Years ago Clarke had said a business eventually wouldn’t even need “an address or a central office—only the equivalent of a telephone number. For its files and records will be space rented in the memory units of computers that could be located anywhere on earth. The information stored in them could read off on high-speed printers whenever any of the firm’s offices needed it.”[[94]] And now Clarke was predicting little portables capable of using the giant networks and memory banks. “It seems to me that as computers become more and more portable and networks more universal (and systems standardised—a MUST!) there may no longer be any question of ‘micros in the office.’ The office will be in the micro—and that will be in an attaché case.”[case.”] Rubinstein himself already knew that Epson was about to market its little lap-size machine with WordStar built into the read-only memory.
Rob Barnaby, the WordStar programmer, asked a slightly overlapping question covered by the same answer. There was something else for them from Clarke, however—his thanks.
“I am happy to greet the geniuses who made me a born-again writer,” he said. “Having announced my retirement in 1978, I now have six books in the works and two portables—all through WordStar.”[[95]]
James Watt, the descendant of the Scottish inventor, also 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 best-seller? 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).”
Clarke 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!”
The seventh questioner, Lynn Wilson, had worked several decades for the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, only to see computers do away with the rotary switches he had so lovingly attended.
“They’ve sent all my equipment to the smelter’s to reclaim the metal,” he said. “I don’t know if anyone’s still in the building. Maybe a few times a week someone goes by. The equipment tests itself twenty-four hours a day and flashes a red light for the serviceman next time he’s there.” Just a few boxes had replaced the long rows of devices that connected the dial phones in the area of Alexandria, Virginia.
But Lynn didn’t feel any futility. The telephone and teletype themselves had superseded another invention he used—the Morse Code telegraph.