Henrietta Hay's Column

On the wall in back of my computer is an abacus. It keeps me humble since I tend to get over-enthusiastic about modern home computers. They handle words with ease and flexibility never before imagined. They do data processing and number crunching - and games, those wonderful games. But when we get right down to fundamentals, my Macintosh and my abacus are really not so different. They are both dumb machines that require the human using them to be smarter than they are.

I am told that early civilizations developed numbering systems some 4000 years ago, which makes my abacus a modern machine. It was not developed until the 3rd century A.D. in the Mediterranean World and is still used in many parts of the Orient. Experts whose fingers move so fast they blur can add huge columns of numbers as fast as a modern calculator can. To be quite honest, however, I have never figured out how to add anything more complex than four plus six on an abacus. I can go faster on my fingers.

The first real computer guru was an Englishman named Charles Babbage and he shared certain personality characteristics with today's experts, who also tend to be single-minded. He was so concerned with numerical accuracy that he once wrote to the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson to criticize the lines, "Every moment dies a man / Every moment one is born." Babbage claimed the line would be statistically correct only if it read, "Every moment dies a man / every moment one and one-sixteenth is born."

He conceived the principles of the modern computer, but lacked the technology to build one. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have written a science fiction novel, "The Difference Engine," which takes place in the world as it would have been had Babbage succeeded in building his behemoth. "The year is 1855. The Industrial Revolution, supercharged by the development of steam-driven cybernetic Engines is in full swing. The computer age has arrived a century ahead of time. The scientists and industrialists are in charge." That is fantasy. Or is it?

This is reality. I recently read that Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2, which he designed in 1849, has been built in London from his original drawings, using parts that could have been made in his time. It works perfectly. It weighs three tons, is 11 feet long and 7 feet high and is operated by turning a crank. Doren Swade, leader of the construction team says that, "To reach its largest number using 31 digits requires turning the handle nearly 27,000 times and we have not had time to do that yet."

Given the way the human mind works, the modern computer was inevitable. It has changed the world. It has pervaded every aspect of modern life.

But while those early experts working on Univac in the 1950's might have had the vision to see the industrial, business and military uses of their room sized computer, it would have taken the vision of Jules Verne to see a seventy-something woman sitting in her own home chasing a fictional thief named Carmen San Diego across Europe and the U. S. on a small color screen. My little home computer is small enough that I can carry it, as compared to three tons for the Difference Engine. Instead of turning a crank I push a button. And it does everything the Engine could do and much, much more. It does not stop with numbers. It does all sorts of things with words and with logic and has added color and graphics and games. But still, like the abacus, it requires a human brain to make it work. The phrase of choice is "Garbage in, garbage out."

The abacus on the wall keeps me humble. The computer in front of it keeps me stimulated and entertained. You can't stare at an abacus or a Difference Engine and watch brightly colored fish swim across the screen while you try to put an idea into words. If the thought takes too long to hatch, the screen goes blank like my mind and there come those beautiful fish. They even go glub glub very softly.

As you may have gathered by now, I think the home computer is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Maybe some day I'll get around to reading the manual and discover some more things it will do. Meanwhile, having it around sure beats writing a column with a pencil, and when inspiration deserts me I'll sit and watch the fish. Glub glub!