The Personal Computer/Hack Away
Hume, Brit
Brit Hume/The Personal Computer '1.1)1 • 1111M11111111111111111111111111C.I.Uki i1 ;•11!. HACK AWAY In the year 2007, it is not hard to im- agine a scene in which children are taken aside by a...
...Computer programs for conventional uses—word processing, database management, spreadsheet planning or accounting—will be standardized...
...Or ask for more information in a particular area...
...The people who frequent or operate bulletin boards, who moonlight writing software or tinker with computers in their basements are today's guardians of the fabled hacker tradition that gave birth to the personal computer...
...Shareware is a unique marketing technique in which copyrighted programs are passed out free with a message requesting those who use the software to please send money...
...Businesses, typically treat personal computers as office automation equipment to be used by clerical personnel who must be trained at company expense...
...Your machine is likely to bring you a blank screen on which you can enter numbers, or draw or write...
...For that we must look to the countless hobbyists, hardware hackers, computer nerds, and software moonlighters out there bent over their computers because they'd rather be there than anywhere else...
...It is also the kind of gradual change that business customers are comfortable with...
...A definition of the word will appear almost instantaneously...
...It is possible, of course, that the most exciting developments in personal computing over the next twenty years will come from the established companies...
...Master of vast plantation lands in the coastal South and delegate to the Constitutional Convention, Pierce Butler bequeathed to his family and nation a legacy of slavery—an inheritance of immense wealth sown with the seeds of Civil War...
...But the question is whether this increasingly corporate culture will foster the kind of invention and breakthrough that has produced explosive growth in the personal computer industry so far...
...And some of the magazines were so thick with ads you'd worry that if you dropped it on your foot, you'd end up in the hospital...
...You'd go to a newsstand and there'd be sixty different magazines about computers...
...But the hallmark of Apple management in recent years has not been innovation...
...He offered to develop this new computer for H-P, but the company wasn't interested...
...1=1 C. Vann Woodward, Southerner John Herbert Roper C. Vann Woodward, Southerner is a chronicle of Woodward's life and of the tumultuous times that have engaged him and shaped his thought...
...Here are just a few subjects covered: • Tutu: Christian prelate or terrorist guru...
...System 2 will bring us release 1 of the next breakthrough product...
...Data storage will be on optical disk or similar media of such massive capacity that every home and office will have all its standard reference works stored on one disk...
...Competition is still fierce, but where there were once many different systems, now there are only two and before long their differences will blur...
...Bulletin boards are storehouses of messages and free software...
...Formerly dignified and beautiful, America's major religious bodies are being run into the ground by middle-aged hippies who don't care what their vanishing parishioners think...
...How much did a computer cost back then...
...The distinctions between programs will vanish...
...But you always felt like you were learning the thing all over again...
...Indeed, in many respects, Apple has been more innovative than IBM...
...They are thrilled by its power and motivated to share their knowledge and enthusiasm with others...
...13.95 Major Butler's Legacy Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family Malcolm Bell, Jr...
...Or print the whole thing out...
...So there were all kinds of devices just for backup purposes...
...They still have the passion to dream and the freedom to experiment...
...HACK AWAY In the year 2007, it is not hard to im- agine a scene in which children are taken aside by a grandparent and shown a gray box...
...Even some of the cheaper ones cost more than the fanciest televisions...
...And prices of computer products have been falling for several years, so much so that IBM, which hates price competition, has all but abandoned the low end of the personal computer market...
...You could fix them, but you always lost all your data...
...More importantly, Microsoft makes the basic software operating system for the IBM line of PCs...
...No arcane commands...
...The clone makers rely heavily on hardware made in the Orient...
...Personal computing is much more mature as an industry than as a technology...
...You refine it to "personal computer...
...literally God-awful • Our Mother Who Art In New Haven: The feminist campaign to rewrite the Bible To learn what's really going on in the Church, send your name and address with a check for $20 for a year to: ehristianChallenge® The Only Worldwide Voice Of Traditional Anglicanism Department A 1215 Independence Ave...
...Still, a few things seem clear...
...Research will involve nothing more than a keystroke (or more likely, a voice command) that will open a window on your screen...
...You say--!`computer...
...A lively, fascinating narrative . . . . Woodward has been in the thick of the intellectual and social causes and controversies of this century"—Bertram Wyatt-Brown...
...Getting more—say everything that ever appeared in the New York Times—will require another disk or so...
...54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 can continue while you pursue your research...
...It actually gave him a release to do it on his own...
...What's that...
...They had what were called hard disks that were much faster, but sooner or later they always broke down...
...They share a passion for the computer, not as an office tool but as an instrument of their imagination...
...There are other languages, but Turbo-Pascal alone has resulted in a harvest of astonishingly good homemade software which authors either give away, or distribute as "shareware...
...It has been the refinement of the Mac, once regarded as a quirky little computer ill-suited to business use, into a more conventional, IBM-like system...
...An encyclopedia article will appear...
...The new cult of cultural illiteracy • Mod liturgies...
...Eliot are fighting back—and it's giving the liberals fits...
...They are the ones who are really still asking, "What if...
...Fortunately, the spiritual heirs of C.S...
...Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T.S...
...Washington, D.C...
...Updated, they called it...
...What's more, they will be easier to use...
...Apple recently introduced a wonderfully powerful yet friendly new database program called Hypercard which it is now building into all new Macintoshes...
...The Flight Simulator of the year 2007 will be so realistic both in video and sound that if you can master it, you may be able to fly a small plane without a single lesson...
...It wasn't the first personal computer, but it was the first one that got millions of people to start using it...
...Plain English phrases will be accepted, probably by voice as well as by keyboard, or by a pointing device, like a mouse, or even your own finger on the screen...
...Certainly, the typical system will pack processing power and speed far in excess of the most potent desktop machines of today, and will cost no more...
...This will mean a thriving, increasingly stable commerce that will provide many jobs and much growth in the next twenty years...
...For example, Borland International, headed by a hacker turned software entrepreneur named Philippe Kahn, sells its Turbo-Pascal editor and compiler for $100, less by mail-order discount...
...The hobbyists and hackers who started the personal computer revolution are still out there, as active as ever...
...The big names in the software business these days are firms like Lotus Development Corporation, makers of the famous 1-2-3 spreadsheet program, and Ashton-Tate, maker of dBase III, the industry-standard database program...
...Given its astonishing growth and change in ten years, it is impossible to predict what it Will look like in another twenty...
...What a mess...
...a child will ask...
...Major changes in software mean extensive and expensive retraining...
...And you can read all about it in the liveliest, most outspoken journal of religious news, commentary, and criticism ever published...
...As a result, a cottage industry that began in a garage and was only a decade ago the province of hobbyists and hackers has now become a full-fledged, maturing, and increasingly conservative major industry...
...A bulletin board is simply a computer with modem which is dedicated to receiving calls from other computers...
...It was developed by a single employee who was freed from other tasks to do it...
...All this is natural and predictable, the kind of progress large corporations like IBM and Apple, and the big software houses, are comfortable with...
...And the programs in those days were constantly being changed...
...Some would like to make money from what they do, but most would keep on doing it because they can't help it...
...That's an IBM PC...
...Only today they are more numerous and have more tools...
...That, in turn, will mean new software capable of using more memory and performing numerous tasks at once...
...rr hese are just safe guesses based on 1 technology that already exists, but remains to be refined and mass produced...
...You had to type commands in from the keyboard...
...A similar progression is underway in the world of Apple computers and software, which is at present the only major competition to the IBM-standard...
...It came out in 1981...
...Now Hewlett-Packard is fighting for market share with its pricey IBM copies and, oblivious to the irony, billing itself in TV ads as the firm "that never stops asking What if...
...Meanwhile, Apple has hurried to adapt its newer Macintoshes to hard disks and expansion boards...
...If you know one, you will know them all...
...And it's worth remembering that Steven Wozniak, the man who developed the original Apple, was working for Hewlett-Packard at the time...
...It is now being imitated by IBM and Microsoft...
...24.95 Separate Pasts Growing Up White in the Segregated South Melton A. McLaurin "McLaurin's account, compassionate and perceptive, unblemished by sentimentality or special pleading, is extremely readable and instructive eyewitness testimony from someone who belonged to the 'last generation to come of age in the segregated South' "—John Blades, Chicago Tribune...
...That leadership remains strong today, but whether it will be in twenty years is less certain...
...But it is not America's manufacturing prowess that has given this country leadership in the personal computer industry...
...Exchanging data from one computer to another or even from one program to another was a big problem...
...Programming software that used to cost $500 or more can now be had for a fraction of that...
...It now is moving ahead in careful incremental steps, the kind that can be planned and managed and marketed and sold to stockholders and boards of directors...
...1he point of the foregoing is this: the personal computer, now barely a decade old, is still in its infancy...
...Each request is answered immediately by more information which you can follow wherever you want...
...You can scroll through it, looking for what you want...
...The industry's copyright battles over the "look and feel" of software and "user interfaces" reflect the urge of vendors to standardize, not diversify...
...They didn't hold much information and the disk drives were terribly slow...
...Brit Hume, a national correspondent for ABC News, is also a computer columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group...
...People were very passionate about whatever computer or program they used being the best...
...Fortunately, not all elements of the computer industry have gotten so corporate...
...That has led to a lot of hand-wringing in this country about the loss of American leadership in an industry we started...
...Bell uses the Butlers to tell America's story"—Miami Herald...
...The images on your monitor, be they text or the rich color graphics of some game, will be of photographic quality...
...It has a full line of business software...
...It is, rather, American imagination and ingenuity in developing the software without which computers are useless...
...And it is the business customer that everybody wants, because companies think nothing of spending $400 for a single copy of a computer program that may have cost only a fraction of that to produce...
...An estimated 750,000 people now use it...
...And you had to store everything on what werecalled floppy disks...
...20003 Isn't it about time somebody printed how you feel...
...Meanwhile, whatever else your computer is doing—recalculating a spreadsheet, or bringing in data from some remote source on an optical data line (continued on page 59) Spearheading The Recovery Of Traditional Values If you think mindless radicalism has made of mess of society, schools, the economy, and our political institutions, you should see what it's doing to our churches...
...It is mass production, of course, which brings prices down...
...Illustrated $29.95 A Selection of the History Book Club Possum, and Other Receits for the Recovery of "Southern" Being Marion Montgomery Prescribing a way of thought by which men can regain the balance ,nat modernity has led them to relinquish, Marion Montgomery posits a concept of southernness that is a state of the soul rather than a result of geography, a southernness that exists not simply in the American South but in the Medieval Church and Russian Gulag...
...You couldn't...
...There are a lot of companies, but there are also a lot of bankruptcies and a lot of mergers...
...16.00 The University of Georgia Press Athens, Georgia 30602 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 59...
...If what you create is a spreadsheet, or a poem, or the design of a rocket engine, or the first page of a newsletter, the software will understand...
...How did you talk to it...
...And the more expensive models cost more than some cars...
...You'll be able to check them out of the library...
...Sorting a database, recalculating a spreadsheet, or finding and replacing a phrase in a body of text will be virtually instantaneous, even when dealing with massive amounts of data...
...And a basic system will be much smaller than the unwieldy boxes that hog desk space today...
...Well, it was confusing, but very exciting...
...Current owners can get it for $50...
...Both IBM and the Apple Macintosh have their passionate adherents, but their worlds are inexorably merging...
...You can get shareware from computer user groups or from the thousands of computer bulletin boards across the country...
...It is now dominated by the makers of the so-called "clones," machines that perform like IBM models, but cost less...
...The Apple Macintosh, for instance, pioneered the use of the "graphical interface" where the computer can be controlled by moving an arrow around the screen with a mouse rather than typing in arcane commands...
...Biggest of all is Microsoft...
...Microsoft is busy these days on a new and long-awaited version of the IBM operating system that will enable software developers to tap the full potential of the latest processing chips...
...In this atmosphere, it seems unlikely the hired hands who brought us Lotus 1-2-3 release 2 and the IBM Personal...
...And there were dozens of different programs for every use...
...The IBM machines, and their copies, were designed with such hardware add-ons in mind...
Vol. 20 • December 1987 • No. 12
