The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (12 page)

“We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out,” and so on. Ah, here’s another one:

“Bill Clinton will lose to any Republican who doesn’t drool on stage,” said The Wall Street Journal, in

1995. It’s a very fat book you can read happily in the loo for hours.

The odd thing is that we don’t get any better at it. We smile indulgently when we hear that Lord Kelvin said in 1897, “Radio has no future.” But it’s more surprising to discover that Ken Olsen, the president of the Digital Equipment Corporation, said in 1977, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.” Even Bill Gates, who specifically set out to prove him completely and utterly wrong, famously said that he couldn’t conceive of anybody needing more than 640k of memory in their computers. Try running Word in even twenty times that.

At least—that’s what I predict. I could, of course, be wildly wrong. Stewart Brand, in his excellent book The Clock of the Long Now, proposes keeping a record of society’s predictions and arguments in a ten-thousand-year library, but it would also be interesting to see how things work out in the short term.

At the beginning of each new year the media tend to be full of predictions of what is going to happen over the course of the following year. Two days later, of course, they’re forgotten and we never get to test them. So I’d like to invite readers to submit their own predictions—or any others they come across in print—of what is going to happen in the next five years, and when. Will we set off to Mars? Will we get peace in Ireland or the Middle East? Will the e-commerce bubble burst?

We’ll put them up on the Web, where they will stay for that whole period, so we can track them against what actually happens. Predicting the future is a mug’s game, but any game is improved when you can actually keep the score.

The Independent on Sunday, NOVEMBER 1999

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There’s now a new generation of smarter office chair beginning to arrive that makes a virtue of doing away with all the knobs and levers. All the springing and bracing we learned about is still there, but it adjusts to your posture and movement automatically, without your having to tell it how to. All right, here is a prediction for you: when we have software that works like that, the world will truly be a better and happier place.

The Little Computer That Could My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Bronte, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done.

This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Bronte piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky.

Having nowhere else to go, I am standing up, leaning against a mantelpiece. Well, a kind of mantelpiece.

I don’t know what it is, in fact. It’s made of brass and some kind of plastic and was probably drawn in by the architect after a nasty night on the town. That reminds me of another favourite piece of information: there is a large kink in the Trans-Siberian Railway because when the tsar (I don’t know which tsar it was because I am not in my study at home, I’m leaning against something shamefully ugly in Michigan and there are no books) decreed that the Trans-Siberian railway should be built, he drew a line on a map with a ruler. The ruler had a nick in it.

I’m writing this article leaning against some nameless architectural mistake, and I am not writing the article on a Mac. I would, but my PowerBook is fresh out of power (funny notion, to name the thing after its only major shortcoming; it’s rather like Greenland in that respect). I have the power cable with me but I can’t plug it in anywhere. Though the power cable very cleverly has a universal power supply, it doesn’t have a universal plug. It has a large, clunky, British-style three-pin plug built right into it, which means that if you forget to buy an adapter plug before you leave Heathrow, you are completely and utterly screwed.

You cannot buy an adapter for British plugs outside Britain. I know. I tried that when I ran into a similar problem with the old Mac Portable. (I am not going to make any Mac Portable jokes. Apple made quite enough of them to be getting on with. Damn. I said I wasn’t going to do that.) In the end I had to buy a U.S. power cable. Or rather, I had to try to buy one. Couldn’t be done. They only came with new Mac Portables. I heaved a dead Mac Portable around with me for ten days and occasionally ate my sandwiches off it because it was slightly lighter than carrying a table. (Damn, there goes another one.)

I don’t have the same problem with my PowerBook, though I am not totally stupid. I brought an adapter with me this time. However, I am slightly stupid because it’s in my suitcase, which I’ve just checked in with the bellman while I wait three hours for my room to be ready.

So what am I doing? Handwriting? You must be joking. After ten years of word processing, I can’t even do handwriting anymore. I know I ought to be able to: handwriting is supposed to be one of those things like using chopsticks: once you get the hang of it, it never really deserts you. The thing is that I’ve had much more practice with chopsticks than with pens, so no, I’m not handwriting. I’m not talking into one of those horrible little Dictaphones, either, that keep on recording relentlessly while you’re desperately trying to think of something to say. Pressing the off switch is the thing that turns your brain back on. No.

What I’m doing is sitting on a chair somewhere writing this on a new Psion Series 3a palmtop computer.

I got one at the duty-free shop at Heathrow, just for the sheer unadulterated hell of it, and I have to say it’s good. It works. May I just say one thing about duty-free shops before I go on to talk about the Psion? It’s not that things aren’t cheaper in the duty-free shops. They are. Infinitesimally. You do save a very small amount of money if you shop at them. Of course you can then lose a very hefty sum of money in fines if you fail to realise that you have to declare anything you’ve bought duty-free to customs when you come back into the country. The stuff is only really duty-free if you intend to spend the rest of your life on an aeroplane. So what happens when you buy stuff at the duty-free shop for very slightly less than you would in the high street? It means that most of the money saved on duty is going into the coffers of the duty-free shops rather than helping to pay for the National Health Service (and Trident nuclear submarines). So why did I buy my Psion at the duty-free shop? Because I’m a complete idiot, that’s why. Anyway. Status update. They’ve found me a room. I’ve unpacked my adapter plug. My PowerBook is charging, itself up. I’m still not using it, though, because I am now lying in the bath. So I’m still using the Psion. I have never ever written anything in the bath before. Paper gets damp and steamy, pens won’t write upside down, typewriters hurt your tummy, and if you are prepared to use a PowerBook in the bath, then I assume that it isn’t your own PowerBook. So the thing is, it can be done.

You can actually write on a palmtop computer, which is something I didn’t realise before I had tried to do it on a Sharp Wizard, but it wasn’t possible because the keyboard was laid out alphabetically, which is hopeless. The principle behind the decision to have an alphabetical keyboard is based on a misunderstanding. I believe that the idea is this: not everybody knows qwerty (it’s an odd feeling, actually typing qwerty as a word; try it and you’ll see what I mean), but everybody knows the alphabet. This is true but irrelevant. People know the alphabet as a one-dimensional string, not as a two-dimensional array, so you’re going to have to hunt and peck anyway. So why not use qwerty and let people who know it have the benefit? I also tried the larger Sharp Wizard, the 8200, which does have a qwerty keyboard, but no word wrap. Can you believe that? Even Etch-a-Sketch has word wrap these days.

Now, this raises some interesting questions. (Well, interesting to me. You can please yourselves.) What about this input business, then? I am, of course, as out of my mind with excitement as the next person about the prospect of voice input and pen input, but you know and I know, and anybody who has fooled around with a Caere Typist or the like will know that things rarely work as smoothly in practice as they do in theory, or at least not yet. Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don’t quite work yet is just not worth the effort for end users, however much fun it is for nerds like us. The days when you can say, “Open pod bay number 2, Hal,” and be confident that Hal understands that you want to be stranded on the outskirts of Jupiter are still a way away. And I suspect that it will be a very long time before I am able to dictate an article like this and for the result to be even decipherable, let alone accurate. We’ve all seen the old sketch in which a secretary writes down absolutely everything the boss says, including the bit where he says, “Don’t write this bit down,” or “Cross out that last sentence.” I think there’s going to be a lot of stupid-secretary-type grief to go through before we get it working smoothly. As for pen input devices, well, as I said above, ten years of word processing has meant that my handwriting has deteriorated to the point where even I can’t read it, so what chance a computer stands I really don’t know. Can I be bothered to tease out the irony involved in all that? No. So for the moment that leaves us back with the keyboard input, and keyboard input, for the moment, means qwerty. But qwerty, as we know, was originally designed to slow down typists so the keys wouldn’t jam.

It’s deliberately inefficient. However, all attempts to replace it with something more efficient, like the Dvorak keyboard, have failed. People know qwerty already, and they don’t have any pressing incentive to change. Dvorak et al. may be better, but qwerty is, or has been till now, good enough. “If it ain’t busted, don’t fix it” is a very sound principle and remains so despite the fact that I have slavishly ignored it all my life.

I think, though, that we might finally have arrived at point at which there is a strong incentive to reinvent the keyboard. Palmtop computers are where all the new action is. Apple and Microsoft and everybody are suddenly beginning to get revved up about personal digital assistants and stuff, and, having been using this Psion Series 3a for a few hours now, so am I. It’s terrific technology, and this is just the beginning of that crucial moment at which something stops being just an entertaining new toy and starts being something you can seriously use in the bath. We’ve all known for years that qwerty isn’t good. I think we’ve now got to that important point where it isn’t even good enough. The point where it isn’t even good enough. (Yes, this is exact copy typing!) I hope that systems designers have not been put off by the failure of the Dvorak keyboard. I hope they are carefully studying the way that people hold palmtop computers, where their fingers naturally fall and fit and how the whole idea of how a keyboard works can be rethought. I would very much like it if my thumb joints were not now stiff and aching. I’ve proved it can be done, but, like Branwell Bronte, I’m not expecting to do the same trick again tomorrow.

We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do. We notice computers, we don’t notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don’t notice books.

Little Dongly Things Time to declare war, I think, on little dongly things. More of them turned up in the post this morning. I’d ordered a new optical disk drive from an American mail-order company and, because I live in that strange and remote place called “Foreign,” and also because I travel like a pigeon, I was keen to know, when ordering it, if it had an international power supply.

An international power supply is the device that means it doesn’t matter what country you’re in, or even if you know what country you’re in (more of a problem than you might suspect)—you just plug your Mac in and it figures it out for itself. We call this principle Plug and Play. Or at least Microsoft calls it that because it hasn’t got it yet. In the Mac world we’ve had it for so long we didn’t even think of giving it a name. Nowadays a lot of peripherals come with international power supplies as well—but not all. Which is why I asked. “Yes, it does,” said Scott, the sales assistant.

“You’re sure it has an international power supply?”

“Yes,” repeated Scott. “It has an international power supply.”

“Absolutely sure?”

“Yes.”

This morning it arrived. The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t have an international power supply.

Instead it had a little dongly thing. I have rooms full of little dongly things and don’t want any more. Half the little dongly things I’ve got, I don’t even know what gizmo they’re for. More importantly, half the gizmos I’ve got, I don’t know where their little dongly thing is. Most annoyingly, an awful lot of the little dongly things, including the one that arrived this morning, are little dongly things that run on 120-volt AC—American voltage, which means I can’t use them here in Foreign (state code FN), but I have to keep them in case I ever take the gizmo to which they fit—provided I know which gizmo it is they fit to—to the U.S.A.

What, you may ask, the hell am I talking about?

The little dongly things I am concerned with (and they are by no means the only species of little dongly things with which the microelectronics world is infested) are the external power adapters that laptops and palmtops and external drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the AC supply from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1,200 milliamps. They have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type that has negative tips and positive sleeves. By the time you multiply all these different variables together, you end up with a fairly major industry that exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things, none which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo-pelmanism. The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body.