Computers Then and Now

Dick Francis is another one of our authors to turn to for a good escapist read. I've just been re-reading 'Twice Shy', which was first published in 1981. Some of his books don't date that much, the world of horse-racing carrying on pretty much as it always has, but this one has at its centre a betting system on computer tapes. It had me glued in reminiscent wonder, as it mentioned the computer they were to be played on - a Grantley Basic with a 32K hard drive, the Basic language taking up 12K in memory so you were left with 20K to work with. Each character, space or comma that you typed would take up one of those 20,000 slots of memory, so all your programs were on cassettes to be loaded only when needed.

In 1981 I was in my O'level year. The year below me was the first group to be taught on the one computer that the school had just acquired. They learned how to write a basic program and play Space Invaders, by repetitively pressing the space bar to shoot and the arrow keys to manoeuvre. Computers seemed then to be on the periphery of life, I played Space Invaders once or twice myself and went on my way.

Five years later computers had advanced enough to be more useful. At university there was a computer room in our faculty building, where we could sign up for a 'Word Processing' course. Some of the more forward-looking did and were able to present essays and theses beautifully typed. I carried on with my fountain pen, tormenting my professors with essays written in turquoise ink.

I slightly regretted not taking advantage of the computer room when I graduated and tried to earn my living from temping. I started as the lowest of the low: doing data entry - names and addresses punched into the membership list of a big company, whereas if I had mastered Word Processing I could have earned double… but anyway eight months later I drove off to Italy in a Mercedes minibus with the world of computers just an inconvenient blip, no longer necessary to master.

I eventually did get to grips with them. By 1995 PCs were affordable and essential to any business and I started doing our accounts on them and typing letters. They had evolved into glorified typewriters and calculators - e-mail was becoming a normal way of communication. My new husband learned about the innards and started dropping motherboards, megs, gigs and ram into the conversation. Computers had edged into our lives and were now indispensable.

Dick Francis' novel has a second section 14 years on, where the computer betting system again rears its ugly head. He would have boggled back in 1981 if he had seen the extent of the shift in computer usage that would actually have taken place by then. His vision encompassed a few boffins with banks of gleaming equipment in air conditioned rooms, complicated programs still in basic that had to be comprehended to make any use of a computer, cassettes still loading programs onto computers and telexes the height of communication technology.

What would he have said to the internet - in fact what would we have said back then if somebody had told us that we would be sitting at computers for fun, blogging late at night? That Microsoft had made sure that we didn't need to learn Basic to be able to use the computer, that most of our communication would be dependent on a temperamental machine deigning to be cooperative and that international boundaries would shrink to nothing in the face of a virtual world.

So now here I sit in my dressing gown with two screens in front of me, so that I can read something on the internet on one and type on the other, behind me my husband's two monitors, both connected so that we can send each other things, though we mostly Skype them to each other, and I write insignificant musings on retro computer culture shock to share with blog friends on the other side of the world. Who would have thought it back in 1981?