Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 02/83 - checked

February 1983

The two children were squabbling again, arguing over whose turn it was next. Their mother, initially indulgent, now frowned at the sight of her children starting once again to fight over something that she secretly thought was a waste of money.

'Somehow', she said wearily, and not a little worried, 'it seems to stop them thinking.'

What could this something possibly be? What was the IT that could stop young, developing minds from automatically exercising a normally limitless supply of imagination? From an outsider's point of view it might easily be construed as an IT or something we could well do without. If it makes children fight and argue, if it stops them thinking, then maybe we should find other things for children to do, or play with.

The 'thing', of course, was a home computer, one of the new breed of machines (and not so new according to some manufacturers) that are specifically designed for use by everybody at home for fun, education, hobbies and the like. For well under £100 you too can join in on the brave new world and teach your children to become TJs.

Now, at this juncture I can hear a million voices raised in horror at the mere hint of a suggestion that, just possibly, home computers might be the thin edge of a wedge that could make future generations little more than automatons. Yes, I agree that it is an overly hard judgement to make of a whole industry when it has hardly started.

Yet already the signs are there that as much, if not more, damage will be done as there is good achieved. What is more, good can usually be seen at once, while damage often shows through only after it has been done.

This is not, I hope, going to be a diatribe - but there are one or two things about the home computer, and the home computer industry, that worry me. I have said before in these pages that I am not one of the greatest 'techno-freaks' around. I can argue along with those that want to talk 8-bit versus 16-bit architectures, even know more than them sometimes, but at the end of the day I have always ended up asking myself - when confronted with the fact that a brand new company has just introduced a brand new 64-bit, 1.5 megabyte computer the size of a small paperback book at a price of £17.54 - why should I want one anyway? The answer prejudices all further thoughts on the subject.

This is the source of my concern with the home computer industry: will it actually last?

Now stop laughing, for there is some evidence to indicate the possibility that it might not. There are also some historical precedents. There have been several consumer 'boom' products in the past, and many of those that really boomed in a big way ended their lives tucked into the corners of cupboards, forgotten. It would be sad to think of the home computer as the next hula-hoop.

People in the industry, not unnaturally, feel confident the business will go on forever. After all, Sinclair sells ZX81s by the hundredweight. Texas Instruments, which claims to have started the business with the TI99/4, was pitching at an installed base in the USA of 500,000 units by Christmas. TI also claims to be outselling Commodore with its VIC-20, which makes for interesting mathematics because Commodore claims to have sold a million of them.

But all this feverish activity can be the precursor to either more feverish activity, or nothing. It could be the latter unless the products (and more specifically the software) improve. It is still an industry that is being `bought-from', rather than one that is 'selling-to'. I saw this myself in a high street shop recently. A couple were interested in a home computer. The salesgirl smiled blandly, offered them no real help and tried to work out what her commission might be on the sale. Along comes another punter, who said, 'I wouldn't buy that, the software is no good.'

'Thank you,' said the couple and walked off. The salesgirl smiled blandly and kissed her commission good-bye.

Once the people who want to buy a home computer run out, will the industry be able to attract the others? And if so, what will they use to attract them? I hope to God it isn't just games.

Now I'll come clean and say that I don't really like video/computer games. I always end up thinking 'so what?' after playing them. ( People who say that this is because I always lose may have a small point.) I always feel that there must be much more that can be done with all this technology than pretend to fire pretend rockets at pretend invaders from pretend space.

The capability of the games that are now available go well beyond the scope of Space Invaders, of course, and they will get to be even more complex. But once again I end up asking myself why? why bother? what does winning or losing actually achieve? and couldn't all that power be put to much better use?

It is here that the subject of software and its development has such a big part to play in the future well-being of the home computer industry and, perhaps more importantly, the people who use its products.

If the industry is to survive, it must have products that have a long-term future. This specifically means software, for the capabilities of the technology used make hardware essentially irrelevant - you can design what is needed. A long term future means software products that hold the ....interest of their users, or are of some tangible benefit to them. These can be in such areas as hobbies, or education or, even though it hasn't caught on yet, the whole area of home management.

Early research has already started to show that the typical usage pattern for a game program is almost constant use in the early days after purchase. This can last as much as a week. The amount of usage then starts to tail off until, after maybe a month, the game is consigned to a cupboard and forgotten. This can partly be explained by the fact that the majority of games programs are tolerably banal. Many are based upon restricted numbers of possible actions and reactions that, once learned, allow the player to win with ease. From this point on, interest soon wanes.

But as the capabilities of the hardware continue to improve, allowing the programs to become more complex and interactive, so these programs will take on a new and potentially dangerous role. Though computing power can be used for a wide range of purposes, there is a chance that it could be used to create games programs of immense power and complexity, allowing the player ever-greater interaction and 'control' over what appears to be happening.

What we are seeing now could be the actual, definable start-point of all those science-fiction books that have as their central theme the proposition that the whole population lives its entire life in cells, never doing anything, only playing games of fantasy that are intended to numb the brain.

We all say that such a thing will never happen in reality, but our forebears also laughed at Jules Verne. The potential for such systems to be constructed is most certainly there, and the games programs are coming. There is already one in the USA I have heard of (though not seen) called 'Millionaire'. This is, I understand, a game of fantasy which allows the player to act out in a small way the role of a millionaire. Like a cross between Visicalc and Monopoly in real time, property, things and people are bought and sold while the player tries to accumulate extra wealth.

Such games are, I feel, inherently dangerous. The greater the degree of 'real' fantasy that is possible, the greater will be the detachment of people from what is real. Now, there are many that would argue that being detached from reality is no bad thing. After all, the state reality is in at the moment there ain't too much to write home about. But unlike the case where, if there is a big enough consensus of opinion on a subject then by definition a Truth has been arrived at, detaching from reality to live inside the mind of a computer-driven game of fantasy will not change reality. Space Invaders do not eradicate bodily functions.

To live in such a way - by the machine as it were - is to become the machine. As the mother at the beginning of this piece put it, 'My children are not communicating with each other when playing with the computer, except to fight. They do not look at each other, yet the machine doesn't care who is playing, it could be anyone. Somehow, personality becomes irrelevant.'

Such fears as these concern events that are well out into the future, and pre-suppose that the home computer industry will survive. There are many reasons to suppose it will, however, and evidence to suggest that embryonic versions of such games are already with us. I would like to think that other people are aware of the potential - both for good and bad.

end