The Port-A-Brain computer system
We moved recently, causing me to end up with all my books in boxes, which in turn led to removing many of my books from boxes, which led to rereading a lot of books I haven’t probably seen since the 1990s.
I was particularly struck by a passage from Phule’s Company, Robert Asprin’s 1990 space opera version of Police Academy. (I say this with a mixture of exasperation and affection.) In it, he describes a computer:
The Port-A-Brain computer system was designed to be the ultimate in pocket computers. Its main strength was that it enabled the user to tap into nearly any data base or library in the settled worlds, or place an order with most businesses above a one-store retail level, or communicate directly with or leave messages for anyone or any business which utilized any form of computerized telecommunications, all without so much as plugging into a wall outlet or tapping into a phone line. What’s more, the unit, complete with folding screen, was no larger than a paperback book. In short, it was a triumph of high tech microcircuitry . . .
The . . . is there in the original, and the paragraph continues past
it, but let’s stop and admire the absolute fucking genius of this writer.
(Sadly, I can’t share my amazement with him; he died in 2008. The first
public announcement of this, as I understand it, referred to him by his
SCA name, “Yang the Nauseating”. Honestly, I think that if you are the
kind of person who would be sad that the first announcement of your death
referred to you as “Yang the Nauseating”, you would not be the kind of
person to have picked that name for yourself.)
So, many, perhaps most, readers won’t understand how incredible this is, because it’s completely normal now. But this was written in 1990, or possibly 1989. (Given his prolific writing speed, I doubt it was before 1989.) There was technically an Internet, but very little other than universities and large corporations was active on it. Email was not widespread or universal. There was no World Wide Web – in theory HTML had been conceived of, but it wasn’t going to be in widespread use for years.
So in 1990, accessing a company’s resources meant that company had put in the extra effort to set up something which would have one or more dedicated phone lines hooked up to modems, and you could dial in to access their service, and while you were on the line nothing else was, and each such service was unique and idiosyncratic. No one was doing things like online catalogs or online ordering. There were no public data resources. There was also, functionally, no mobile phone coverage, let alone mobile phones with some kind of data support. The concept of what we think of as “mobile data” probably existed in military circles and the like, but for end-users? Nope. I think you could get low speed modem connections over cellular but mobile phones were large, expensive, and unreliable.
The closest thing I have to a criticism here is the “folding” screen. To be clear, I don’t think he intended to describe what we today call a “folding” screen; I think he meant the traditional “clamshell” form factor. People did, in fact, make small computers in roughly that form factor, with screens and keyboards. Tiny keyboards. So basically, if you want to know what he was probably envisioning, I’m guessing it was much more like a Psion Series 5 than like a modern iOS/Android device.
But still, he absolutely fucking nailed it, having gotten several things right (essentially universal access to almost everything, able to buy from anyone, able to send messages to anyone, access to data and libraries in all human territory) that most people did not.
However, he did get one minor detail wrong… Let’s follow up again from that elipsis and see the rest of the paragraph:
. . . but there was a small problem. Each unit cost as much as a small corporation, placing it well out of the financial reach of the individual and all but the most extravagant conglomerate executive officers; and even those who could afford one usually contented themselves to use the cheaper modes of data access, particularly since their job positions were lofty enough to allow them to delegate such menial tasks as research and communications to lower echelon staffers. As such, there were fewer than a dozen Port-A-Brain units in use in the entire galaxy.
This is, to me, a fascinating error, because it turns out that the order of events was wildly different than this predicts. The widespread adoption of networks meant that “can access networks” quickly became a killer feature that you simply had to have to make devices viable. Given that, it’s not a huge surprise that the market quickly pushed that functionality out to everyone, making it much cheaper to produce than it would have been if it had been too expensive. And, in particular, I think he missed that the network would be a shared and ubiquitous substrate – that everyone’s computers would all be sharing a single network. So he was probably envisioning some insanely complicated device which could talk to 20+ different kinds of networks, but actually we simplified that.
Still an absolutely incredible example of his ability to see where things might be going.