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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?
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.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
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...
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.
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.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
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.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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... ?
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.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
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.
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
games won't last... heh.
;-P
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.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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...
"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).
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
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")
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.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
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.
My favourite book from this era is definitely Stephen Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution . Worth it for the hottub tales alone.
Da Blog
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.
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.