I might better understand the future. There were no new clues, however,
nothing but bulky transformers and spaghettilike wires and resistors and
capacitors and the other odds and ends of my youth. But what a record my
junk pile was of the American electronics industry. Half gutted, near
the 6146, reposed a silvery ARC-5, a war-surplus receiver. Had it flown?
ARC-5s were what American bombers carried during the Second World War.
Had a B-17 crew kept in touch with England with my ARC-5 while pummeling
the Third Reich? Had my receiver seen action over Tokyo? Scrapping it,
had I inadvertently defiled History? Near the ARC-5 I saw a giant
condenser for a transmitter. With row after row of plates on a metal
shaft, it looked like an electronic potato slicer. I thought of
fingernail-sized chips in computers today; the big potato slicer might
as well be an artifact from another species. There in the crawl space
the 1950s showed up in little vacuum tubes the size of pill bottles.
They were a reminder of the short-sightedness of the U.S. electronics
executives who had stayed years too long with vacuum-tube technology.
Just what did this mean to American computer makers facing similar
challenges? There was an object lesson here. Many portable computers
from U.S. companies had flat screens, for example, but most of the
display designs came from the laboratories of Japan. Although IBM would
prosper—even if half of the innards of its PCs came from the Orient—many
of the smaller American manufacturers might die. And even the larger
domestic companies could suffer in the price ranges where computers were
mere commodities; with flat displays and better memory chips, Nippon
might again make us relive the transistor fiasco. I groped, poked, and
wandered some more. And there in a dim corner I found the 1960s, too—in
the form of a Nuvistor, another pygmy vacuum tube, another refinement of
the obsolete. By the 1970s Heathkit was finally offering transistorized
ham transmitters like the one I’d lend Eric. Heath still sold quite a
few updated versions of the little HW-7. But now the amateur radio
magazines seemed half filled by ads for solid-state equipment from
Japan. How long until computer magazines looked the same?
I went upstairs. My parents, who for years had been patiently awaiting
the removal of the clutter from the crawl space, had second thoughts.
What if I injured my back dragging the equipment to my car? Why couldn’t
Eric and his father come for the tubes and chassis?
A passage from a novel—the name escaped me—came to mind. It was almost
as if, by removing my old childhood toys, I were aging both myself and
my parents.
I left the equipment at Eric’s after a meeting of the Kaypro writers
group to which he and his father belonged. They lived in a white house
in a greeny neighborhood high above most of Washington: a good location
for an antenna, a great “QTH,” as Lynn Wilson would have put it in ham
talk. The Meyers had filled the house with the paraphernalia of their
obsessions. Downstairs Rima Meyer was at her spinning wheel; a huge loom
dominated what normally would have been the dining room; and upstairs
was the book-packed den where Gene, a _Washington Post_ staffer, had
been working on a long history of Maryland.[85] No one spoke of the odd
juxtaposition—a Kaypro used to write of hogsheads and sailing ships.
Footnote 85:
Gene’s book should appear under the title _Maryland Lost and Found:
People and Places from Chesapeake to Appalachia_. The publisher is
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Eric, a small, curly-haired boy, helped lug the radio gear into his
bedroom nearby. Then we soldered up the Heathkit’s connectors and began
hearing international Morse code and Spanish babble on the 15-meter
band. He was amazed. I could make sense of the dots and dashes at twenty
words per minute; he could copy at only a quarter of that speed. “Hey,
don’t worry. You’ll learn it much faster than I did,” I said. “You
learned BASIC. I haven’t the mind for it. Anyone who can program will be
a whiz at code.” And how much more useful computer skills would be. Take
communications; 20 words per minute was one-thirtieth the speed of my
dot-matrix printer. And yet I was dismayed to hear Eric speaking so
enthusiastically of the day when he could transmit in voice. To Lynn
Wilson and me, ham radio didn’t exist without code. We were like the old
man at my newspaper back in Ohio who couldn’t stand a city room bereft
of typewriters. Computers, in fact, had even violated the sanctity of
code. A micro’s video display could flash out the letters summing up the
holy dots and dashes—the ones I’d so painfully learned in my youth. I
felt like a sailboater tipped over by the wake of a motorized yacht.
I snapped off the Heathkit. Eric and I went downstairs where Rima, a
tiny woman named after the bird-girl in _Green Mansions_, was still at
her spinning wheel. She dreamily looked up at us and proclaimed herself
an anachronism. Children like Eric, she said, would be different from
those before them—would think more abstractly in this video-game era.
She wrote poetry; she heard voices; would the computer children do the
same? I thought of Rob Barnaby, the WordStar writer, who had said he
heard “a voice from the back of my head”; it wasn’t the same
back-of-the-head voice as a poet’s, but it was there, anyhow. Someday
Eric might be another Barnaby.
Later that evening I demonstrated WordStar for the Meyers. Father and
son agreed: WordStar moved words around faster than did Select, the word
processor with which our Kaypros had originally come. I turned to Rima.
“Computers are supposed to be very good for poets,” I said. “You can
consider the possibilities. You can learn what words look like before
you commit yourself to paper.” Rima listened politely, but I thought I
might as well be showing off an electric guitar to a mandolin player.
Gene and I discussed the Arthur Clarke connection. It was iffy. The
telephone lines might not work; Clarke might be away on a business trip.
Gene wouldn’t ghostwrite Eric’s questions for Clarke, but he did have
one he hoped would make the list. “At the writer’s group,” Gene said,
“this businessman was telling me how he fired his secretary when he got
his computer.” How did Clarke feel about such situations? It was a
common but acceptable question, I felt—one just as reasonable as any
that science-fiction writers and philosophers might raise about the
origin of the universe.
Two weeks later I rang Clarke, around eleven in the morning, Virginia
time. A little sleepily, he answered. He was tired after a trip
promoting the _2010_ novel in the United States, and right now he
could not recall me. “Remember,” I said, “we talked several months
ago, and you said we could get together on the modem.” Clarke had
phoned late one evening after I’d written him questions about
WordStar, and in a sense we were now even; for my mind had drawn an
absolute blank when this stranger had begun in a British accent,
“David, you’ll never guess who this is.” Well, I asked now, could we
still get together on the modem? We’d run a test to be ready for the
questions from Eric and others a few days later. “Call my computer
store,” Clarke said. He was using BSTAM, alas, a communications
program that didn’t work with my MODEM7 software. Imagine my
disappointment. I’d been hoping for quick computer-to-computer
contact, over 8,900 miles, with the inventor of the communications
satellite; and now a mundane problem confronted us—a simple lack of
software compatibility. BSTAM in some ways was a Rolls of a
communications program, excellent for transmitting large blocks of
data over long distances. In fact, Clarke had used it to send his New
York publisher some changes in _2010_. And yet, for communicating with
me, his BSTAM disk was nothing but a worthless piece of plastic,
because it snubbed MODEM7-style programs—perhaps the most common among
micro users. It was as if Clarke were a lonely billionaire in a
chauffeured Rolls. His ride might be velvety, but he would never meet
the commoners in the Chevy in the next lane.
After calling around the country, I finally located a review copy of
BSTAM. Eric helped me test it out over the phone. “May I come over and
watch you talk to Clarke?” he asked. I hesitated. Hadn’t Eric already
modemed his questions to me? His being in my apartment seemed redundant.
Then, however, I remembered my youth, when Lynn Wilson would invite me
to his attic for DX sessions. It was like angling. Lynn might not snag
those stations in New Zealand or Morocco, but it was still the
electronic equivalent of treating a boy to a morning of trout fishing in
a mountain stream. Now Arthur Clarke would be the new DX. Of course, the
Rothman-Wilson analogy didn’t absolutely hold, for Eric knew more about
computers than I did. “Sure, Eric,” I said at last, “sure you can come.”
With Eric and his mother watching a few days later, I punched the “0”
and confidently said I wanted such-and-such number in Colombo, Sri
Lanka. A tape-recorded voice soon came on with a New Yawkish accent,
announcing that all circuits to Sri Lanka were busy. Well, what did I
expect? Sri Lanka wasn’t one of the great centers of global
communications. And yet it still seemed vaguely bizarre. Why shouldn’t
Sri Lanka enjoy instant contact all the time with the whole world? Why
not? _Arthur Clarke_ lived there. Perhaps on my tenth try I finally
heard the musical tone of Clarke’s number ringing. “Eureka!” I yelled.
Once more Clarke himself answered. He warned me that he was rushing
through a movie project and some books and was months behind in his
correspondence; the most I could hope for in reply to the questions
would be a series of “Yeses,” “Nos,” and “Maybes.” That irked me. For my
enterprise I deserved a response ahead of the other letter writers; in
fact, you might say I wasn’t even a letter writer—I was a _modemer_. I
glanced at Eric. He could tell the general direction of the
conversation, and he looked just as downcast as I must have. Eric was
even hoping—quite unrealistically, I believed—that Clarke might call him
at home. “I am starting my own computer software company (R & D),” Eric
had said in a preface to his questions, “and I hope to profit in this
venture. I am enjoying your book _2001_ and want to get _2010_. I am
also a novice-class ‘Ham.’ If you ever need any software or just want to
chat, my home and work number is.... I also have interests in ROBOTICS
and COMPUTER HARDWARE, and ELECTRONICS (etc.).” I’d reminded Eric that
the technology might fail in my quest for answers to his questions; I
hadn’t been so emphatic in warning that Clarke himself might fail us.
“I’m going to need to test the modem, anyway,” Clarke said after a
pause, however. He wanted to exchange ideas with an MGM/UA director for
the movie sequel to _2001_.
He gave me the number of his telephone with a modem hooked up, and then,
several times, I again suffered the vagaries of global phone
communications before a line finally opened up and I heard the familiar
tone of a modem. I reached for my own modem, a slim blue box, and
switched over from “TALK” to “DATA.” Then I hit the return key on my
Kaypro, firing up the BSTAM program.
My screen flashed word that the connection was in progress, and I was
about to slap Eric on the back, but I waited, and quite rightly, for as
the seconds wore on, the connection was _still_ progressing. Something
was amiss. By voice Clarke said my transmission hadn’t registered in his
computer memory—not even the mere existence of my electronic file.
I called Michael Scott, a technician at Business Computing
International, Clarke’s New York computer store. He sent a Telex to
Clarke. Was Clarke using the normal 300-baud modem speed matching mine?
I learned a day or so later that he was. “Well,” I asked Michael, “how
long has it been since Clarke last communicated with you [the store]
through the modem?”
“Months.”
“Okay,” I said, “maybe he needs a refresher on how to set up the modem
program.” Patiently, Michael ran through the procedures.
Half an hour later I again was braving surly operators and busy signals
to place another call to Sri Lanka.
“What you want to do,” I told Clarke, “is type RXN B:ODYCORR.TXT, then a
carriage return, then select ANSWER when you see the prompt.” Clarke,
however, hadn’t been doing it that way. We tried again, and for the next
ten minutes my screen kept flashing dozens of confirmations of the
connection.
Then our computer link broke.
I called Clarke back. Surely at least the start of the electronic file
had shown up on the B disk, the one on which he was to store my
questions. “No,” he said, “I don’t see it.” Clarke, it seems, had
forgotten to put a floppy disk in his B drive. It was a very excusable
mistake—this whole modeming procedure was still a novelty to him—and we
failed yet another time even with Scott’s instructions followed
exactly.[86]
Footnote 86:
Clarke’s forgetting to insert the disk in the B drive should
underscore a truism: _all computer users can commit idiocies_. Once I
owned a printer that I couldn’t use without unplugging my modem.
Things worked the other way around, too—as some people discovered when
they tried to communicate with me over the phone but couldn’t because
I’d forgotten to yank out the printer cable and put in the modem’s.
So a few days later I settled on another tack: getting Clarke a free
Kaypro II.
Why not? Kaypro itself had once suggested that to me. It could do worse
than to be able to say that Clarke and an MGM/UA director had used
Kaypros to communicate during the creation of the _2010_ film. I, in
turn, might reach Clarke more easily if he was tapping away on a machine
like mine. Besides, he eventually could give his Kaypro to the new
Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies. The center was to
promote high tech in the Third World, and Joseph Pelton, who was
rounding up U.S. backers for the organization, liked the Kaypro idea. So
did Clarke. And so did Peter Hyams at MGM/UA.
Hyams wasn’t just a well-known director with such credits as _Capricorn
One_ and _The Star Chamber_. He was the kind of person for whom I was
writing this book—he had a problem open to possible solution by
computer.
The problem was the need to consult closely with Clarke during the
adaptation of the _2010_ novel; how to overcome the time difference
between Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Culver City, California?
“Some things work brilliantly when read but aren’t well suited to the
screen,” Hyams said, and as a conscientious scriptwriter he didn’t want
to make arbitrary changes to Clarke’s story. “I was interested in
finding out what the author was thinking when he wrote certain things.
And secondly I thought it was very, very important that Arthur C. Clarke
be made to feel an important part of the making of this movie.” With
rapport might come a greater understanding of the man and his books.
Hearing of Hyams’s proposal to work together via computer, however,
Clarke was skeptical. I could imagine why. Hyams would need a dependable
link, not just the capability to exchange occasional messages. It might
be 1983, satellites might be old hat by now, but the quality of the
phone transmissions didn’t belie the fact that Clarke was on an island
in the Indian Ocean. Could computers deal _reliably_ with the electronic
echoes, with the delays from the signal traveling more than 45,000 miles
on earth and in space? What about Sri Lanka’s primitive phone system?
And yet Clarke’s location—some 9,350 miles from Culver City—also helped
the struggle seem all the more worthwhile.
“Because he’s twelve or thirteen hours away in time, it almost makes
normal conversation impossible,” Hyams said. “Someone is always going to
be speaking at a very inconvenient hour for them. And there are some
times when you don’t want to talk, and sometimes when you’re asking
somebody for something, you want to think about something. It requires
more than a quick answer.” Letters, though, just wouldn’t do: “I’ve
gotten mail from him that’s almost a month old.” Hyams might have used
telex or a similar system, but the costs would still be greater than a
direct computer-to-computer link. Ideally, he could tap out memos on a
computer, then whisk them to Clarke without a secretary taking the time
to type them into another machine. Hyams was already comfortable with a
Xerox 860 word processor. Like me, however, he realized that the link
had more chance of succeeding with the two ends using the same computer
systems—Kaypros in this case. Two hardworking Kaypro employees, Margaret
Phanes and Clifford Odendhal, pushed through the project at their
company. Within a week or so a Kaypro II was on the way to Clarke, and
the company installed another in Hyams’s office; at long last, the Great
Modeming seemed at hand.
Then, however, rioting broke out in Sri Lanka: fighting between two
ethnic groups, the Singhalese and the minority Tamils, who were seeking
a separate state. Somehow Clarke’s Kaypro reached the airport. But he
couldn’t pick it up because of the rioting, during which an arsonist
burned down the house of one of his technical assistants.
“They’re swinging the jawbone again,” said an acquaintance of mine,
alluding to a scene in _2001_ where a man-ape kills another with the
high tech of his era. It was not a slur on Sri Lanka—just general
disgust over violence of any kind. News stories appeared, then stories
about the island trying to censor reporters so there wouldn’t be any
more stories.
Just when every circumstance seemed to be conspiring against me, I
enjoyed a miraculous fluke. Arthur Clarke’s neighbor Susan Hayes, the
wife of an American official in Colombo, was visiting Washington and
would return to Sri Lanka soon; and through a member of the Kaypro
writers group, Marcia Tyson, I passed on to her the written questions
for Clarke to answer by phone if need be. I wasn’t cheating. It was
perfectly in line with both the Marco Polo tradition and the spirit of
this book; don’t ever shy away from paper backups.
I also supplied Clarke a disk of MODEM7, the public-domain program that
I used—so that we needn’t worry about software differences if my program
didn’t work with the one that Kaypro gave him.
Kaypro, in fact, did provide Clarke with MODEM7-compatible software—a
company program—but it wouldn’t run acceptably on Peter Hyams’s
computer. So both men instead received a commercial program called MITE.
There was a problem, though, as Peter and I prepared for the Great
Modeming—I couldn’t be Arthur C. Clarke. My MODEM7 could talk to Peter’s
MITE, but it wasn’t really the same. With MODEM7 you couldn’t leave your
computer unattended and have a machine thousands of miles away call you
up and choose from dozens of electronic files on your disk. With MITE
you could.[87] And Peter, true to the perfectionism of a top director,
wanted his rehearsals to be as realistic as possible. “I’d like to be
Arthur Clarke,” I told a kindly software dealer, who gave me a review
copy. MITE, however, locked up on my machine. On the screen it
stubbornly kept saying I was receiving signals from another
computer—even before I turned on the modem.
Footnote 87:
MITE’s auto-answer feature won’t work without an appropriate modem. My
own modem was manually activated, meaning that I couldn’t take
advantage of this wrinkle. I could, however, switch on the modem when
Peter called. And for him, that would realistically duplicate the
experience of reaching Clarke’s computer.
So I visited a hacker I’d heard of. He was a little technobully, who,
bare chested in the August heat, worked sullenly on my software, making
rude noises whenever I asked a question. MITE seemingly succumbed to his
efforts. He berated me for not using the right number of data bits, the
right stop bit, the right everything else in computerese. Chastened, I
returned home, only to find that the program still wasn’t working
reliably.
I took my Kaypro and software to a friend, a systems analyst, an
intelligent, learned man fond of aphorisms like “Even kings must obey
the rules of mathematics.” Unfairly, cruelly, MITE still wasn’t running
after five hours of his toil. My friend played by the rules; he’d based
his whole career on following instruction manuals; he was the perfect
man to help run the computer system of a hospital or bank. I was just
the opposite. When it came to the laws of math or computer manuals, I
was willing to turn criminal. In fact, that’s how I undeservedly
succeeded at last—by flouting MITE’s instructions on connecting my
computer and modem.
It was the first time in years that I’d used a soldering iron. I didn’t
own a vise, even, so I placed the RS-232 connectors on an aluminum pie
plate on the wooden floor of my apartment and breathed lead-poisoned
fumes.
The work was hot. It was also murder on my eyes, hardly the joy I
recalled from amateur radio—a task fit for robots, not people. Squinting
away, I hoped that beneficent HALs would soon multiply in the world’s
factories. Then I remembered my friend Lynn Wilson, a telephone-company
retiree who had soldered for decades, who loved it, and who had lost his
service job to computers.
With MITE running at last—and with me as a more Clarke-like imitator—I
began another series of rehearsals with Peter Hyams. The program was
excellent; the instructions were bewildering in places. Peter called a
MITE distributor and traded insults. It was outrageous. We were not
ordinary end users. Peter was a movie director trying to communicate
with a famous novelist-scientist; and I, if an obscurity, was at least
around to chronicle whatever abuse Peter suffered.
What would average computer users have done? Without other MITE owners
to share their problems, they would have been up the creek. The whole
ordeal was a potent argument for user groups; in fact, you might say
that Clarke, Peter, and I were a three-member one. Clarke, meanwhile,
was reportedly suffering a disk-drive problem. He may have enjoyed
sympathy, however, from another user—nearby; an American in Sri Lanka
owned a Kaypro. Of course, the ordeal was still another argument for
easier-to-master software.
Finally, it happened: the Great Modeming—more than six months after
Clarke had first phoned me from Sri Lanka.
Hyams and Clarke started typing messages to each other, and I knew my
own Great Modeming would succeed. But a problem lingered even now.
Colombo and Culver City couldn’t send already-typed material to each
other’s unattended machines.
So one of Clarke’s first messages to the MGM/UA Kaypro wasn’t exactly
“What hath God wrought?” It was something in the spirit of “Tell **** to
fix that software or I’m going to throw the computer in a river. And
tell **** that Sri Lanka has many rivers.” A furious Hyams and Rothman
phoned Odendhal, who promptly contacted the distributor. Contrite, the
MITE man apologized and gave Hyams the guidance he needed.
The Clarke-Hyams link was now in place. It hadn’t been easy. The two men
were each using a $1,595 computer, a modem selling for several hundred
dollars, and a communications program listing for more than $175, and
Peter’s new printer cost several hundred; and those expenses normally
would have been only the beginning. Kaypro had set up the software and
offered other consultant-style services; Clarke used his own technician.
If Average Company, Inc., had duplicated the computer link on both sides
of the Pacific, the project might have exceeded $5,000. And yet clearly
the technical hurdles seemed surmountable and the rewards worthwhile.
Two weeks into the link Hyams had only one complaint—the difficulty of
reaching an international operator at times to place calls. And in
future years that problem would lessen as special computer links let
Telenet spread into the world’s poorer countries. An attachment to make
the Sri Lankan phone system compatible would cost the government several
thousand dollars. And the expense to Clarke and Hyams would be perhaps
$60 an hour—no great barrier, considering that they could transmit
1,000-word computer files in a fraction of that cost using 300-baud
modems. With faster modems they might end up spending still less.
More important to Hyams right now, however, was the friendship he was
building with Clarke—so important to the success of the film.
“I think we’re kind of linked in a strange way,” Peter said. “He’s
written some lovely and sweet things. It’s strangely intimate. You’re
just getting daily mail. It has some really wonderful advantages that
letters have over telephone conversations.
“The kinds of questions that I’m asking him and the kinds of things I’m
saying are things you don’t really say off the top of your head. You
know, ‘What do you think about so-and-so?’ and you sit down and compose
the answer and you write it back. Some of the stuff is purely personal.
Some of it is not. I want him to experience the making of this movie.
There are a lot of logistical details. I’ve spoken to some people that
Arthur’s recommended I speak to. There are things to do with everything,
from marketing to plans I have, to changes I want to make, to What does
he think of certain things? to technical areas of the film that he can
be enormous help with.”[88]
Footnote 88:
A Ballantine paperback titled _The Odyssey File_, records much of the
computer dialogue between Clarke and Hyams. Very briefly Clarke also
writes of the link in _Ascent to Orbit: The Technical Writings of
Arthur C. Clarke_, released by John Wiley & Sons, New York, in 1984.
Clarke, using British spelling, modemed to me that the “connextion” with
Peter Hyams was “invaluable. We are on exactly the other side of the
clock, so I leave my machine on ANSWER with a file for him when I go to
bed, which is about the time he goes to MGM, and when I get down to
breakfast, there’s his answer on the disk.” If Peter worked late at
night, the two men might save their “conversation” on computer disk so
“there will be a complete record of our collaboration. It’s truly
fantastic, like WordStar. I just can’t imagine how I ever managed
without it. My big worry is that as more and more of my friends get
plugged in, I’ll never be able to get away from the keyboard.”