has an interview with the videotopia guy called Arcade Feaver. There's an amusing antidote where he talks about the lowest point in his life, a time where a mint condition "Discs of Tron" game had just been found, but was demolished while being shipped. The book has a lot of color pictures from video games from the golden age and features a bunch of interviews (the Videotopia guy, Ken Lobb the Defender/Robobron guy, and Nolan Bushnell the Computer Space/Atari/Pizza Time Arcade guy). A good read, that belongs on any nerd's coffee table.

Re:I WAS THERE!!

[krinsh]

Thank you, thank you, thank you for that post. I so remember 'Discs of Tron' and the other console that let you pick from the various games - they were in my local 7-11 in Texas at one point. I would buy those if I had a basement (and were making another 10-15K a year).

Troll or no? Re:Reasearch quality in Crichton...

[Jack William Bell]

I can't decide if this is a well executed troll, or just someone who really believes what he is saying. I certainly find it goes against everything *I* know about Crichton's work...

If it is a troll, comparing Crichton to Gibson is a masterstroke!

Re:and were the responsibility of trained personne

[jgerman]

Or another guy who had to deal with a new hire who did and doesn't know jack. Pretty common actually. Though it's almost as big a problem as some college grads.

Re:Troll or no? Re:Reasearch quality in Crichton..

[omnipotus]

It is not meant as a troll. Don't get me wrong, I like Gibson. But he tends to do a lot of hand waving - explaining how AI, surgical and cybernetic augmentation, private space stations and VR so immersive that it can kill you came to be common place are glossed over. It is left as an excerise for the reader's imagination how all this came to be. Crichton on the other hand ties all of his science fiction to science fact; insects in amber to DNA to supercomputing gene sequencers to overambitious developers and their patented living creations.

I don't fault Gibson at all, because the world he created was so far removed from the one that he actually lived in, but for me the suspension of disbelief is much more easily conjured when I start in the concrete and fact-based and am lead to the what-if through the narrative. Gibson had no choice but to start with the what-if, and for that reason I could never feel as immersed in his world as I can in Crichton's. At the same time, Gibson scores more points than Crichton for his prophetic prediction of the 'Net, and as of yet no T-Rex's or Compy's have shown up on the mainland ;)

As much catching up as reality has done since Neuromancer and its sequels were conceived, the reader has to invent for himselfs the paths that lead from the world as we know it to the world in which Gibson's characters operate. Crichton draws that path much more clearly, and for that reason I find it much plausible. I will be the first to admit that plausible doesn't directly equate to enjoyable, as I enjoy George Lucas' to no end, but in my mind.

Star Wars and Neuromancer are in my opinion great works of technologically themed fantasy, whereas I think of Jurassic Park and Andromeda Strain as great science fiction. The distinction between science fiction and fantasy have been as hotly debated on /. before. I don't consider myself on expert on either, but perhaps this better states my opinion on the matter.

antidote?

[Sean Johnson]

Don't you mean anecdote? Unless you consider "Discs of Tron" as some sort of vile disease or something.

Re:Nostalgia --

[rupes99]

Brought to mind one thought... I got in computing in that era (built my own Sinclair ZX80) when you *had* to program yourself. That probablt isn't a good thing... But somewhere along the way it has become harder & harder to actually program computers (not in the sense it is more difficult as such, just you now have to try and search it out) When did they stop supplying BASIC as standard with computers ? Do kids who interested download free compilers these days instead ? Or do we encourage passive consumers ?

My co-worker is better!

[Stoutlimb]

My co-worker is better...

She's this lovely lady in her sixties. She's doing office admin work here in our small office, just for spending money for when she flies to Palm Springs every winter. Until this job, she hasn't touched a computer in literally decades! It took her a while to get used to the idea of a mouse and a GUI, not to mention the flakiness of Office, but she's learning great. However, she used to be a crackerjack COBOL and FORTRAN programmer, so once in a while she still amazes me. She says she misses the old UNIX command line, and all that came with it.

Boy was she mad when she found out she couldn't have a look at the source code for MS Word, to see where the bugs were!

Bork!

Re:My co-worker is better!

[Elwood P Dowd]

That's pretty fuckin' cool. I went to U of Penn, and there was a reunion of all the programmers for the ENIAC while I was there. Those are some hard core old ladies.

Re:Troll or no? Re:Reasearch quality in Crichton..

[susano_otter]

Well, Gibson and Crichton are doing different things, aren't they? Crichton focuses on tracing a line from Today to Tomorrow, with a plot about hubris as a substrate in which to suspend the results of his research. He is also obviously weak at character development, and it's generally quite obvious that the plot (man vs. technology or whatever) is subordinate to the story (how today's technology came to be, or how today's technology becomes tomorrow's technology). Airframe is an excellent example of his preference for research data over character development.

Gibson, meanwhile, belongs to that group of SciFi writers who prefers to focus on how individuals and societies might be changed by some future technology, and never mind how the tech got there or how it works. For my taste, Gibson is also much better at developing interesting characters--so much so that the "Virtual Light" trilogy took me a little while to warm up to. It was very character focused, and the blinkenlights were kept more in the background than I was used to. Nowadays, though, my fave "SciFi" author is Iain (M.) Banks, whose stories are all people/societies, and when the tech comes up at all it's usually just handwaving on the order of "here's a glossy brochure about technobabble, but let's set that aside for now and talk about the characters some more".

Re:Sad news, Michael Chrichton found dead

[Anonymous Coward]

First Stephen King, and now this. Man, the Great Ones are going down left and right. Sheeeeeeit.

I doubt it

[Goonie]

My parents are now in their mid-50's, and they've managed to cope with computers and stuff just fine. However, my grandparents were never really able to get the hang of new technology. Funny thing is, according to my parents this was the case since they were children.

I think the main difference is that my parents received a much more comprehensive education than my grandparents, and consequently didn't treat new technology as some sort of voodoo.

different MIPS definitions

[Goonie]

If I recall my history books correctly, some people used to talk about "VAX MIPS", where a particular model of VAX minicomputer was defined as a 1 MIP (though I suppose it should still be "MIPS") machine, and other systems' benchmarks were compared to that model's performance and quoted in "VAX MIPS". Whilst a 4 MHZ Z80 might have been able to do more than 1 million instructions per second, I'd imagine its performance would probably have been slower than that that particular VAX.

Re:different MIPS definitions

[Alien Being]

The original VAX model, the 11/780 was one MIPS. Dec called it 1 VUP (Vax Unit of Performance).

http://telnet.hu/hamster/vax/e_1977.html

The 11/750 we had at college was only about .6 VUP, but it really screemed once they installed the 2nd MB of RAM!

Re:OPEN source breeds CLOSED minds

[Anonymous Coward]

They hate the world because the world (CORRECTLY) has shunned them.

Re:Troll or no? Re:Reasearch quality in Crichton..

[0x0d0a]

I never understood the draw of Gibson. Yes, he contributed a great deal to later authors, and his books are at least enjoyable, but IIRC from reading an Hypercard version of some of his earlier books, they tended to be confusing...

Re:Gotta credit Peter Norton; kickboxing? hehe

[urbieta]

hehehe, Id like to see the beating that the first human to confront a robot in kickboxing will get! 8D

Re:Gotta credit Peter Norton; kickboxing? hehe

[Tri0de]

The robot probably won't be programmed to bring a flamethrower to a kickboxing match. Or an EMP device :-)

Hook her up with linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't let her use MS crap!!1