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Even now, if you can pin down your topic by name, you can pay next to nothing to use electronic data banks and similar services on occasion. You needn’t even cough up a fat subscription fee. Through MCI Mail—$18-a-year basic charge—you can use the Dow Jones News/Retrieval Service. It’s one way to watch companies of interest. Regularly, during the writing of this book, I would ask Dow what Kaypro was up to. I merely typed “.KPRO” and a carriage return, and the computer spewed out the latest Kaypro news; even at 300 baud the bulletins took less than a minute or so to reach me. My cost? Maybe forty cents a shot. Just before Ballantine wanted the final version of this manuscript, I learned of stockholders suits against the Kaypro—facts that I might not have known in time without the Dow Jones wire.
My experience illustrates the speed with which the information services can update their indexes and articles.
The New York Times index at your local library, for instance, may be weeks out of date. Without a computerized search you’d better either read “All the News That’s Fit to Print” every day or be willing to flip through perhaps a month’s worth of papers.
You can even read condensed articles daily from major papers on line—long before they thud against your door, which they may never do if they’re in cities a continent away. CompuServe offers the Washington Post, for instance, among others, plus the Associated Press, the major American wire service. The Source flashes bulletins from United Press International. And there are electronic editions of specialized publications like the U.S. News Washington Letter.
“Buy stocks now,” the Letter’s first electronic edition said presciently in 1982.
“The very next day, August 17,” gloated a news release from The Source, “the stock market went through the roof.”
Not surprisingly, big newspaper and magazine companies are tinkering with electronic information services. Often, rather than home computers, the services use Teletext (using cable television lines or broadcast TV) or Videotex (phone lines).
Of course lines may fuzz between technologies. Television-based systems are growing cheaper; and someday your portable TV may have a built-in computer, a socket for a keyboard, and a flat, high-resolution screen fit for word processing and electronic mail. Call it a Vu-Write. Make it a first-class color television. But also a computer suited for clerks and professionals alike. Give it a memory system less quirky than floppy disks. Develop idiot-proof software selected by simple switches. Mass-produce a Selectric-style keyboard, detachable, or, eventually, a good voice recognizer. Throw in artificial speech, too, once it’s perfected, and include a built-in, high-speed modem or the equivalent. Sell the Vu-Write for $200 at the local Sears. Or perhaps to companies who can recruit clerical telecommuters by in effect offering free TVs.
Somewhere in Silicon Valley, a savvy company may be at work on a Vu-Write now; and if it succeeds, maybe mass telecommuting will be with us sooner than anyone thought.