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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.