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Electronic Life
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:
- Arcade Games (which are in turn split into 'invader games', 'defender games', and 'eating games'.)
- Strategy Games (chess, backgammon, etc.)
- Adventure Games (text-based interactive fiction)
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.
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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...
Are you on drug(s)?!! Why not?
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...
Also, you forgot the passage where he talk about Al Gore inventing the internet.
-Linux is SO fast it does an infinite loop in 5 seconds.
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... ?
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.
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.
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.
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")
...starring russell crowe as 'everyman' with special appearances by the tron's master controller, and an original soundtrack by thomas dolby...
Sounds about right. You're talking about Java, right?
Oh, BASIC.
Nevermind...
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.