The Microcomputer Revolution: Was George Santayana Right?

It is with great relief, tinged perhaps with some nostalgia and just a touch of regret, that I note the death of the old-fashioned manual typewriter in America. Smith-Coro­na produced the last of them in May. Sur­prisingly, little or nothing was done to mark the event. No statues were erected, no holi­day was declared. The reason is that, in the words of Dan Rather of CBS News, “The Computer is here!”

“We are looking at a massive change in intellectual society,” says Andries van Dam, one of the architects of Brown University’s plan to spend more than $50 million over the next six years to provide a computer for each student and every member of the administra­tion, faculty, and staff on campus. “If you aren’t scared about the implications of this change, how it’s going to revolutionize teach­ing and research, you’re not thinking. . . . [W]e don’t even know what most of the questions are.”¹

Most likely Johannes Gutenberg would have been amused. Certainly no one could foresee the consequences of that one mo­ment in the history of technology when the first page of his German Bible was lifted from the press. The implications of movable type were enormous, but many people, in­cluding probably even Gutenberg himself, would have believed it blasphemy to try to predict them. And the initial reaction of Homo sapiens to subsequent culture-warping technological innovation continued in much the same vein. When the first of Henry Ford’s tin lizzies hit the street, the common man responded at first with, “Get a horse!” Granted that Americans were soon smitten by an enduring love affair with the horseless carriage—but for some time yet to come, we will be living with the results of a generation’s unwillingness to consider in advance, let alone prepare for, the impact of the automo­bile on the American economy, society, and infrastructure.

Historians of Western civilization routinely point out to their college students the great problem of the Industrial Revolution, that its impact upon society was unplanned, uneven, and generally left to be influenced by the laws of the marketplace. It seems therefore ironic that historians, so given to citing the old saw that “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” should be more or less oblivious to the fact that contem­porary man is barely beginning to see the real consequences of the information explo­sion detonated by Gutenberg over 500 years ago.

Apparently we have before us a singular opportunity, to shape the applications of the new computer technology and do so in a way that is appropriate to history and the human­ities in general. The critical question is whether the profession is prepared to deal directly with the tidal wave of high tech that has just struck.

In general, the prevailing attitude of his­torians toward computers has been an emo­tional and limiting one—in a word, resist­ance. Many have preconceived notions about the machine. They somehow feel themselves compromised by using it, and would scarcely buy one of their own. Indeed, our society has become quite fearful of the apparent ease with which the computer can “fold, spindle, or mutilate” the identity and/or record of the individual. This can be attributed in part to the legacy of the punch card, in part to the fact that we are fast approaching 1984, the year of “Big Brother.” But as Time magazine noted in naming the computer “machine of the year,” our sympathy for the bleakness of George Orwell’s image is probably due less to a mistrust of science than of basic human nature.

On the other hand it must be admitted that there are good and ample reasons for appre­hension. The CRT (cathode ray tube) was introduced to our culture in an oblique fash­ion during the period between World War II and the Korean conflict, when the US was still wrestling with the choice between isola­tionism and global power responsibility, and looking for some way to relieve the tension. “TV will change the world!” they said, and Americans rushed into a new amorous relationship with the television set—a machine soon characterized as a wasteland of medioc­rity—even more quickly than they had fallen in love with the automobile. To those in professions such as history that revere the tradition and prestige of the book as both artifact and source of knowledge, television quickly came to signify a kind of alienation from the printed page. Small wonder that the general public’s new and even more giddy passion for the home computer should be dismissed as little else than a fad created by a gigantic sales campaign carried on by the high-tech barons of California’s Silicon Val­ley.

There is certainly something to the charge of “home computer hype,” for personal for­tunes seem to be made every day by those able to rationalize the jargon of the informa­tion revolution. In his book Megatrends, John Naisbitt, the Henri Bergson of high-tech catch phrases, has provided the bureaucracy of higher education a new mine of insights and quotable quotes to borrow from for institutional planning documents. But few historians are likely to be impressed by his thesis, that we have become a profoundly “bottom-up” culture because the computer “handles complexity and encourages it in society.” With two and one-half million mi­crocomputers marketed last year alone, an industry that claims it can sell nearly four times that amount by 1986 begins to stretch

the credibility not just of scholars, but apparently Wall Street as well. And while the recent stock market nosedives of Atari (Warner Communications) and Texas Instruments do strongly suggest that video game is doomed to follow the hula hoop and Rubik’s Cube onto the back shelf of some closet, it points out that the least significant feature of the computer revolution has so far been its most visible aspect.

In reality our children are far more likely than we to see computers in the jargon of the day as “user-friendly” since, unlike adults, they haven’t yet “learned” they aren’t good at technical subjects and should surrender at the first unfriendly beep from a machine. For the historian, as for the senior corporate executive, the desire for results is often contradicted by a fear of trying, with the new technical jargon itself allowed to become a technical barrier. As Dean Harriet Sheridan of Brown University points out, “The problem with humanists in the past has been that they haven’t wanted to recognize their dependence on machines. Yet they drive cars and use refrigerators and stereos.”² The question then is whether the current generation of historians will realize they must do some unlearning, or whether they have already become a generation of the disadvan­taged, as isolated as Ivan Turgenev’s fathers from their sons in their romantic rejection of a realism sometimes viewed in the extreme as nihilism.

Indeed, if we are to keep our self-respect while still clinging to our values, we must attempt to humanize a technological trend. Unhappily the jargon of computer users is often so impersonal that it appears quite silly. Eight “bits” (binary digits) are a “byte,” and half a byte is a “nibble”; a double-sided “floppy disk” used for data storage is quite properly called a “flippy floppy.” Moreover, traditional humanists put off by incompre­hensible jargon are likely to feel that their quantitative colleagues have left the human­ities for the social sciences. And those who do succeed in mastering the new methods and language find the emphasis to be predomi­nantly on the side of science. Small wonder, then, that so few humanists have been bold enough to start using computers.

Typical of the knee-jerk responses to the pervasiveness of computer technology is the argument of Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT, the author of Computer Power and Human Reason, who views the machine as a “quick technological fix,” a solution looking for the core problem of American education, which he sees as still suffering from an earlier tidal wave of mediocrity. However, the computer is not simply a TV with a typewriter attached. Unlike television sets, which more often than not are a source of passive entertainment, computers require work, training, and edu­cation if they are to yield any noticeable benefit. This means head-on confrontation with a common campus buzzword, perhaps the most abused piece of high-tech jargon: “computer literacy.” There is considerable disagreement as to its proper use. In some quarters it means the ability to sit down at an unfamiliar computer with unfamiliar soft­ware, flip through some documentation, and gain the use of a new tool in a relatively short time. Elsewhere it is defined only as an awareness of computing capabilities within a discipline or profession, and the ability to recognize and articulate problems that can be solved with the aid of computing technology. Such a definition does not necessarily imply the ability to program or operate computers.

At the minimum, however, computer liter­acy should mean an ability to leave behind any fear of the machine itself, a level achieved by those who are willing to substi­tute “bugs” and “debugging” for the words “mistake” and “failure” in their vocabulary. And in overcoming the mental blocks and negative attitudes that are so common among first-time users, the computer’s own software can be used to guide the novice over the learning hump. In his book Mindstorms, Sey­mour Papert, another MIT professor, argues persuasively that the computer can be a ready means for improving human logic and thought processes and, far from making us more dependent on machines, the intelligent use of computers will help us become all the more creative.

Logically the first place to begin creating a new literate generation is in the academic community itself, and Stanford University has set a noteworthy example of how the teaching of educators can be pursued. In a special classroom they call SMILE (Stanford Microcomputer Instructional Lab Experi­ment), humanities faculty can learn the mys­teries of the personal computer. The facility is fruit born of a two and one-half year joint Stanford-IBM study of scholarly communications, the Tiro Project, named for a slave who took dictation and copied manuscripts of the Roman orator Cicero, who freed him out of gratitude. The modern Tiro is an attempt to increase the word-processing and information-handling powers of humanities departments that have had to find new ways of making up for declining university bud­gets. Stanford, and the significant number of humanities professors participating in the experiment, recognize that anything that can be done to improve their writing capabilities is going to have a big effect on their scholarly productivity. More than one participant has recognized that the computer can be a way to extend his or her academic life span, since more effective writing means the potential to publish a greater number of books than ordinarily possible in one lifetime.

The professional and economic advan­tages that can come through eliminating rep­etitious clerical typing may prove a key con­sideration in expanding the use of the micro­computer in the liberal arts. Moreover, the Tiro Project has shown that when given the opportunity to make their own choices, his­torians and other humanists will opt for the microcomputer over time-sharing on a mini or mainframe. The reason is simple. Mini and mainframe computers mean a long-term commitment to the use of equipment that can easily become outmoded or impossible to budget for, whereas the judicious purchase of a relatively inexpensive micro, particularly when costs are amortized over a number of years by supportive firms like IBM, keeps open the opportunity to trade up to better systems as soon as they become available.

Recent technological advances in data storage and a­ sharp decline in the cost of computer memory chips have also served to make the micro the preferred choice regarding both­ cost and capacity. For example, the sheer amount of data to be manipulated, which until quite recently made the quantita­tive historian dependent on the availability of a very large computer, is no longer a factor. Social scientists have learned that human activity follows certain statistically expressed rules, and that general principles can be derived despite the anomalies created by individual difference if the sample is at least some 1,500 cases. And that figure is well within the capability of current microcom­puter design.

The personal involvement of historians and other academics in the pursuit of com­puter literacy will likely continue to be of interest primarily to themselves and their institutions, but the general public has in­creasingly become aware of policies and pro­cedures affecting students. Clarkson College in Potsdam, New York, and Drexel Universi­ty in Philadelphia have instituted and finan­cially facilitated a requirement that all enter­ing freshmen purchase their own personal computers. Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh has arranged with IBM to develop the hardware and software for a campus network of 7,500 work stations, while IBM’s investment of $17 million at Brown has made possible the creation of a broadband network linking 125 buildings on campus. And what does IBM get out of such deals? A far better appreciation of college-level computer needs and applications, with the participating insti­tutions made more aware that business will invest large sums in education if they believe that students and teachers will lead the way to questions and answers that matter. Cre­ative thinking, it would seem, need no longer be its own reward.

Hence the significance of the microcom­puter’s own language(s). This year in autho­rizing an Advanced Placement test for high school students in the computer language PASCAL, the College Entrance Examination Board and ETS (Educational Testing Ser­vice) decided to give a distinct edge to those individuals whose analytical minds and high­ly structured patterns of thought have led them to study the language of the machine. For the historian there is much to consider in this development. But  unfortunately, some of our colleagues have already affirmed their intention not to become involved in pursuits outside the traditional limits of the discipline. For example, one historian recently re­marked in Byte magazine, a professional mi­crocomputer journal:

I am not a trained programmer in any computer language and I have no plans to study such a language. Having al­ready studied Russian, French, German, Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, I think enough is enough! This means that I need the services of good programmers . . . and if it’s a question either of spe­cific subjects or of the relevant and nec­essary information to be included, I am quite prepared to make well-docu­mented recommendations just as other historians would be.³

Clearly the probability that one will learn a computer language depends on the applica­tions involved and the amount of training time available. And it would seem most hu­manists have simply thrown up their hands at the prospect, recognizing that by definition the creative mind is hostile to highly structured thinking. However, the actions of the College Board and ETS have made it highly unlikely that during the course of their edu­cation, potential programmers will enjoy anything but minimal exposure to the liberal arts. As a result, the discipline of history is very unlikely to enjoy the benefit of their skills in the creation of a new computer­ supported curriculum.

My own hope is that a growing number of historians will follow the example of their colleagues at Stanford, and eschew the im­pulse to sit on their hands and wait for the trained computer programmers to come to them. Writing in Byte magazine, two archae­ologists, Ned and Lou Heite, have spelled out the essence of the problem: “Unfortunately, most subdisciplines in the humanities and social sciences are too small to support com­mercial development of the specialized, user­ friendly microcomputer software that is needed immediately.”⁴

The answer seems clear to the historian, using computers ought to mean learning a new language, for in acquiring such skills one has the greatest opportunity to make an original contribution to the development of new techniques for research, and sorely needed educational software. There is no question that using a computer application program implies a need for the user to learn about the tools, which can prove a singular advantage if and when you mess up. And the language of choice by no means has to be as formidable as a FORTRAN, COBOL, or PASCAL.

In 1964 professors John G.  Kemeny (whose name subsequently became a house­hold word when he chaired the federal inves­tigative committee that examined the disaster at Three Mile Island) and Thomas Kurtz of Dartmouth invented a computer language called BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Sym­bolic Instruction Code) that made program­ming much, much easier for nontechnical people. BASIC makes it possible to begin a program without any specific plan or order, and is one of the most creative tools available to our students and ourselves. Programming in BASIC, the nonquantitative historian can undertake a great number of sophisticated tasks with reasonable confidence that he/she can achieve them with a considerable degree of sophistication. But the possibilities are even more promising than that.

In the last two years, the development of the personal computer as a multifaceted tool for the structure of information needed by business executives and management has produced unforeseen benefits for historians. In producing so-called “Decision Support Systems,” software for use particularly on the IBM Personal Computer, a phalanx of highly trained computer programmers have provid­ed the very sort of thing humanists haven’t even been able to conceive. Flexible and generally affordable software packages per­mit the gathering, analyzing, modeling (“what-if”), and presenting (graph/table) of data in a manner that will gladden the heart of even the most creative intellect.

Word processing in particular has sudden­ly been brought up to the level of academic standards, resulting in greater clarity and order in written communications. And if one takes care to choose both software and hard­ware on the basis of what will do the job and also be easy to use, the results can make it well worth spending one’s personal savings—for example, touch typists will find the key­board of the Eagle Personal Computer vastly superior to that of the IBM PC. Having such an instrument at his or her disposal gives the historian a single tool with which to accom­plish the three most important elements of his vocation: research, writing, and teaching.

The message sent us from the business world is simple. Although the technological improvements are being brought to market at an alarming rate, don’t wait for cheaper and better! When we decide not to purchase a crackpot or a microwave in the expectation of improved quality or lower price, we still have alternative ways of preparing our meals. But if we defer the purchase of a personal computer, we sacrifice not only the opportunity to perform many tasks in a far more efficient manner, but also the benefit of self-education in the meantime.

The second part of this article will present a more in-depth, albeit nontech­nical, introduction to the selection and use of microcomputers, peripheral equipment, and software. The reasons why one should choose the software before the hardware will be explored, and specific IBM PC compatible programs that historians are likely to find of interest will be discussed. The categories of applications software included will be word processing, proofreading, grammar checking and thesaurus programs, calculation spreadsheets and data base management sys­tems. The salient characteristics of operating systems, utility programs, assemblers, com­pilers, and language interpreters will be con­sidered, as well as some alternative approach­es to CAI (computer-assisted instruction). Hardware decisions are usually the most ex­pensive to make, and the basic considerations when purchasing a microprocessor, data storage subsystem, communications equip­ment, printer and other peripherals will be explored. Nor will the questions of how to pick a vendor or whether to choose a dedicated word processor over a micro be neglected.

The third part will conclude with a discus­sion of computer applications, how historians can apply themselves to computers and vice versa. Various ways in which the humanist can employ a computer in his or her re­search, the use of information data bases, and classroom applications, including simu­lations, testing, advising, and grade keeping will be examined. Periodical literature of interest will be noted when appropriate.

The purpose of this series on computers and the historian is to inform members of the profession about a topic that no longer can be ignored with impunity. It has been said that knowledge is power; the power brokers of today already have their fingers on the keytops of the computer.

 

Notes

1. Quoted in Katherine Hinds, “The Computer and Education at Brown: Symbols of a Changing Time,” Brown Alumni Monthly, Vol. 84, No. 1 (September 1983), p. 29. [↩]
2. Ibid., p. 44. [↩]
3. Don Karl Rowney, “The Historian and the Mi­crocomputer: A Student of the Past Meets the Machine of the Future,” Byte, Vol. 7, No. 7 (July 1982), pp. 176, 170. [↩]
4. Ned and Lou Heite, “Breaking the Jargon Barri­er: Designing Programs for Humanists,” Byte, Vol. 7, No. 7 (July 1982), p. 104. [↩]