iconAfterword
It’s November 1984 now, and I’ve sold my Kaypro.
Business computers are production tools, not family heirlooms; when I found that the Kaypro’s screen and storage capacity were becoming inadequate for my needs, I unsentimentally ran want ads. The new owner—a church magazine using the Kaypro for lighter-duty work such as letter writing—couldn’t be happier.
The Kaypro’s replacement was a sleek Victor 9000. I was growing accustomed to it when a writer friend, Stephen Banker, called with news of an auction at a shut-down computer store a few miles from my apartment. A year and one-half ago the store’s managers and I had argued about the Kaypro’s merits versus the Osborne’s. They’d gambled on the wrong machine, the Osborne. Micro sales in general were growing, but this business had perished in the Silicon Jungle.
Now I returned to the store and saw the debris of the micro revolution. Spread out haphazardly on long tables, treated like dead fish, were the computers that I’d seen glamorized on the covers of the micro magazines just months before.
The auction had begun on a Thursday and would last over the Labor Day weekend through Monday. The first day the prices were reduced 30 percent, and they would keep declining, until on Monday you could buy most of the machines for 80 percent off. It was now Friday.
The machine I wanted, a hard-disk version of my Victor 9000, would be $2,400 Sunday—40 percent of the original list price of $6,000.
“Don’t buy it Sunday,” said Steve. “If God intends you to have a hard disk, He’ll let you get it for $1,200 Monday.”
There were two hard-disk Victors, one new, one used, both selling for the same. So far only one other person seemed to be showing the amount of interest that I did, a husky, gray-haired man in a T-shirt. He was trying the used machine. I wondered ifhe’d seen the new one and was trying to distract me from it. This could be the stuff of nightmares:
A whistle blows that Monday. T-shirt pushes a frail young auction staffer aside and races toward the new Victor. I overtake him, however. Just as I’m about to lay hands on the machine, T-shirt throws a punch toward me. I duck. T-shirt grabs the Victor monitor.
“Listen,” I say, “that computer isn’t yours unless you get the main part. The monitor won’t do.”
An auction staffer nods.
I unplug the main machine from an ACextensionextensioncord. T-shirt, however, sets the monitor down and moves closer, as if to grab the part with the disk drives and the central processing unit.
“Look,” I tell the auction staffer, “it’s my machine.”
“First come, first serve,” he says. “First to the counter gets the computer.”
T-shirt flexes his biceps. “You and me got some fighting to do.”
“Hell, no,” I say. “I already have my computer.”
“Mycomputer,” T-shirt growls. I hug the Victor more tightly. My back is aching. T-shirt laughs at my discomfort.“Mycomputer,” he repeats. “Gimme!” The auction staffer watches calmly. I don’t. That’s $6,000 worth of machinery we’re fighting over. Suppose I drop—
T-shirt rushes in. The computer’s plastic case smacks against the floor and shatters. Simultaneously, one of us brushes against the monitor. It, too, falls; and the CRT makes a horrible sound as the air rushes into the vacuum. The Victor, however well built, isn’t a machine to be fought over, barroom-brawl fashion. On the floor I see tiny computer chips and spaghettilike clumps of wire. God knows how, but the hard disk has spilled out of the Victor and is rolling down the aisle of the store.
The auction staffer makes clucking noises. I glare at T-shirt. “You saw it all,” I tell the staffer. “He’s the one who’s going to have to make good.”
“Hey, boss,” the staffer yells toward the counter, “we got ourselves a little accident here.”
The chief auctioneer rushes over and looks over the Victor’s remains.
“He smashed it,” I say, frowning again at T-shirt.
“But you let it drop,” T-shirt snaps.
“The price was only $1,200 on the last day,” I remindeveryone. A lump is forming in my throat. Inflation notwithstanding, I’ll never feel right putting “only” in front of “$1,200.”
“Well, it was still worth six thou,” says the head auctioneer. “See you both in court.”
“Both?” T-shirt and I ask at the same time.
“Both,” says the auctioneer, “unless you want to pay now. That’ll be $3,000 each. Cash or certified check?”
Hoping that T-shirt wouldn’t notice me, I put the new Victor through its paces as much as I could. It wasn’t set up to run WordStar, the program I wanted to test it with. I’d be taking a chance. Still, if I bought the Victor for $1,200, I’d have enough money left over for even massive repairs—assuming someone didn’t beat me to the machine.
“Maybe I’ll buy it myself,” said a sales rep, out of either cruelty or a desire to increase my interest still more, assuming that was possible. “Maybe I’ll sell it for scrap.”
He himself was a good six foot four inches, perhaps three hundred pounds, but some Victor enthusiasts might have thrown a few punches, anyway, at the source of such sacrilege.
The Victor, unlike most of the other micros there, wasn’t the computer equivalent of a dead fish.
With the built-in hard disk I could keep every syllable ofThe Silicon Jungleready for editing without jockeying around the floppies. I silently thanked “Big Blue” IBM for the bargain that might await me. Through its normal marketing muscle, including a massive ad campaign featuring a Charlie Chaplin look-alike, IBM had overwhelmed the competition. People shunned “obscure” brands, especially if they couldn’t use IBM PC-DOS IBM software. The Victor didn’t have Charlie on its side. Some bozos at the company evenchargeddealers for promotional literature.[97]But what a micro! The Victor was a 16-bit, MS-DOS machine and ran WordStar 3.3 and the CrossTalk communications program, the software I used in my work. The screen was noticeably sharper than the IBM’s; the keyboard was closer to a Selectric’s; the light brown plastic cabinet was sleeker, and it didn’t take up as much desk space as an IBM PC would. And the floppies could store an amazing 1.2 megabytes of information or three times as much space as the usual IBM disk. How lamentable that IBM rather than Victor had set the standard for the personal computer industry.Victor had gone into chapter 11, but subject to court approval, would be bought by a Swedish company—and even if the sale doesn’t go through, there would be 100,000 Victor owners, enough to guarantee a market for replacement-part manufacturers. IBM might have the brand name. But the Victor right now was best formyneeds.
“When’s a safe time to get here before anyone else gets the Victor?” I asked the sales rep.
“We open at nine o’clock,” he said.
“Won’t do me any good to come several hours earlier?” I asked out of curiosity—I’d show up regardless of the answer.
He shook his head.
That night I called Steve, just to overcome last-minute doubts. The better the bargain, the more suspicious I should be. “You think I should go ahead?”
“Why not? The biggest problem you’ll have is selling your present Victor.”
I’d paid $1,750 for it new, through the mail. It, too, had been a risk. I’d taken out a maintenance agreement with a local company in case the new arrival turned out to be a lemon. It hadn’t been. But could I recover the money selling a supposedly “has-been” machine?
Monday, I arose at five in the morning. If the Victor was still there and if I got to it before anyone else did, I’d save more than $4,000 off the normal price. For four hours of waiting? I’d have to be a regular on all the best-seller lists for my time to be worth $1,000 an hour.
When I pulled into the shopping center, I saw no one else there except for a police car passing through. An old van wheezed into the parking lot a few minutes later. A bearded man and a boy of perhaps ten got out and set up a canvas chair; veteran auction goers? They’d have advice on the best way to fight the crowd and claim my prize.
The man, however, just gestured and grunted. The boy couldn’t speak, either. They were apparently deaf mutes. I pulled out pen and paper and learned they were after Atari-games software.
Maybe an hour later a few others straggled in, one of them a psychologist, with whom I began discussing the great issues of the day.
“You’re not interested in the Victor, are you?” I asked.
“I’m looking for Osborne software,” said the psychologist.
“What about detachable keyboards and monitors?” I asked, remembering my nightmare over the criteria for laying claim to a machine.
We decided that proper auction etiquette required you to deferto the person who carried away the main part of the computer to the counter; an auctioneer later agreed.
Miraculously, a small, orderly line was forming even now, with fifty people in front of the store by eight. Over the next hour a mob came, some in old jalopies like the van, others in Cadillacs and BMWs. There was both excitement and desperation. Many people, like me, simply would forego buying a new computer if someone else beat them to a suitably priced machine. Should I lose out on the Victor, I’d just spend another year or so juggling floppy disks around. Others, however, might have been hoping to be able to afford a serious business computer, period. No, it wasn’t like the Depression, but I couldn’t help thinking of the dance marathons of the 1930s where the hardiest carried off the prizes. I was the first in line—of all the hundreds of people—but I certainly didn’t boast the strongest back. Just a few feet down the line I saw ... T-shirt.
An auction staffer picked up a bullhorn. He said only fifty people could come into the store at once. I heard sighs. Relatively few people, however, left that line. Maybe, just maybe, the others wouldn’t appreciate the merits of the bargain machines that they themselves wanted. I hoped that to most in the crowd the new Victor would be just another dead fish of a micro.
Finally, it was nine. The salespeople—as if at a fire—urged the crowd to stay calm. If the mob lost discipline, the other early comers and I might be crushed against the glass.
As the doors opened, I glanced back at T-shirt. If he was worried about me, he wasn’t letting on. At a pace between a jog and a sprint I entered the store; I tried momentarily to excise the image of T-shirt from my mind.
Oh, look! A friendly sales assistant. I’d offered him advice on electronic mail and—
“Do you think you could help me with the Victor?” I asked.
Suppose he couldn’t. His job might be at stake if he did even a small favor in this every-man-for-himself struggle.
“Sure,” he said. And I’d like to think this was another demonstration of the value of befriending others in The Jungle and sharing knowledge, user to user. With the sales assistant watching guard over the main machine, I picked up the monitor and pushed through the crowd to the counter. I still couldn’t believe the Victor would soon be mine. What if the sales assistant had suddenly developed a fondness for Victors and had himself decided to claim the main machine? T-shirt all this time may have been in the other part of the room; perhaps he was a gracious, mannerly fellow who, having seen me first in line, was decent enough to relinquish the new Victor to me. I don’t know how T-shirt fared at the auctionbut hope that his own patience was rewarded through the acquisition of the used Victor.
Within half an hour after taking the new Victor home, I had WordStar running on it. There was some tinkering to do with the software so the computer would start up without my having to stick a floppy disk in it, but otherwise it was a perfect machine, save for a little crack in the front of the case, which I discovered after I peeled away the price tape. For $40 or so I could buy a replacement front. The hard disk, at any rate, has been just as handy as I expected for editing this book.
My old Victor is in the hands of Gabriel Heilig, an aspiring screenwriter, who saw my want ad and bought the machine for $1,750, exactly what I’d paid. Gabe is no dummy; indeed, he used to sell cars—Mercedes—and he insisted that his purchase price include plenty of advice and several hours of instruction in WordStar, my favorite word processor. And then what does Gabe do? He goes out and buys a copy of Word Perfect, a new program that he swears is easier to use. I say, “Great if it helps you do your work.” It must. Gabe tells me that the Victor helps him revise five times as fast as he can on his electronic typewriter. “You constantly have a fresh copy in front of you,” he says, “whereas if you’re using a typewriter, you must retype the whole page even if you change just once sentence.” A producer is interested in a proposal for a TV series, and Gabe says: “I did it in three days—it would have taken two weeks with a typewriter.”
Having sold the old Victor to Gabe for $550 more than the price tag on the hard-disk one, I invested $230 in a 1,200-baud modem. I remain a computer communications junky. A draft of this afterword, in fact, reached my technical editor up in New York via the phone lines.
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My afterword could cover a number of topics, but I’ll resist. Still, you might be interested to learn that the Great Modeming continues between the United States and Sri Lanka.
Because of problems with the Sri Lankan phone service, the link over the past year hasn’t been 100 percent reliable—monsoons can wreak havoc on cables between Arthur Clarke and the satellite station. But Steve Jongeward, who is now an assistant both to Clarke and Peter Hyams, the2010director-writer, reports that the struggles have been worthwhile. The movie will be out in December 1984 (remember: I’m writing this in November 1984), and if a reporter has questions for Clarke in Sri Lanka, Steve will just type them out on the Kaypro in California, and the novelist will typically respond within a day or so. Sometimes the reporterseven visit the office with the Kaypro and interview Clarke via modem and get instant replies.
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The Great Modeming has produced a wonderful outgrowth: an attempt to start an Electronic Peace Corps (EPC) to pipe U.S. technical savvy into the Third World via computers links. (See BackupXIII, “Why Not An Electronic Peace Corps?”)
The idea—in the form of an agency working within or alongside the existing Peace Corps—has won support from people ranging from Clarke to William F. Buckley, Jr., and ChicagoSun-Timeseditorial writers.
Two established foreign-aid groups, Partnership for Productivity and Volunteers in Technical Assistance (VITA), hope to develop an informal EPC-style project with the Sri Lankans.[98]If successful, it could complement an existing VITA plan for an earth satellite to relay electronic mail to and from the Third World. Ideally, a permanent EPC would develop. Then it could recruit volunteers, help fund projects like the satellite and the Clarke Centre, and otherwise encourage computer communications in vital fields such as public health and agriculture.
—Alexandria, Va.Nov. 15, 1984
—Alexandria, Va.Nov. 15, 1984
—Alexandria, Va.Nov. 15, 1984
—Alexandria, Va.
Nov. 15, 1984
BACKUP:More Tips andTales from theJungle
BACKUP:More Tips andTales from theJungle
BACKUP:More Tips andTales from theJungle
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