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.

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Comments

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.

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.

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: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.

Re:On the death of video games...

[zonker]

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

atari and nintendo stuff...