Computers: Where the Joys Are

Last Month, we took a look at what personal computers are. This month, we'll explore what they can—and cannot—do.

To ease our exploration, let's divide the use of personal computers into two categories: home and business. This follows the generally accepted cliché that we spend one third of our lives at home, one third of our lives at the office and one third of our lives in bed.

We'll skip the bed third. Computers are worthless there. What's worth while in bed is covered (complete with photographs, diagrams, graphic prose and Oriental woodcuts) in other parts of Playboy.

In the remaining two thirds of life, personal computers are decidedly more useful in business than in the home.

Never one to avoid the obvious, I'd like to state that computers compute. Computing is adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, watching over numbers the way a shepherd watches over sheep.

The question is, How many numbers in the average home need shepherding? Not many. Certainly not as many as in the average office. (Computers reduce everything to numbers. Binary numbers, to be sure, but still numbers. Words, people, parts—everything gets a number, then the computer manipulates the numbers.) There may be as much going on in a four-person home as there is in a four-person office—if not more—but the office has more of the repetitive, predictable, easily reduced-to-numbers activities that computers adore.

Balancing a personal checkbook on a personal computer, for example, is a waste of time. You can add a deposit or subtract a withdrawal by hand (with the help of a pocket calculator, if you're like me) and have the entire process completed before you can get the proper disk into the computer and turn it on.

In addition, pocket calculators cost five dollars. Checkbook programs for personal computers cost $30. A record of your checks kept in your checkbook is portable. Records kept in your computer are not. Your checkbook will accept anything for a date: 11/5, Nov. 5, the 5th, the first Saturday in November, one week later—whatever you find helpful. Computer programs require a specific format, such as MM-DD-YY (computer talk for month-month, date-date, year-year).

The same is true for many of the highly advertised uses of computers around the home. You can file recipes better with a 99-cent card file and 3" x 5" cards than you can on a $3000 computer. Addresses are better managed in a little black book than on a little black disk. A three-dollar appointment calendar is far more practical for one's personal life than the most elaborate scheduling program. And all that talk about putting the household budget on a computer: Do you know anyone who even has a household budget?

There is no point in putting information into a computer unless you plan to manipulate that information elaborately and frequently. Businesses tend to do that with names, numbers, addresses and words. Households do not.

Eventually, however, personal computers will find a way into almost every home. In ten or 20 years, they will be as invaluable as telephones. Telephones were first installed as emergency devices, to summon aid. It was years before people used them to "reach out, reach out and just say hi." There wasn't a telephone in the Oval Office until Herbert Hoover.

But even today, at the dawn of its usefulness in the home, there are three good reasons for putting a personal computer in the home: (1) games, (2) kids, (3) curiosity.

Computers play games very well, from chess to backgammon to a new genre of recreational activity called, appropriately enough, computer games. They provide worthy opponents for solo play or impartial refereeing and accurate scorekeeping for paired combat.

There are mental games, strategy games, action games, even X-rated games. Computer games are marvelous recreation. Far from viewing them as a waste of time, I tend to go along with Professor Harold Hill, who once said in defense of billiards, "I consider that the hours I spend with a cue in my hand are golden. Help you cultivate horse sense and a cool head and a keen eye." The same could be said of joy sticks today.

But then, there are those who are of another opinion. As Bette Midler said, "I was invited over to a guy's house for an evening of Donkey Kong. Boy, was I disappointed to find out it was only a game." (Midler, in fact, cannot understand the computer revolution. "I got into show business," she says, "so I wouldn't have to do data processing.")

Kids love computers. Not just because of the games, either, but because they are the latest thing, the state of the art. And, as usual, this newest technological development has created a bit of a generation gap. Indoor plumbing, central heating, movies, radio, television—each had its friends and enemies on opposite ends of the age spectrum. Today, it's computers and computer games. Whatever it is that their parents can't possibly understand, kids will usually embrace.

Computers hold a fascination, too, because, for the first time, kids can make the TV do what they want it to. All their lives, they have watched television come at them. Hook a computer up to the TV and, finally, they have control. Pac-Man goes where they tell him to go. They can help Indiana Jones find the lost ark. Kids can write programs that make the TV say or do anything. While adults balk at learning programming languages, kids feel that if that's what it takes to communicate with their new friend, they'll learn them. Parents ask, "What's the point?" Kids ask, "How can I make the screen turn blue?"

Despite their legions of young followers, computers are still educational. At least, that's what every kid and every computer company would like every parent to believe. In truth, computers are currently good only at teaching things by rote—spelling, multiplication tables, and the like—expensive electronic versions of the old flash cards. That will change as computer memories increase and more programs are written.

Of course, you don't need children to get a home computer. For those of us in the older generation (the ones, now approaching 40, who said never trust anyone over 30), it may be the love of gadgetry that will get us to buy one.

For others, it's (continued on page 176) Where the Joys are (continued from page 107) simply curiosity: What are those television/typewriters, anyway? As those late-night public-service announcements about foreign-exchange students say, there's no better way to find out than to invite one into your home. A few hundred dollars invested in an inexpensive home computer, and a few evenings of fiddling with it, will provide you with enough information to become a first citizen of the computer age.

You will never, by the way, need to learn how to program a computer in order to operate one. Writing computer programs is a creative act and an exciting one for many; but then, so is making a movie. Most of us buy tickets and watch other people's movies, and most of us will buy software and run other people's programs. I can't program my computer to do anything practical, but I can buy programs that make it do practical things, and that's good enough for me.

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I think computers, for most homes, are the food processors of the Eighties. For gourmet cooks, food processors are marvelous. For the rest of us, they can't even make a decent milk shake. The number of food processors in suburban kitchens collecting suburban dust will be surpassed sometime in 1984 by that of personal computers stuffing overstuffed closets.

However dim my view of computers in the home, I am optimistic about personal computers' finding a home in business—all businesses, large and small.

In the United States, large computers do the work each day of three trillion clerical workers. Naturally, the large computers do that work for the large companies that can afford them. Small computers offer the same edge to small businesses.

But big businesses have not taken that equalizing of competition lying down; oh, no. They are buying personal computers for their managers and middle managers and secretaries and janitors and anyone else they think may be able to use some increased efficiency. In big business, those are now known as personnel computers.

A bit of history: One hundred years ago, the population of the United States was growing so fast that the 1880 census took eight years to process. It was estimated that the 1890 census would take 12 years. At that rate, we would know by 1985 what the population had been in 1930. A better way of counting people had to be found, and it was: the 1890 census machine.

It was the brain child of John Shaw Billings and Herman Hollerith. Hollerith distributed to the census takers dollar-bill holders and preprinted punch cards. (The dollar-bill holder had already been invented; hence, the size and the shape of computer punch cards for generations to come was determined by the dimensions of the 1890 dollar bill. There's an irony in there somewhere.)

The census taker would put a punch card into the holder, punch holes in the appropriate locations while conducting the census and send the completed cards to Washington. There they were fed into a machine that read the holes and tabulated the results. The 1890 census took only three years, and Hollerith was a hero.

To market his invention (now called The Tabulating Machine), he turned to big business. The consumer public was, after all, having enough trouble accepting such recent inventions as the light bulb, the phonograph, the automobile, the telephone and indoor plumbing. Hollerith joined a company that eventually called itself International Business Machines.

In 1939, IBM joined with Harvard and created the first electromechanical computer, the Mark I. It was the size of a 7-Eleven and had 530 miles of wire and 765,299 parts, including 3304 relays. This behemoth could add, subtract, multiply, divide and, most important, prepare mathematical tables for the forthcoming World War.

By the mid-Fifties, there were Univacs and IBMs all over the big-business landscape. Digital came along with its cheaper computers (a mere $120,000 per) in 1960, and while most of America was deciding whether or not to invest $500 in a color TV, thousands of businesses were buying computers.

The late Seventies started a new chapter in computer history: the personal computer. Some small-business people started using personal computers for accounting or word processing or cost projection. The big computer companies weren't interested in such small fish, but Radio Shack and Apple and a few others started making a lot of money, and the big computer companies had a change of heart. IBM introduced a small computer and the other big computer companies said, but of course we have one, too. And so personal computers were firmly established in business, and they all lived happily ever after. End of story.

What is it about personal computers that makes them so irresistible to businesses, both large and small? Well, they're cheap, for one thing. Sure, $2000, $3000, $4000, $5000 is expensive for you and me, but for a business it's not much, especially when you consider what that business gets for its money.

In these days of increasing labor costs and decreasing labor skills, personal computers have become the Mighty Mouse of business ("Here I come to save the day..."). Computers do their work reliably, uncomplainingly, 24 hours a day, if necessary, with no vacations, sick leaves, unions, salary or coffee breaks.

Besides, computers are best at the kind of work human beings hate: mechanical, repetitive manipulation of words and numbers. A personal computer can sort a mailing list of 10,000 into Zip Code order in about ten minutes. Can you imagine how long that would take a human? And how painfully dull the process would be?

But the computer doesn't care. You can tell it to re-sort the list in alphabetical order by last name, and ten minutes later, a new list of 10,000 alphabetized names is ready. Want the name of a person who lives on Elizabeth Court? Ask it to find Elizabeth Court and it will—within minutes. (Given a mailing list of 10,000, that's roughly equivalent to examining every article in this magazine looking for a single word.)

Those are extreme examples, showing how a single personal computer can eliminate hours, if not days, of tedious work. Not everything the computer does telescopes two days into ten minutes. But if a personal computer only doubled the efficiency of the person using it, it would pay for itself in six months (and that's including two months of training and transition time).

Let's look at some of the things personal computers do well in business.

Word processing. When I sent around my manuscript for The Word Processing Book two years ago, the New York publishers asked, "What's word processing?" Today, even people who claim to know nothing about computers know that word processing is using a computer to write with.

I can't spell and I'm a terrible typist, so when I heard about a marvelous machine that would correct my spelling and never again make me retype anything, I knew I had to have one. That was my introduction to personal computers.

Four years later, I can't imagine writing, or running a business, without one. Letters, articles and reports can be revised and retyped (reprinted, actually) in a matter of minutes, not hours. Personally "typed" form letters can be churned out at the rate of one per minute. Labels for our hypothetical 10,000-person mailing list can be printed in less than a day. Over and over, time is saved and tedium reduced.

Word processing, in fact, goes on in the human mind. The various tools of word processing—pens, pencils, typewriters—are simply there to remind one of what has already been processed. A personal computer outfitted with a word-processing program is the best tool to date for assisting the word-processing mind.

To demonstrate, let's turn to The Word Processing Book and take the work of that beloved poet Isadora Goose, known affectionately to all as Mother. Let's suppose that the well-known journal of poetics Humpty Dumpty has asked us to update a few of Mrs. Goose's better known poems. We will do it very much as Isadora herself might if she were alive today with a word processor at her peck and call. Let's take the classic Little Miss Muffet.

Little Miss MuffetSat on her tuffet,Eating her curds and whey.Along came a spiderAnd sat down beside herAnd frightened Miss Muffet away.

Now, we know we'll have to keep the basic structure of the piece, maintaining the natural rhythm and as many rhymes as possible. Our job is to update, not rewrite.

The first word that stands out is tuffet. A tuffet, in this context, might be either a mound of grass or a stool. Mother's meaning is not certain here. She states that Miss Muffet owned the tuffet when she says "sat on her tuffet." However, the word little seems to imply that Miss Muffet may be too young to be a landowner; hence, tuffet may refer to a stool, or a seat. Nonetheless, spiders are more commonly found out of doors on grassy tuffets. It is a puzzlement, and great books have been written on this very subject by men and women far more learned than I.

The point is that you don't hear the word tuffet used very much in either context anymore. Real-estate salespersons do not extol the beauty of a garden "with flower beds, beautiful shrubbery and several very nice tuffets." And advertisements do not appear saying, "Dining-room set complete with break front, table and six tuffets." No, tuffet will have to go.

But what to replace it with? I like the idea that Ma Goose meant tuffet to mean stool. Too many poems have been written outside, going on and on about the beauty of the out of doors. We need more poems about the beauty of the in of doors. The two-syllable word nearest to stool, remembering that we must keep the Goose's meter, is barstool. Everyone knows what a barstool is—even the readers of Humpty Dumpty.

With the press of a few buttons on our word processor, we find that the first two lines have become:

Little Miss MuffetSat on her barstool, ...

The Muffet part must go. It no longer rhymes. The Miss will, of course, become Ms. In that light, little seems a bit sexist, too. The entire first line needs an overhaul.

What's a contemporary rhyme for barstool? Why, of course, car pool. Wonderful. Teach the kids the importance of conservation from grade one. Miss Muffet is now Ms. Car Pool. We've lost an alliteration, though: the two Ms in Miss Muffet. And what about little? What adjective describes this truly contemporary Ms. Car Pool and begins with an M? Why, of course, modern.

Modern Ms. Car PoolSat on her barstool,Eating her curds and whey....

Curds and whey are the solid and the liquid parts of milk when it curdles. It was very popular back when people sat around on tuffets. It has since lost its popularity. It is very doubtful that our modern Ms. Car Pool would be sitting at a bar eating curdled milk. A banana daiquiri, maybe; curdled milk, no. We are, however, writing for a children's magazine, so we can't make this too contemporary. She'll have to be eating some healthy dairy product.

Further, whatever she's eating will have to rhyme with whey, because we want to keep as many of the original rhymes as possible, and we've already departed from that in the first two lines. Muffet does not rhyme with car pool, no matter how far we stretch it.

What rhymes with whey and is a healthy dairy product? Simple: Yoplait, the brand name for a kind of yogurt. Yoplait yogurt, unfortunately, does not rhyme with curds and whey. We must invoke our poetic license and switch Yoplait and yogurt around, very easy to do on a word processor.

Modern Ms. Car PoolSat on her barstool,Eating her yogurt Yoplait.Along came a spiderAnd sat down beside her....

The stuff about the spider is OK. I mean, it's traditional. Besides, spider and beside her make a great rhyme. Then we come to the last line: "And frightened Miss Muffet away."

The obvious thing to do is to change Miss Muffet to Ms. Car Pool and collect one's box of crayons. But, no: There is something very wrong with that line. In the first place, would "modern" Ms. Car Pool really be frightened away by a spider? I doubt it. She might not appreciate his company as much as, say, John Travolta's, but to be frightened away? We could end the poem with, "Said she, 'Would you please go away?' " making Ms. Car Pool the graduate of an assertiveness-training group, but that, too, skirts the real issue.

Yes, the disparity is a deeper one. It goes to the very core of one of our primary cultural taboos: unjustified prejudice against spiders. Justified prejudice I can understand. People are prejudiced against mosquitoes. Who can blame them? But where is the justification for the prejudice against spiders? A few black widows may kill a few Sierra Club members every year, but so what? Cars kill 50,000 people each year and we love cars. No, the prejudice against spiders is unjustified.

Beyond that, spiders actually do good. They eat mosquitoes and flies and all those other creepy-crawly things that we have justifiable prejudices against. It's time we changed, and change must come through education, and education begins at bedtime, with nursery rhymes. Let's make the spider an ordinary sort of guy!

So here we have our scenario: Ms. Car Pool is sitting at a bar, eating yogurt. A spider comes along and sits down next to her; since he's a regular, normal person, what does he do? Why, he orders something to eat, just like Ms. Car Pool.

But what would a spider order? "I'll have a Yoplait mosquito yogurt, please." No: Spiders don't eat yogurt. People eat yogurt. No point in making this a Walt Disney movie. Spiders eat bugs. But going into a bar and ordering a plate of bugs is rather unappetizing, so how do we add a little class to the situation and, being locked into a rhyme pattern, rhyme his order with Yoplait?

Let's make this a gourmet spider. That means he will have to order bugs prepared in some French-sounding way, such as sauté or flambé. Eating bugs is a bit weird, so we'll modify that just a bit, too. We add this last line to our Mother Goose computerized update and, voila!

Modern Ms. Car PoolSal on her barstool,Eating her yogurt Yoplait.Along came a spiderAnd sat down beside herAnd ordered an insect soufflé.

There are 26 words in the original poem. By changing only 11 of them—fewer than half—we transformed the entire poem into something quite different. Fifteen words remained the same. With a word processor, there was no need to retype even one of them.

Let's continue with other uses for the personal computer in business.

Accounting. Accounts payable, accounts receivable, invoicing, payroll, general ledger, inventory control—all those things that are handled by the data-processing departments of large companies—can now be moved from piles of books to piles of disks in small companies.

Computers love playing with numbers. Your bookkeeper may not, at first, enjoy becoming a computer keeper, but once he or she writes the first invoice with only 12 key strokes and marvels as the information is automatically posted to accounts receivable or general ledger and the invoiced items are simultaneously removed from inventory, resistance will melt.

Cost projection. On a computer, this is known as electronic spread-sheeting or electronic work-sheeting. It's putting information in rows and columns and then playing the game What if? What if the cost of goods goes up five percent; how much will we have to raise the retail price? What if the cost of goods goes up five percent but sales go up seven percent? What if we charged $1.95; how many widgets would we have to sell before showing a profit?

Those questions once took spread sheeters hours to answer with paper and hand-held calculator. A personal computer answers them in seconds. Electronic spread-sheeting allows one to be creative with numbers. You can play What if? for an hour and consider more options than can be considered otherwise in a week.

Data banks. Data banks are like money banks, except that they hold data instead of money. You contact a data bank using a personal computer, a modem and a telephone. You can get up-to-the-minute stock-market quotations, financial histories of any traded stock, read A.P. and U.P.I. stories before Dan Rather does, make travel arrangements, do research, etc. The three most popular data banks are Dow Jones News/Retrieval, CompuServe and The Source.

Electronic mail. Electronic mail allows information to be sent across the country in seven seconds, not seven days. ("And on the seventh day, the postmaster said, 'It will do,' and he rested.") Letters, memos, reports, charts—anything that can be displayed on a video screen—can be sent to any other connected computer (again, through modems and phone lines) almost instantly.

That costs a bit more than a first-class letter but far less than Federal Express. Many computers and modems have auto-send and auto-receive capabilities. A letter can be sent and received at three A.M., when phone rates are cheap and when the computer is not likely to be in use. No one needs to be at either end; the computers will take care of it all. An average letter takes only a few seconds to transmit, and the information is stored on a disk.

Electronic mail can not only speed communication around the country, it can also speed communication around the office. Memos, letters, reports, etc., can be sent directly to the "In basket" of one's personal computer. Their headings can be checked from time to time: Urgent Message or Indecent Proposition may get faster attention than 14th revision of farm report.

Another version of electronic mail is teleconferencing, which allows computers in various parts of the world to be connected for a conference. It can happen in "real" time—that is, everyone can be on line at the same time—or it can happen over a longer period, with the conference participants checking in occasionally, reading what's been said, making comments and checking out.

Graphs. Some companies have entire art departments that do nothing but prepare bar graphs and pie charts. Computers can make them in minutes, not hours, and in color, if necessary.

That gives the small business its own art department. And while the large business will no doubt retain its art department to produce bars and pies for corporate reports, the daily flow of graphs from screen to screen and (when printed) from hand to hand should increase dramatically in board rooms across this great land of ours. (Someone may even do a bar graph charting the increase.)

Vertical markets. Although Playboy prefers dealing with horizontal markets, let's briefly discuss vertical ones.

Vertical markets refers to the specialized uses of computers for different professions. The banker can amortize mortgages on his computer. The doctor can schedule patients and fill out insurance forms. The lawyer can bill clients and do legal research. The minister can write sermons and mind the flock.

The number of programs available for professionals is vast and is getting vaster every day. Whatever your profession—from the oldest to the youngest—the chances are that someone has written a program just for you.

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If any of this has whetted your appetite, don't run out and buy a computer—at least, not yet. Next month, we complete our three-part extravaganza on computers with a buying guide. Yes, in the tradition of the Sixties, I'm going to get down, name names and tell it like it is.

We'll explore not only the best computer to buy but also how to buy it. Which are the best values and which are the worst? How can you get discounts? Is mail order worth while? How much should you spend and how low can you go?

All that in next month's Gala Christmas Issue of Playboy. (It may even have pictures of naked ladies draped across the most sexy computers. I can't wait.)

If you have any questions between now and then, may I direct you to four marvelous books on computers, all of them written, of course, by me. For general information about personal computers, I recommend The Personal Computer Book. (Catchy title, huh?) For information on personal computers in business, there's The Personal Computer in Business Book. If you're interested in word processing, there's (you guessed it) The Word Processing Book and its sequel, Questions & Answers on Word Processing.

Well, I've gotten in my plug and I've plugged Playboy Gala Christmas Issue and I've told you what personal computers do well and don't do well (yet), so I guess I'm through. See you next month.

"You will never need to learn how to program a computer in order to operate one."