[81]. PBX stands for private branch exchange.
[82]. For some of Clarke’s own writing on the future, readers might turn to 1984: Spring—A Choice of Futures, published by Ballantine Books, New York, 1984.
[83]. Eric later decided to change the name of his company to EMCo. Computer Consulting.
[84]. The actual beginnings of the micro age, less romantically, go back to the invention of the microprocessor—a central processing unit on one chip—in 1970. It happened at Intel, an electronics company in Santa Clara, California, and was the idea of a young Stanford University grad named Ted Hoff.
[85]. Gene’s book should appear under the title Maryland Lost and Found: People and Places from Chesapeake to Appalachia. The publisher is Johns Hopkins University Press.
[86]. Clarke’s forgetting to insert the disk in the B drive should underscore a truism: all computer users can commit idiocies. Once I owned a printer that I couldn’t use without unplugging my modem. Things worked the other way around, too—as some people discovered when they tried to communicate with me over the phone but couldn’t because I’d forgotten to yank out the printer cable and put in the modem’s.
[87]. MITE’s auto-answer feature won’t work without an appropriate modem. My own modem was manually activated, meaning that I couldn’t take advantage of this wrinkle. I could, however, switch on the modem when Peter called. And for him, that would realistically duplicate the experience of reaching Clarke’s computer.
[88]. A Ballantine paperback titled The Odyssey File, records much of the computer dialogue between Clarke and Hyams. Very briefly Clarke also writes of the link in Ascent to Orbit: The Technical Writings of Arthur C. Clarke, released by John Wiley & Sons, New York, in 1984.
[89]. President Reagan’s campaign schedule and trip to China forced him to cancel his April 1984 meeting with Clarke.
[90]. In the postscript of Ascent to Orbit, Clarke described himself and Hyams as “lousy typists.” They may be in terms of accuracy but not speed—and, of course, with a computer, you can correct mistakes so easily that accuracy becomes secondary to speed.