Kaypro, in fact, did provide Clarke with MODEM7-compatible software—a company program—but it wouldn’t run acceptably on Peter Hyams’s computer. So both men instead received a commercial program called MITE. There was a problem, though, as Peter and I prepared for the Great Modeming—I couldn’t be Arthur C. Clarke. My MODEM7 could talk to Peter’s MITE, but it wasn’t really the same. With MODEM7 you couldn’t leave your computer unattended and have a machine thousands of miles away call you up and choose from dozens of electronic files on your disk. With MITE you could.[[87]] And Peter, true to the perfectionism of a top director, wanted his rehearsals to be as realistic as possible. “I’d like to be Arthur Clarke,” I told a kindly software dealer, who gave me a review copy. MITE, however, locked up on my machine. On the screen it stubbornly kept saying I was receiving signals from another computer—even before I turned on the modem.

So I visited a hacker I’d heard of. He was a little technobully, who, bare chested in the August heat, worked sullenly on my software, making rude noises whenever I asked a question. MITE seemingly succumbed to his efforts. He berated me for not using the right number of data bits, the right stop bit, the right everything else in computerese. Chastened, I returned home, only to find that the program still wasn’t working reliably.

I took my Kaypro and software to a friend, a systems analyst, an intelligent, learned man fond of aphorisms like “Even kings must obey the rules of mathematics.” Unfairly, cruelly, MITE still wasn’t running after five hours of his toil. My friend played by the rules; he’d based his whole career on following instruction manuals; he was the perfect man to help run the computer system of a hospital or bank. I was just the opposite. When it came to the laws of math or computer manuals, I was willing to turn criminal. In fact, that’s how I undeservedly succeeded at last—by flouting MITE’s instructions on connecting my computer and modem.

It was the first time in years that I’d used a soldering iron. I didn’t own a vise, even, so I placed the RS-232 connectors on an aluminum pie plate on the wooden floor of my apartment and breathed lead-poisoned fumes.

The work was hot. It was also murder on my eyes, hardly the joy I recalled from amateur radio—a task fit for robots, not people. Squinting away, I hoped that beneficent[beneficent] HALs would soon multiply in the world’s factories. Then I remembered my friend Lynn Wilson, a telephone-company retiree who had soldered for decades, who loved it, and who had lost his service job to computers.

With MITE running at last—and with me as a more Clarke-like imitator—I began another series of rehearsals with Peter Hyams. The program was excellent; the instructions were bewildering in places. Peter called a MITE distributor and traded insults. It was outrageous. We were not ordinary end users. Peter was a movie director trying to communicate with a famous novelist-scientist; and I, if an obscurity, was at least around to chronicle whatever abuse Peter suffered.

What would average computer users have done? Without other MITE owners to share their problems, they would have been up the creek. The whole ordeal was a potent argument for user groups; in fact, you might say that Clarke, Peter, and I were a three-member one. Clarke, meanwhile, was reportedly suffering a disk-drive problem. He may have enjoyed sympathy, however, from another user—nearby; an American in Sri Lanka owned a Kaypro. Of course, the ordeal was still another argument for easier-to-master software.

Finally, it happened: the Great Modeming—more than six months after Clarke had first phoned me from Sri Lanka.

Hyams and Clarke started typing messages to each other, and I knew my own Great Modeming would succeed. But a problem lingered even now. Colombo and Culver City couldn’t send already-typed material to each other’s unattended machines.

So one of Clarke’s first messages to the MGM/UA Kaypro wasn’t exactly “What hath God wrought?” It was something in the spirit of “Tell **** to fix that software or I’m going to throw the computer in a river. And tell **** that Sri Lanka has many rivers.” A furious Hyams and Rothman phoned Odendhal, who promptly contacted the distributor. Contrite, the MITE man apologized and gave Hyams the guidance he needed.