A. I don’t recall ever using the term, but it’s a good idea, and you’re welcome, anyway.

That’s part of the conversation with the typos cleaned up—on-line typing isn’t for the vain. Clarke was brisk at the keyboard. There wasn’t any doubt I was “talking” to a professional author. Hyams was fast, too, reaching maybe eighty or ninety per minute on good days; and yet as Peter pointed out, typing speed didn’t matter that much, since you normally would compose at leisure, then squirt out your prepared file.[[90]]

The Clarke-Rothman connection ran just fourteen minutes and cost $25.11 on my phone bill—a good case for the economy of global computer communications. I didn’t know what Clarke’s rates might be. But if I’d given a thousand words to a Telex service in Washington, D.C., a one-way message to Sri Lanka would have totaled some $125. And if I could have afforded my own Telex machine? Well, the connect charges alone still would have exceeded $60. Moreover, my $25.11 charge was for a 300-baud connection, a slowpoke one by some business computer standards. With a 1,200-baud link—a strong possibility since the connection had proved so reliable for Clarke and Hyams at 300 baud—my phone bill might have been well under $15 even on a weekday. And with everything sent already typed, it might have been between $5 and $10. Imagine the thousands of dollars a company could save using micros instead of Telex for regular communications with faraway offices.

In one of the questions sent there Marco Polo fashion, Eric asked if computers someday would replace secretaries who took dictation. Could the machines display the words on their screens and electronically police spelling and grammar? “We will certainly get computers that can take dictation,” Clarke replied by modem, “and this may lead to two desirable results—better elocution and rationalisation of spelling.”

Yes, yes. Maybe someday American and British computers could even spell alike. Although Eric’s question was a very good one, it was passé in many technical circles, as he himself must have known. Articles were already appearing in micro magazines about low-cost computers that could recognize simple commands like SAVE (to preserve material on a disk). One of the big problems with speech recognition was usability with different voices. But I had no doubt that practical machines with a vocabulary fit for the business world would be taking dictation by 2001.

The keyboard would remain, however. Not everyone would want to dictate; I suspected even two decades from now I’d still prefer the pleasure of letting my fingers linger over the keys. Then again, how did I know? Just a few years ago I could have seen myself at only a typewriter keyboard.

As for spelling checkers—well, there again the basic technology was already around. I myself would be proofing this chapter with The WORD Plus, a 45,000-word electronic dictionary that would flag the places where my spellings contradicted it. Not that The WORD Plus would ever replace proofreaders at The New Yorker. It would let you use “his” when you meant “this”; it was absolutely incapable of considering spellings in context. Even by 2001 the checkers might lack that capability. But eventually they would respond perfectly to context, as would grammar checkers. That might require artificial intelligence, the ability of computers to reason independently without their humans laying out the machines’ tasks in detail. But the day would come.

Of course even the best prophets could err. In his 1945 article entitled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” Clarke predicted communications satellites but missed by a mile in another area. “It seems unlikely that we will have to wait as much as twenty years,” he said then, “before atomic-powered rockets are developed....” Still, I appreciated Clarke’s general philosophy of prediction: Experts are more often wrong in saying something can’t be done than in saying that it can.

“Do you think there will ever be a HAL?” Eric asked Clarke.

“Yes,” Clarke said, “HAL will arrive—but not by 2001!”