ACN Volume 4 No 4 Summer 1992

    Interview with Staff Member Michael Hauben on the Occasion 
         of the 10th Anniversary of the Personal Computer

	               Part II

(Editor's Note: This interview was conducted on August 11, 1991.
It has been edited.)

Ronda: Do you think there are any lessons from what is going on?

Michael: Well, the Timex/Sinclair Commodore agreement was proof
that the best choice is not always for the best. The best product
does not always end up being marketed or sold. That seems true of
many things in this capitalist world. Sony's Beta video system
was technologically superior to the current VHS standard. I don't
know if there is a lesson to draw or not. A similar problem is
occurring with computer magazines. In particular I am thinking
of: Popular Computing, Family Computing, PC Computing, Creative
Computing, and Compute. Most of the magazines have changed their
priorities from an emphasis on hobbyist or home users to
business. Popular Computing disappeared shortly after changing
its name to Business Computing. The same thing happened with
Family Computing after it changed its name and emphasis to Home
and Office Computing. Unfortunately PC Computing is following the
same path. PC Computing started out as an alternative to other
magazines such as PC Magazine and PC for the home or hobbyist
crowd in the PC community. It had reviews of games and broader
articles, while being a smidgen less technical and completely
unconnected to a business point of view. The subtitle is now "The
magazine for Business Computing Experts." Readers have recognized
the change and written letters to the editor to comment and
complain. As for other examples, Creative Computing vanished and
Compute compressed down to one magazine from what was four.
However, Commodore 64s still sell, and that is a viable
community. I guess PCs are coming home from the office, but that
doesn't mean they are only used for business at home. A whole
community seems to be left un-serviced by this trend in computer
magazines. True, computer gaming magazines exist, but home
computers are used for much more than just playing games. One
problem is that PCs are not particularly getting cheaper. Any
decrease in price has more or less been incidental to the
increase in power. The 386s (Intel 80386) cost today what the 286
(Intel 80286) cost yesterday. But there are still no really
affordable computers in the $100 to $200 range. This is sad,
because the computer is not as affordable as it should be. Thus,
personal computers are still not a normal part of most households
which was the real goal of the personal computer revolution.
While most homes have been affected by the arrival of
microprocessors in many home appliances, the Personal Computer
itself is not yet a home appliance.  The general recent trend of
computer development is aimed at business, as opposed to the
people. Not for the majority, but for the minority. It's like
what IBM did for the mainframe and other mainframe manufacturers
in the '50s, '60s and '70s. The mainframe then was only
affordable by the biggest of the big companies or the large
educational institution. The difference today is that small
business can afford computers, but still only businesses.
Computers are marketed as for businesses and entrepreneurs, and
not for the average person at home, or for the majority of the
people. The radical push of the personal computer movement in the
mid to late '70s was to make the computer available to everyone,
and not just accessible to Fortune 500 companies. True, these
days computers are much more affordable than 20 years ago, but
the general movement in the personal computer world seems opposed
to its roots.

Ronda: How so?

Michael: IBM exemplifies this movement with the release of their
PS/2 line. These computers have a proprietary bus. IBM changed
the name away from Personal Computer to Personal System/2 which
is more like the main-frame names. It made it less friendly in
that sense.

Ronda: Are you optimistic? Pessimistic? What do you think will be
the future with computers? With you and computers?

Michael: Well by going away to school I'll gain more access to
what's called the Internet, the big net that exists, the
connection of computers across this country and across the world.
You gain more access when you go into an educational community.
I'm optimistic because of that. I'll have to manage that as part
of my time. Businesses and education are involved in that. It's
harder if you live at home to have access to it. (Editor's Note:
Home access is more available now, than it was a year ago when
this interview was done.) Somehow you need something powerful
enough to hook into. It's not quite fully open. If you live near
an educational community you can gain access to it. I have and
you can. Our connection is MichNet. So that will be broadening.
That will be a connection with the rest of the world
computerwise, but it's not quite just the computer. So that's
encouraging.
   Somehow they are working on building things smaller and more
minuscule but not quite pricewise. The computers aren't quite
like the microwave and the VCR. Home appliances started out
expensive but there are now so many different companies making
them that they have come down in price so they are affordable. As
I said before computer performance increased but it doesn't come
down in price. Actually, it's going to be a stretch to buy a
computer for myself, but I wouldn't have been able to buy one
last year. What used to be $2000 is now $1000 or coming closer to
$1000.

Ronda: Do you think there has been some kind of revolution with
computers? Do you think there has been a computer revolution?

Michael: Well, there is the personal computer. If it was up to
the big companies, there wouldn't have been one. As I said the
corporate trend is reactionary.

Ronda: Do you think there's been a computer revolution, William?

William: What do you mean by a computer revolution?

Ronda: That something fundamental has changed because of the
computer.

William: Fundamental?

Ronda: Or something substantial that you see at work?

William: We're using computers more. We've got IBM 486 computers
on the shop floor.

Michael: But what do you use them for?

William: For altering and transferring programs to our CNC
machining center. We got rid of the Westinghouse computer in the
computer room and you can download more files into the 486
computer. It has all our files already. It won't hold us up when
we are running the machine.

Ronda: But the computer isn't being used to run a machine?

William: No it's not to run a machine directly. You have other
computers for that.

Michael: So the computers are like terminals?

William: It's like a database. But you can edit and change the
data if you need to.

Ronda: Are most people comfortable with them. Or is it that if
people don't have home computers it's harder to use them?

William: Well they have menus instead of working with DOS. It
just takes a F[unction] key and that is it. We finally got a
manual for it. The editor is difficult to work with. They're
still working on a new editor....

Ronda: Remember they were talking about the workerless factory in
the last 7 or 8 years. My sense is that hasn't come to pass.

William: Well, there are a lot less people working in my shop.
They're standardizing everything so there's less skill involved
in putting dies together.

Ronda: But the computer hasn't cut the people out or caused
problems?

William: No.

Ronda: So do you think there's been some kind of computer
revolution in the last 10 or 15 years? That something substantial
has happened to change....

William: Society?

Michael: Well a lot of things have computer chips in them now.
All your household appliances have them from the tv set on.

William: Cars have them.

Michael: Cars have them now so society has been changed by the
introduction of them. The mainframe computer didn't use
processing chips. It took buildings with several floors to house
those computers. But now, the personal computer is the
achievement of the trend of miniaturization that came in the
1950s.

William: More like evolution, right. You got chips in tv's now.
You got picture-in-picture, not revolution, not a substantial
change.

Michael: Well, there was the miniaturization after WWII but it
didn't hit computers then. Computers were still the great big
mainframes that used the vacuum tubes. Then came the transistor,
the microprocessor, and the integrated circuit. But they weren't
really utilized with the mainframes. Or if they were, instead of
a whole floor, it was a room. But it wasn't down to a single chip
which now exists and which is constantly getting smaller. They
think they're reaching the bounds actually. Now people are
speculating that the silicon chip has reached its physical speed
and size limits and a new material needs to be used, like
chemical or biological materials instead of electronic.  But I
feel if it had not been for the personal computer revolution,
there wouldn't be such use of processing chips and use of
computing technology involved in so many things in our daily
lives.

Ronda: But I feel the substantial question is are they being used
to produce more with less labor? I think they are being used more
as consumer goods. But it doesn't sound like there has been a
change, a fundamental change in the way things are produced. For
example, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people
worked in their homes. Then people were brought into the
factories to work together. There was an increasing division of
labor, and then machines were introduced and people operated the
machines. Then machines were used to operate other machines.
   It doesn't seem as if the computer has led to a similar kind
of change in industrial production. It doesn't seem that
computers are widely used to produce things. It seems the
computer has been used for paperwork but not for producing goods.

William: It takes longer to get a computer to do something than
it does a machine. They are probably working on that stuff too.

Michael: But actually there's something called CAD/CAM or
Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing. But then there's
something called CIM which I did study and it seemed like it was
trying to steal the computer and give it to management which was
a top down design and not a bottom up design. When I read about
it two years ago it seemed a flop. It was trying to steal the
computers from the people rather than using the computers to help
the manufacturing process. But I don't know what your experience
has been with CIM.

Ronda: But there was also a big push to lower wages and have
people work a lot of overtime. And I thought that got in the way
of using the computer to make production more efficient.

William: You also had international competition too. Third world
countries have cheaper labor. So we had to compete with them. So
that's one reason why the lower wages.

Ronda: But you can never compete with the cheapest country, and
in fact the story of production is that the higher the wages, the
more advanced the technology, the less labor that goes into
producing something, the cheaper it can be sold for. Somehow the
whole stress of trying to make U.S. workers compete with workers
in less industrialized countries is a backwards trend. The price
of things is very high because hand labor is very expensive. So
in this country we had the ability to make production more
efficient, that's the story of how cars have gotten cheaper, how
microwaves have gotten cheaper, how air conditioners have gotten
cheaper because there were more advanced technologies, not
because you found someone abroad to work for cheaper wages. With
cheaper wages and backward production methods, the price of goods
stays high. There is a need for more public discussion over how
computers can be used to change industrial production. There was
a fight with the corporate world over what would happen with
computers and people had to challenge the corporate barrage
demanding wage cuts and longer hours which impede automation.
There are examples of countries where advanced technology that
was available was never used in production because workers' wages
were so low or their hours so long that it was not cost efficient
to put in the new machine. So that country remained
technologically backward. The story of the development of
technology is that the more advanced technology somewhere
replaces the lower wage backward technology somewhere else, not
that goods made by low wage workers replace goods made with less
human labor and operating more efficient machines. But workers
have to organize to prevent the wage cuts and increased hours
that impede the introduction of new technology. Somehow the
corporate attack on workers and unions has led to people looking
backward, not keeping our eye on how to go forward.

Ronda: Any final words?

Michael: Even though I have decided to go to Columbia University
in NYC instead of the University of Michigan, I am optimistic.
Columbia is less computer-oriented than the University of
Michigan, but Columbia seems better connected to the educational
and academic computer networks. But Michigan for me would have
been a better computer school. Columbia has more of its computer
roots in the past while Michigan has more in the future. There
are a couple of centers opening up and there is, at Columbia, the
State Center for Computing Research. But it's not as obvious as
Michigan how involved Columbia is with computers. I am sort of
pessimistic, because with the age of the computer industry, it
seems to have receded. But it's probably just a cycle.

Ronda: No, it's a fight. You have to figure out how to take it
up. The personal computer caught people by surprise when it
spread so quickly and so substantially. People now have to
evaluate what has happened. I feel the lesson is you can't trust
the business world of large corporations to develop computers and
computer technology. Big corporations can't be coddled by
government, the press, etc. and encouraged to freeze the
development of technology or to go backwards to hand labor as
they have done in many instances. The machine is a machine for
society. It was a mistake to have trusted that the corporate
world would develop it. Instead the corporate world must be
regulated and limited in its efforts to impede the development of
technology. That's what antitrust legislation originally
accomplished. The personal computer was created while there was a
U.S. govt. anti trust suit on against IBM which kept it from
interfering with the development of the personal computer. Once
again there is a need for something independent of the corporate
world, and there is a need for regulations and limitations on the
corporate world so that their narrow self interest is prevented
from interfering with social and technological development.

Michael: You need a new Henry Ford for the Computer world.

Ronda: No, you need another Computers for the People movement.

Michael: No, again.

William: My niece is going to go to Michigan State and she's not
going to get a computer. She's going to get a word processor. You
have a screen, keyboard, and a printer all in one unit. That
suits her. Michael: But it's not compatible with anything other
than another wordprocessor of the same type.

William: There are some that have a floppy disk.

Ronda: But it's sad the computers aren't cheap with a cheaper
printer too.

William: Well it's a letter-quality printer, she's not going to
be doing graphics.

Ronda: I thought John Kemeny once predicted that there would be
computers used in the schools for wondrous things. But now he is
disappointed that that has not happened.

William: One of the problems is software. There aren't enough
software developers to write programs people need. To get them
involved.

Michael: It's not just software developers, it's ideas. People
are not creating new ideas but merely copying old ideas.

Ronda: But I thought that there was the discouragement, when
people were told "People don't need to learn to program." Michael
learned to program and it was a good thing he learned to program.
Instead of saying it's a good thing to learn a little programming
it was said you don't need programming. So it seems that there
has been a lot of pressure to keep people away from utilizing
computers and discouraging them instead.

Michael: I left out that I know a little MS-DOS batch language, a
little C, and a little Forth. I did very little in Assembler.

William: Are you going to take computer classes in collage.

Michael: I don't know if I'll have time.

Ronda: To sum up, it seems it is as if this period is like the
period in France before the French Revolution. Then there was the
basis to have capitalism, but you had the feudal lords and the
King holding society back. You had a Monarchy. There was a need
for the French Revolution to get rid of the Monarchy and the
Aristocracy and the feudal social forms and laws that they kept
in place. They prevented the reforms that were needed to develop
large scale production in France. The problem we have today seems
similar. Big companies are discouraging investment in new
technology like computers because such investment will lower
their rate of profit. There is a need to get rid of this fetter
so that technology can be encouraged and developed. In France, in
1789, it took a revolution to get rid of a similar fetter. What
will it take now?

-------------------end of interview----------------------------

The whole interview can be seen at:

http://www.ais.org/~hauben/Michael_Hauben/Collected_Works/Amateur_Computerist/Interview_with_Staff_Member.txt

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