Fear of Interfacing

if you're of the millions who are baffled by all this computer staff, have we got good news for you

Its All Going too fast. Eight years ago, personal computers didn't exist. Two years ago, there was little or no public awareness of them. And then, suddenly, in the past year, boom! Computer books, computer articles, computer records, computer shows, computer classes, computer ads and, inevitably, computer cocktail-party conversation. Never have so many written so much about so little.

One writer I've read says that personal computers are the most important invention since the discovery of fire. Another writer disagrees: Personal computers are the most significant event, evolutionarily speaking, since man fell out of the trees. I have yet to read that personal computers are the most important step since our ancestors crawled onto dry land or since one-celled animals learned to divide, but I'm sure that's just because I'm behind in my reading.

Personal computers, I find, are the most important thing to happen to humanity since television. Small computers today are where television sets were in 1948, where automobiles were in 1905 and where telephones were in 1880. Available; invaluable to some, of limited use to most; adored by the younger generation, feared by the older; and, undeniably, the wave of the future.

But the wave of information being disseminated about computers is no gently lapping one; it's a tidal wave, producing as much misinformation and misunderstanding as it does information and understanding.

People use computer terms they aren't quite sure about and are never corrected because the people they're talking to aren't quite sure about them, either. After repeating misinformation a few times, one tends to accept it as truth.

All this takes me back to the early Sixties, when my friends and I were struggling to learn about what were then called The Facts of Life. There wasn't much--to use a computer term--hands-on experience available to the average 14-year-old, so we read a lot.

A few of us found circa-1940 marriage-and-family manuals that our parents had used and forgotten long ago. There were no photographs, and trying to learn about sex from the anatomical drawings was like trying to learn how to operate a stereo from a schematic diagram.

There was, of course, Playboy, but we were too young to buy it. We carefully searched alleys for discarded back issues. There were few. Millions of copies were distributed every month. What were people doing with them? (We were a naive group.) The few copies of Playboy we could find were months and sometimes years old. We were terribly afraid that something had been discovered and we had missed it.

As we were reading about sex rather than hearing about it, we often failed to get the pronunciations right. We would have deep, meaningful discussions about organisms, contraptives and lesbanians. (I was 33 before I learned that clitoris does not rhyme with Lavoris.)

How I wished that some book or article or TV show or skywriting exhibition or something would start at the beginning and take me, in plain English, through the basics of sex. (Of course, if that had happened, I don't know what my friends and I would have talked about all those years. I'm sure the intense intellectual poking and prodding had an effect upon our lives: The member of our group who discovered the difference between an organism and an orgasm became a doctor, and another became an investigative reporter.)

Playboy never did publish such a nuts-and-bolts sex manual, but it's not too late to do it for computers. By reading this and the next two issues, you'll be able to learn as much about computers as the average 12-year-old knows, and all the while, you can pretend to be looking at the pictures.

This month, we'll look at what personal computers are; next month, we'll examine what they do; and the following month, we'll tell you how to select and purchase the right one for your specific needs.

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To begin with, personal computers are just machines. The misconception that computers think--and that as they get smarter and smarter, they'll somehow take over our lives as Hal the computer took over the spaceship in 2001--has caused no little fear among the general public. The fact is, computers no more think than tape recorders talk or phonographs sing. Personal computers are simply the latest technological goody in a line of technological goodies (electric lights, telephones, phonographs, automobiles, airplanes, radios, movies, television sets, Veg-o-matics) that have, in the past 100 years, changed the face of the earth.

Let's take a look at the machine itself. In the process, I'll provide you with a crash course in conversational computerese, an idiom intricate enough to qualify as the world's 297th language. The United Nations already provides translators fluent in it to various delegations, and Berlitz is offering a basic computerese course on cassette tape. After reading this article, you'll be able to trade jargon with some of the best computer salespeople in town; and most of the time, you'll even know what the other guy is talking about.

The heart of any computer is known as the processor. A processor sorts and resorts information at a very high speed. (It's the phenomenal speed of computers that gives the illusion of thought, just as the speed with which still pictures change on a movie screen gives the illusion of motion.) This repeated sorting is known as processing. Hence, the sorting of words is word processing, the sorting of data is data processing and so on.

In the old days (the Forties), processors used vacuum tubes and filled entire rooms. Then transistors replaced tubes and a miniprocessor could fit in a single room. Then silicon chips replaced transistors and soon you could hold a microprocessor in the palm of your hand. More importantly, you could build a computer around a microprocessor that could fit on a desk, and microcomputers were born. Microprocessors are also known as C.P.U.s, for central processing units. I have yet to hear, however, of P.P.U.s, for peripheral processing units, though I'm sure some lexicographer of computerese will invent it soon.

Microprocessors are fast but simple minded. They know only two things: on and off. Like all machines, computers are good at black/white, yes/no, open/closed. They're not good at shades of gray, maybe tomorrow, a little bit open but not quite closed. (Humans, on the other hand, prefer the gradations of life, which is why many people feel uncomfortable in the presence of computers and religious fanatics.)

This makes the binary system of numbers invaluable to computers. It's a system of counting that has only two symbols, 0 and 1. (The system we're used to is the decimal system, which has ten symbols: 0 through 9.) With the symbols 0 and 1, the binary system can represent any number, though it takes up more room and is more cumbersome to work with than the decimal system. (In binary, "27" is "11011," for example.)

Because processors are so fast, their cumbersomeness is not noticed. The computer translates from decimal into binary, does its work in binary and translates the answer back into decimal so fast it seems instantaneous. (In working with a personal computer, by the way, you'll never know that this binaryness is going on.)

To process words, each character of language is simply assigned a number. To process music, the audio spectrum is divided into 50,000 slices, and the intensity of each slice is assigned a number from 0 to 65,000. This gives an accurate representation of the sound at a given moment in time. Play those moments back one after another and you have music, sort of. In this way, the computer reduces the masters of literature and music to 0 and 1.

This 0-or-1 choice is the smallest increment of computers. It's known as a bit. The more bits a processor can handle simultaneously, the more powerful the processor. Most small computers have eight-bit processors. Many have 16-bit ones. Somewhere on the personal-computer horizon is a 32-bit processor. (I'm not sure personal computers need 16-or 32-bit processors, but some old fogies at the turn of the century didn't think that cars would ever need heaters or headlights.)

A byte is eight bits, which is enough to represent a single letter, number or punctuation mark. A kilobyte is 1024 bytes. Kilobyte is abbreviated simply K. Each generation has its measurements to brag about: In the Fifties, it was horsepower; in the Sixties, micrograms; in the Seventies, inches. In the Eighties, it's Ks.

"My computer has sixty-four K."

"What's a K?"

"I don't know, but my computer has sixty-four of them."

To understand the amount of information in a K, imagine an 8 1/2"x 11" sheet of paper, typewritten, double spaced, with margins. The amount of information on such a page is two K. Kilobytes are used to measure various forms of memory on personal computers. Bits are used to measure the power of microprocessors.

While some silicon chips (silicon, by the way, is just a fancy word for glass) were designed for processing information, other chips were developed to remember what had been processed. (Microprocessors are fast, but they can't seem to remember what it was they did so fast.)

The two kinds of memory chips used in personal computers are RAM and ROM. RAM is an acronym for random-access memory, and ROM stands for read-only memory.

ROM is a chip that contains information that cannot be changed. It's like a phonograph record. The C.P.U. can play (or read) information from that chip as often as it wants. It cannot, however, record (or write) information onto that chip. (Hence, read-only memory.)

RAM is like a cassette tape. You can record information on it and play back information from it. You can erase, alter, take from or add to RAM at any time you like. You have random access to this memory.

RAM is also known as user-programmable memory. I've never seen it abbreviated U.P.M., nor have I ever heard ROM referred to as manufacturer-programmable memory (M.P.M.). The Noah Webster of computerese is obviously asleep at the dip switch. (A dip switch, in case you're wondering, is one of many switches found inside personal computers that are so small they require the point of a pencil to flip them. Why it is called a dip switch and not a microswitch, I will never know. I also do not know who put the dip in the dip da dip da switch any more than I know who put the RAM in the rama lama ding dong. My ignorance about computers is boundless.)

The amount of memory RAM can hold at any one time ranges from one kilobyte to 1000 kilobytes, and larger memories are forthcoming. As you may have guessed, 1000 kilobytes has a name: one megabyte. Most personal computers have 16K, 32K, 48K, 64K, 128K or 256K of RAM.

RAM, while more versatile than ROM, has a tragic flaw: Once electric current stops flowing through it, RAM forgets everything it ever knew. ROM, on the other hand, remembers everything, power or no power, indefinitely. This poses a problem if you want to store the processed information when it comes time to turn the computer off.

The solution? Most personal computers today use some form of magnetic medium. These generally come in the form of tapes and disks.

The tapes used in personal computers are the standard cassette tapes that the record industry is blaming all its troubles on. When a cassette recorder is connected to a computer, it will record and play back computer impulses just as it records and plays back musical impulses when attached to a stereo set. Cassette tapes, while inexpensive, are limited. The rewinding and fast-forwarding necessary to read and write information at various portions of the tape are time consuming, and the possibility of error when you're using tapes is far greater than when you're using disks. Further, cassette tapes hold less information than disks.

Disks come either floppy or hard, in sizes from three and a half to eight inches. They're circles of plastic or metal covered with the same brown garden-hoe-variety rust (iron oxide) as tapes.

Disks spin like phonograph records, though much faster. The playback and record head (called a read/write head) moves across the disk like the arm on a turntable, and it can go quickly from one spot on the disk to another.

Floppy disks are circles of flexible plastic enclosed in a square, protective cardboard covering. The entire square goes into the computer's disk drive, and the computer has access to the disk through a hole in the center of the square and an oval slit on one or both sides.

Information is recorded on floppy disks in circles known as tracks. Each track is divided into sectors. When twice as many tracks are squeezed onto one side of a disk, the disk has double density. When read/ write heads are on both sides of a disk, the disk is double sided. The combination of those two features is (logically, for once) called double-sided double density.

Floppy disks on personal computers come in three sizes: three and a half inches, five and a quarter inches and eight inches. The five-and-a-quarter-inch disk is the most popular. Each disk holds 71K to 2400K (2.4 megabytes) of information. For greater storage, greater speed or both, one usually goes to a hard disk.

A hard disk is a platter of metal on which a layer of iron oxide has been bonded. The rapid spinning of the disk (about 30 revolutions per second) creates a breeze. The read/write head floats above the disk on this breeze. Because there is no head friction and because the disk spins so quickly, hard disks store and retrieve information several times faster than floppy disks. Hard disks also hold more information. The smallest holds five megabytes (5000K) of information, and they go up from there. Naturally, they cost more than floppies.

Another type of magnetic medium used in a few personal computers is bubble memory. This incorporates the best features of both ROM and RAM: You can manipulate (continued on page 204) Fear of Interfacing (continued from page 120) the information as you please, and it is retained even after the computer has been turned off. Bubble memory has a flaw, too: At the moment, it is expensive. Like anything else, it should be cheapened by broad exposure and popular acceptance.

(The next mass-storage device will be the laser disk. A standard video laser disk, the kind that shows movies and costs $25, will hold more than one gigabyte [one billion bytes] of information. That's roughly the amount of information in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, including color photographs. The laser disk should be available within the next year or two.)

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Magnetic media aren't just for remembering what absent-minded C.P.U.s and fickle RAMs forget. Disks and tapes are also used for providing information and instructions to the computer in the form of programs. Programs tell the computer what to do, how to do it, when to do it, when not to do it and so on.

A program is to a computer what a record is to a phonograph. (Didn't you love those tests in school? "A rose is to a thorn what a ---- is to an atomic bomb.") Phonographs play records. Computers run programs.

It is programs (also known as software) that give computers their enormous appeal. All the good things you've heard about computers happen because programs tell the computer (the hardware) how to make them happen.

A computer running a word-processing program is a word-processing computer. (Word processing is the most significant advance in the manipulation of the written word since the advent of writing. I do not exaggerate. Every secretary, every student and, certainly, every professional writer will find his or her life changed--dare I say transformed?--by the simple addition of a personal computer and a word-processing program.)

The same computer, running an accounting program, becomes an accounting computer. The incredible advantages large computers have given large companies are now available to small companies through small computers. Accounts receivable, accounts payable, cost projection, inventory control--all the repetitive numerical tasks that can make or break a small company--are manageable with ease, speed and great cost effectiveness.

With a change of program, the same computer that runs a small business can help keep the wheels of big business turning, too. (Although the company may have two or three large computers, an executive can have his or her own "personal" computer to help manage all the information that managers are paid to manage. In years to come, the small computer will be as familiar a desktop item as an adding machine or a typewriter.)

Remove the business program, insert a game program and you have a game-playing computer. (Man does not live by information management alone, and computer games aren't just for kids. Chess, backgammon, blackjack; you name it, computers will play it. Beyond the traditional games, there are action and adventure games that can be played only on computers. These are remarkably seductive and may become your favorite waste of time.)

Most people buy prerecorded music and most people buy prewritten programs. Some people record their own music and some people write their own programs, but you need know nothing about programming to use and enjoy a computer. (I know as much about writing computer programs as I know about writing music, which is as close to nothing as is metaphysically possible.)

Writing computer programs (programming) is, I am told, all-consuming and occasionally delightful. (Anything some people find addictive is worth checking out.) Programming is a creative act but one in which the creator has the dubious pleasure--shared by only film makers, Henry Higgins, Dr. Frankenstein and God--of watching his creation take on a life of its own. Computer programs can be remarkably three-dimensional. They interact. Randomness can be written in. And, maybe for the first time in your life, you can get a TV set to do what you want it to. Ah, power.

The enthusiasm of that last paragraph is secondhand. I have listened to the rapture of the converted and believe it to be genuine. As with jogging or marriage or backpacking across America, though, when it comes to the joys of writing computer programs, I have, thus far, resisted temptation.

When you write programs or enter any other information into the computer, a keyboard comes in handy. This looks like an ordinary typewriter keyboard with a few extra keys. (These keys are labelled Control, Escape, Break and other words taken from the dialog of old Warner Bros, prison movies.) Some keyboards have a square with the numbers 0 through 9 in an adding-machine arrangement. This is known as a numeric keypad.

Another method of entering information is through a joy stick. Joy sticks are handheld devices that move the spaceship or the submarine or the Pac-Person about. A mouse is a small square that is moved across the top of a desk. It's used to move a pointer around in business programs. (If you want to get rid of something, you move the pointer to a picture of a garbage can and push a button.) A mouse, then, is an executive joy stick.

It is helpful, of course, to see the information as it's being processed, stored and manipulated. For this, computers use video screens. The video screens in personal computers are the same ones that have been showing I Love Lucy for the past several decades. The fancy computerese word for a video screen is C.R.T., which stands for cathode-ray tube, which is the kind of tube a TV picture tube really is.

Some computers, especially smaller home computers, use regular television sets for display. For business and for word processing, most personal computers use monitors. Letters and numbers (known as characters in computerese) are sharper and easier to read when displayed on a monitor.

Video displays can be either color or monochrome. Monochrome screens offer one color (usually white, green or amber) against a black background. Color screens, naturally, offer the full spectrum of colors. The best color screens are known as R.G.B. monitors, so named because the three primary electronic colors are red, green and blue. (For some reason, in electronics, red and green combined produce yellow. Try telling that to your eighth-grade art teacher.)

In general, color monitors are better for games and graphics, and monochrome monitors are better for the display of characters.

When it comes time to print what one has processed, computers use printers (another of the rare examples of logical labeling in computerese). Printers used with personal computers are generally of two types, dot matrix and letter quality.

Dot-matrix printers form letters and numbers using little dots, like the signs on banks that display time, temperature and current interest rates. Like those signs, dot-matrix printers communicate information effectively, though not elegantly.

For elegance, one must turn to letter-quality printers, which print one fully formed character at a time, like a typewriter. The term letter quality comes, I suppose, from the fact that it's hard to tell the difference between a letter typed on an electric typewriter and one printed on a letter-quality printer.

Dot-matrix printers cost less and print faster than their letter-quality counterparts. Letter-quality printers produce better copy. Dot-matrix printers are necessary for graphics; letter-quality printers are necessary for word processing.

(Lasers, by the way, threaten to revolutionize printing as well as mass storage. Laser printers combine the best of both dot matrix and letter quality at a speed that rivals that of offset printing. The cost, as you may have guessed, is high but should come down over the next few years.)

To communicate with other computers over telephone lines, one requires a modem. Modem (pronounced modem) stands for modulator/demodulator, which is what modems do to computer signals. Outgoing information is modulated (encoded) and incoming information is demodulated (decoded) by a little black box that plugs into your telephone line. (Not all modems are black anymore. Many black boxes in the world of personal computers are now fashionably beige.)

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So there we have it, the personal computer. But what do we have? Not much. It's not what personal computers are that's important (or even interesting, as you may have noticed). What's important is what they do.

Next month, we'll take a look at what personal computers do well and, equally important, at what they don't do well--at least not yet.

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"Some people write their own programs, but you need know nothing about programming to use a computer."