2

By David Rothman

image “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Arthur C. Clarke wrote some 46 years ago in Profiles of the Future. I really believe that’s how he felt about WordStar, just as did I during the 1980s. WordStar was perfection. The format, I believed, would last and last. It didn’t, at least at the mass level; and to this day I’m suspicious of the long-term durability of commercial formats, whether the word-processing or e-book variety.

Early Wednesday, Sri Lanka time, Sir Arthur died at age 90; and his Wikipedia entry already tells of his death—the bits and bytes of news having passed through communications satellites of the kind he foresaw. How do I remember him? Well, it turns out that I was a footnote, or maybe a footnote of a footnote, in ACC’s collaboration with director Peter Hyams during the script-writing of 2010, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Kaypro connection

image Clarke needed a computer-modem combo for a trans-Pacific computer hookup with Hyams back in Studio City, and I cajoled Kaypro into sending him a Kaypro II with CP/M and, yes, WordStar. Along the way, I interviewed him through a 300-baud connection between Alexandria, VA, and Sri Lanka, and you can read the results here, in a chapter excerpted from my book The Silicon Jungle, called “As the Jungle Thickens,” a collection of predictions. Both his and mine were mixed in accuracy. I dwelled among other things on the decline of America as a manufacturing nation; and for now, alas, I’m right, although China, not Japan, is where the jobs have gone. Yes, the chapter included an e-book-related passage, and here is what I wrote about a bookstore owner:

“James Watt, the descendant of the Scottish inventor…figured to an extent in Clarke’s work, in the sense that the Haunted Book Shop sold it. ‘A computer disk the size of a phonograph record can hold about 54,000 frames of pictures,’ Watt observed in his questions, ‘enough for a large encyclopedia. Does that mean we’ll see the end of going into a bookstore and buying a bestseller? Are we going to lose the printed word as we know it today? Will “book” buying become a computerized activity? Will I call up XYZ computer firm and then peruse disks at my leisure?’

“‘Nothing will ever replace books,’ Clarke reassured him. ‘They can’t be matched for convenience, random access, nonvolatile memory (unless dropped in the bath), low power consumption, portability, etc.

“But information networks will supplement them and replace whole categories, e.g., encyclopedias and telephone directories (as is being planned in France).”

Ah—Wikipedia!

“Clarke,” I went on, “was more sanguine about Watts’s fear that computerized shopping might ‘dehumanize us’ and clerks might vanish. He said, ‘I believe personal service will become more and more important and hopefully more and more available as older occupations disappear. We’ll “window-shop” through home terminals but will still discuss important products with salesmen, even if they’re hundreds of kilometers away!’”

So, in this Amazon era, what’s happened to James Watt and his Haunted Book Shop. It’s apparently still in business in Annapolis, Maryland, and I hope that James is alive and prospering. Meanwhile you can also find The Haunted Bookshop, the Christopher Morley novel, on the Internet, not just in stores. Download it at no cost from Project Gutenberg and Manybooks.net if you’d prefer E, but if you live in Annapolis, think of James for other titles. 

Meanwhile I suspect that Sir Arthur, despite his skepticism about e-books, most likely would have been pleased. He had, after all, written in 1968 about text-capable computers.

RIP, ACC.

 
2