“Sure,” he said. And I’d like to think this was another demonstration of the value of befriending others in The Jungle and sharing knowledge, user to user. With the sales assistant watching guard over the main machine, I picked up the monitor and pushed through the crowd to the counter. I still couldn’t believe the Victor would soon be mine. What if the sales assistant had suddenly developed a fondness for Victors and had himself decided to claim the main machine? T-shirt all this time may have been in the other part of the room; perhaps he was a gracious, mannerly fellow who, having seen me first in line, was decent enough to relinquish the new Victor to me. I don’t know how T-shirt fared at the auction but hope that his own patience was rewarded through the acquisition of the used Victor.
Within half an hour after taking the new Victor home, I had WordStar running on it. There was some tinkering to do with the software so the computer would start up without my having to stick a floppy disk in it, but otherwise it was a perfect machine, save for a little crack in the front of the case, which I discovered after I peeled away the price tape. For $40 or so I could buy a replacement front. The hard disk, at any rate, has been just as handy as I expected for editing this book.
My old Victor is in the hands of Gabriel Heilig, an aspiring screenwriter, who saw my want ad and bought the machine for $1,750, exactly what I’d paid. Gabe is no dummy; indeed, he used to sell cars—Mercedes—and he insisted that his purchase price include plenty of advice and several hours of instruction in WordStar, my favorite word processor. And then what does Gabe do? He goes out and buys a copy of Word Perfect, a new program that he swears is easier to use. I say, “Great if it helps you do your work.” It must. Gabe tells me that the Victor helps him revise five times as fast as he can on his electronic typewriter. “You constantly have a fresh copy in front of you,” he says, “whereas if you’re using a typewriter, you must retype the whole page even if you change just once sentence.” A producer is interested in a proposal for a TV series, and Gabe says: “I did it in three days—it would have taken two weeks with a typewriter.”
Having sold the old Victor to Gabe for $550 more than the price tag on the hard-disk one, I invested $230 in a 1,200-baud modem. I remain a computer communications junky. A draft of this afterword, in fact, reached my technical editor up in New York via the phone lines.
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My afterword could cover a number of topics, but I’ll resist. Still, you might be interested to learn that the Great Modeming continues between the United States and Sri Lanka.
Because of problems with the Sri Lankan phone service, the link over the past year hasn’t been 100 percent reliable—monsoons can wreak havoc on cables between Arthur Clarke and the satellite station. But Steve Jongeward, who is now an assistant both to Clarke and Peter Hyams, the 2010 director-writer, reports that the struggles have been worthwhile. The movie will be out in December 1984 (remember: I’m writing this in November 1984), and if a reporter has questions for Clarke in Sri Lanka, Steve will just type them out on the Kaypro in California, and the novelist will typically respond within a day or so. Sometimes the reporters even visit the office with the Kaypro and interview Clarke via modem and get instant replies.
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The Great Modeming has produced a wonderful outgrowth: an attempt to start an Electronic Peace Corps (EPC) to pipe U.S. technical savvy into the Third World via computers links. (See Backup [XIII], “Why Not An Electronic Peace Corps?”)
The idea—in the form of an agency working within or alongside the existing Peace Corps—has won support from people ranging from Clarke to William F. Buckley, Jr., and Chicago Sun-Times editorial writers.