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|Winter 2003/04     15 Years of the Amateur Computerist     Volume 12 No 1| 
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                              Table of Contents

                         [1] Editorial
                         [2] Doing Democracy	
                         [3] Reality Behind  E-democracy
                         [4] OhmyNews.com: A Case Study
                         [5] 2004 U.S. Election	
                         [6] Fifteenth Anniversary of ACN
                         [7] Letters
                         [8] Net and the Netizens 
                         [9] Reprints
                        [10]     INTRODUCTION	
                        [11]     DAWN OF A NEW ERA	
                        [12]     Cartoon	
                        [13]     COMPUTERS & FREE SPEECH
                        [14]     TRUE HEROS	
                        [15]     Impact of the Computer on Society	
                        [16]     The Spirit of Babbage
                        [17]     Interview with Staff Member
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Editorial

With this issue of the Amateur Computerist we celebrate 15 years
of publication. Our first issue appeared on February 11, 1988.
Though there were various thoughts of what to name our new
newsletter, we soon arrived at an agreement that the name the
"Amateur Computerist" would be appropriate. Michael, one of our
founding editors, had proposed the name. Floyd Hoke-Miller, who
was one of our early writers, concurred, explaining that
"amateur" signified those who do something for the love of it.

Since that first issue we have maintained our effort to put out a
newsletter for those who do computing, and now online computing,
for the love of it. Though the general tenor of the online world
has changed, since the early 1990's when the Amateur Computerist
first got online, the goal of the newsletter was constant. We had
a 10 year reunion meeting in 1998, at which all the founding
editors were present. That gathering was in Toronto, Canada. At
the meeting, Michael proposed that we seriously consider
publishing a book version of the back issues. We did not find a
way to pursue the suggestion and to republish the back issues,
but William Rohler, another of our founding editors has gotten
all of our previous issues into a PDF format and they are now all
online at our web site at: http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/Back_Issues/.

This issue is celebrating 15 years of publication, so we also
include some articles from past issues to give current readers
and contributors a flavor of the earlier years of the Amateur
Computerist. We include "Dawn of a New Era" by Floyd Hoke-Miller.
Floyd welcomed the publication of the newsletter and put it in
the context of the pioneering struggle for an open press, that he
had been part of as a contributor to the early American labor
press, and the creation of a local trade union press in the UAW.
The article "The Impact of the Computer on Society: The Future"
describes the social potential that the computer can provide for
society if the goals are kept in mind, "The Spirit of Babbage:
Chapter One" looks back at the early mythological origins of the
computer and gives a fresh perspective for creating this
mythology anew. The labor roots of the newsletter are reflected
in the cartoon by Doc Wilson. There are other articles that
describe the commitment to freedom of speech that is required to
support the continued evolution of the computer and networking,
and an article about computer pioneers like Gary Kindall, the
creator of the early operating system CP/M, and why he is the kind
of pioneer that need to be remembered and cherished as those who
have made the open and vibrant networking world a reality. There
is also an interview with Staff Member, which looks back at the
roots of interactive computer development and the hobbyist
movement that spawned the BBS developments and the sharing
tradition it was part of. The second part of the interview looks
back at the introduction of computers onto the shop floor in a
factory and the kind of challenges that presents.

Along with these reflections from the past, we have included
articles on the potential for a more participatory democracy that
the Internet provides. The article "Doing Democracy" was written
to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the first posting online
of "The Net and Netizens". The article is reprinted from its
publication in German and English in the German online Journal
Telepolis. Another reprint from Telepolis, is John Horvath's
article "The Reality Behind E-democracy" examining how hard is
the challenge to actually achieve a democratic form of democracy,
and what are some of the obstacles to be overcome. The article by
K. Jean Min, "OhmyNews.com: A Case Study," describes how a
participatory form of journalism was created in South Korea and
how the netizens movement there was able to challenge the
conservative press and achieve some victories over it. A
president for the country who was not part of the conservative
power structure was elected as a result.

We want to thank our readers, subscribers, contributors and all
who have helped to make the Amateur Computerist possible through
these 15 years. Most especially I want to thank the editors.
William Rohler, Norman Thompson, and Jay Hauben have worked hard
to keep the Amateur Computerist publishing and developing. Sadly
one of our founding editors, Michael Hauben, is not able to share
this 15 year anniversary with us. We will strive to carry on the
tradition of the netizen that he helped to bring into the world.
We welcome comments on this and other past issues, contributions
from readers, and support toward continuing to publish the
Amateur Computerist long into the future so that there will be a
journal for those who do computing and online networking for the
love of it.
                                                  R. H.
----------------------------------------------------------------

[2]                       Doing Democracy
             Reflections on the 10 year Anniversary of the 
                 Publication of "The Net and Netizens"
                                   by Ronda Hauben
                                   ronda@panix.org

This is a period marked by serious political dissatisfaction
around the world. There is the promise of democratic societies,
but the promise too often is far removed from the reality of
people's lives. Yet there is the widespread yearning for a better
world, for a society where democracy is practiced, not merely
pretended. In this situation the question is raised: "What does
democracy look like? How does it function? Are there any
operational models to observe and learn from?"

Fortunately, there is a model to be examined, a practice to be
investigated. Ten years ago, on July 6, 1993, a student, [Michael
Hauben (1)], posted a paper on the Net. The title of the paper
was "Common Sense: The Net and Netizens". The paper begins:

"Welcome to the 21st Century. You are a Netizen (Net Citizen),
and you exist as a citizen of the world thanks to the global
connectivity that the Net gives you. You consider everyone as
your compatriot. You physically live in one country but you are
in contact with much of the world via the global computer
network. Virtually you live next door to every other single
netizen in the world. Geographical separation is replaced by
existence in the same virtual space."

It was a long paper so it was posted in three separate parts:
Preface (2), Paper (3), Appendix (4).

The paper introduced a concept, which has since spread around the
world, both online and off (see also Netizens: On the History and
Impact of Usenet and the Internet (5)). This concept can provide
a practical operational framework to explore a model for
democracy.

Describing how he hoped to focus the paper, the student wrote:
"The Net and Netizens: A Revitalization of People Power, a
Strengthening of People Power. Bottom Up is the Principle of this
paper."

The interesting aspect of "The Net and Netizens" is that it
identifies and describes the important role of the online user in
creating the new social treasure that had come to be known as the
Net. The net.citizen, or netizen, as the student wrote, was the
active agent in creating something new, the democratic online
content and form of the 1993 network of networks. The netizen
contributed information and viewpoints that made it possible to
consider an issue or problem and come to a reasoned judgment or
decision. Netizens would help other netizens if they deemed it
worthwhile.

The initiative that was being developed was from the netizens
themselves. Examples included a mailing list by a person in
Ireland summarizing the weekly news and sending it out to over
1000 people around the world who wanted to stay current with
Irish news; Usenet newsgroups like misc.news.southasia and
soc.culture.india which made it possible for people from an area
to continue contact with what was happening; a mailing list to
watch the prices of gas in California to warn against price
gouging. There were many other examples that the student provided
which he had learned from his research online.

The key aspect, however, of this new form of democracy, was that
the previously disenfranchised reader could now broadcast to
others around the world, news and views from a grassroots
perspective. Previously, there had been central control of the
mass media. Now the participant himself or herself, could provide
information to the online world about an event or an area of
knowledge. Netizens also had the ability to be citizen reporters,
to offer a more wide ranging set of viewpoints and perspectives
on issues or problems, a broader basis from which to form one's
own opinion, than hitherto had been possible.

Netizens could meet online, discuss issues and problems, and from
the process decide on the goal or direction to pursue. The
student saw this process as a way of revitalizing society, as a
way that those previously disenfranchised could gain power over
both their society and over their personal lives.

In this operating model of democracy, there were no elections or
representatives. Rather this embryo of democracy was focused on
the active participation and contributions of the many in a
manner not hitherto possible. The student described some of the
broad ranging ages and occupations of the more than 10 million
computer users who, by 1993, were connected around the world. At
the time the computer networking connections were made possible
by gateways between different networks, like the scientific and
educational Internet, the academic Bitnet, the technical research
Unix UUCP and Usenet network, the Cleveland Freenet for community
people, and other networks.

While the netizen was an active contributor to the developing
social treasure, the student realized the need to make it
possible for everyone to have access to this new communication
paradigm to realize its potential. He writes:

"This complete connection of the body of citizens of the world
does not exist as of today, and it will definitely be a fight to
make access to the Net open and available to all. However, in the
future we might be seeing the possible expansion of what it means
to be a social animal. Practically every single individual on the
Net today is available to every other person on the Net....
International connection coexists on the same level with local
connection. Also the computer networks allow a more advanced
connection between the people who are communicating."

Although the path was difficult, the student also appreciated the
importance of the goal. He writes:

"Despite the problems, for people of the world, the Net provides
a powerful way of peaceful assembly. Peaceful Assembly allows for
people to take control over their lives, rather than control
being in the hands of others. This power has to be honored and
protected. Any medium or tool that helps people to hold or gain
power is something special and has to be protected."

The focus of democracy, as described in "The Net and Netizens",
is on the people themselves, and on their ability and
achievements in determining the nature and development of their
society. It is on support for the ever increasing contributions
of more of the populace in the process.
----

Links 
(1) http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/ 
(2) http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/CS/Common_Sense1.txt 
(3) http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/CS/Common_Sense2.txt 
(4) http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/CS/Common_ Sense3.txt 
(5) http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_7/introduction/ 
----

A version of this article appeared on TELEPOLIS and can be seen
at: http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/15166/1.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------

[3]               The Reality Behind E-democracy
                                 by John Horvath
                                 jhorv@canada.com

The dream of e-democracy lives on, despite the fact that it
belongs in the realm of virtual reality.

Looking back, the late 1990s expectations of a "paradigm shift"
to an Internet-driven "new economy" was naively over-optimistic.
The economy as a whole wasn't altered as fundamentally as some
had hoped (or feared). Likewise, other utopian views of our
digital future have failed to materialise. This includes notions
of a new form of governance, commonly referred to as
"e-democracy".

Yet a growing number of people continue to view modern
communications technologies, such as the Internet and e-mail, as
a way to bridge the gap between citizen and government.
E-democracy is still seen as a way to breathe new life into
democratic systems of government. The interest in a "digital
democracy" is in part due to the fact that participation in
traditional democratic forums has hit new lows in the west. The
explanations for this apparent drift towards apathy are manifold,
as are the proposals for addressing it.

Without doubt, these are tough times for democracies in the
western world. At every level of government voter turnout is low
and, in many cases, steadily falling. Many citizens feel
government is becoming increasingly remote. There is little
transparency and there is corruption at all levels economic,
moral, and ideological rendering most democratic systems as
nothing more than a contest between tweedle-dees and
tweedle-dums. 

"From an intermittent democracy regulated by elections to a
continuous democracy"

Nevertheless, European Union leaders still consider the notion of
e-democracy as something worth pursuing and promoting. In a
recent special issue of The IPTS Report (1) put out this past
summer by the Seville-based Institute for Prospective
Technological Studies, government officials at local, national
and European levels, as well as broadcasters, academics and IT
specialists, attempted to identify the opportunities and pitfalls
on the road towards a digital democracy.

Several of the authors noted that the Internet, by breaking down
traditional barriers to communication, may provide a prime
opportunity to revolutionise the mechanics of democracy. "The
internet has created radical new possibilities to reinvigorate
and enrich democratic dialogue," stated Greek Foreign Minister
George Papandreou in the editorial.

The feeling of those who continue to harbour pleasant dreams
about a digital democracy is that the Internet could pave the way
for a more participative, or direct, democracy. "We are moving
from an intermittent democracy regulated by elections to a
continuous democracy," explained Andre Santini, the mayor of
Issy-les-Moulineaux, a Paris suburb that has carried out several
experiments in e-government. Just as some ancient Greek
city-states were role models for our modern democracies, Mr
Santini says that modern cities are spearheading the drive
towards electronic governance. "Local government has experienced
a real revival through the introduction of information and
communication technologies," he says.

According to The IPTS Report, digital democracy has made some
remarkable advances and provides a number of examples of
successful experiments. These include the world's first global
online poll which was set up to coincide with the Earth Summit in
Johannesburg, Internet games to promote participation among young
people, as well as citizen's forums and e-voting in local
elections. One notable example at the EU level was the recent
launch of the "e-Vote" project. As the report explains, tens of
thousands of European citizens have already voted on numerous
topical issues, with more than 100,000 expressing opinions on the
Iraq crisis alone.

One major hurdle for proponents of digital democracy, however, is
the enigma of the "digital divide". Democracy is by definition
inclusive, so the current level of Internet exclusion is a
fundamental constraint on the spread of e-democracy. In fact, new
research shows evidence of this digital divide growing in Europe.
The study (2), compiled by Forrester Research, suggests that by
2008, the proportion of homes with high speed Internet access in
Europe could vary from 5 per cent in Greece to 45 per cent in
Norway.

The study concludes that broadband in Europe will be unevenly
split along a clear north/south divide. Scandinavia and the
Netherlands will dominate the ratings; German-speaking Europe,
Belgium, Finland, and the U.K. will form a second tier; and
Southern Europe and Ireland will continue to lag. Overall, by
2008 Forrester predicts that only 30 per cent of all homes in
Europe will have broadband.

Realising the extent of this gap, some have suggested that if the
EU and its Member States regard electronic participation
seriously, they must then ensure universal access to the
technology. "As we move towards a written EU constitution, we
must ensure that the Internet [...] is in both its heart and
mind," says Derek Wyatt, member of the UK parliament. Wyatt urges
governments to view the Internet in the same way as gas and
electricity, as a public utility for all.

This, in itself, is a problem of sorts: if Internet access is to
be regarded as a public utility like electricity, does this mean
the more money you have the more you are able to exercise your
democratic rights and responsibilities? And what happens when the
lights go out, as in the U.S., the U.K., and more recently all of
Italy? Are your democratic rights then suspended or at least put
on hold until the power comes back on? No doubt, this would give
extra meaning to Bertrand Russel's saying that we have our
freedom until we need it the most.

Waving the wand of electronic wizardry will not magically boost
democratic participation.

Along these lines, some have been careful to warn that simply
waving the wand of electronic wizardry will not magically boost
democratic participation. "The process of widening involvement
[...] will be harder than just creating the opportunity to
participate," cautions Greg Dyke, Director-General of the BBC.
"E-democracy requires not just technical development but deep
cultural change where the 'citizen consumer' is given a
recognised role in the political process." Mr Dyke suggests that
public television can provide an instructive model for greater
citizen involvement and a crucial link between government and
society. "The BBC and other European public service broadcasters
may be better placed than almost any other organisations to
provide a starting point to encourage the widest range of people
to participate in civic life."

At the end of the day, what is missed by many when considering
the question of digital democracy is not just issues of
technology or access. "Digital literacy" is also important. Many
who use the Internet today don't exploit it to its full
potential; they are trapped within the narrow confines of basic
and routine tasks. Most wouldn't know how to find information
which exist outside the range of Google, Yahoo, or MSN, for
instance.

Moreover, democracy is not simply the act of voting but also of
taking a measure of interest and responsibility for actions which
may affect society as a whole. While some mention activities such
as communicating with elected representatives as a step forward
for the concept of digital democracy, computer-mediated
communications in this case can be a curse as well as a blessing.
True, it makes it easier to make contact, but automation
processes also enable elected representatives to hide behind
their virtual identities, sometimes avoiding the public
altogether. As that old adage from the late 1990s goes, "no-one
knows if you're a dog on-line".

But even more important than this is the realisation that most
politicians and policymakers who talk about e-government are not
really interested in democracy at all. The proof is in the
pudding, as can be seen in anti-globalisation protests in Europe
and abroad. When real democratic participation is attempted by
citizens at large, leaders hide behind high fences and far away
in remote locations, surrounded by successive rings of security.
For digital democracy to succeed in reality, off-line democracy
must first exist in practice. ----

Notes: 

(1) The IPTS Report. Special issue on e-democracy, Number 75,
    European Commission, Joint Research Centre, June 2003,
    http://www.jrc.es/iptsreport 
(2) http://dbs.cordis.lu/cordis-cgi/srchidadb?ACTION=D&SESSION=
    129102003-10-8&DOC=2&TBL=EN_NEWS&RCN=EN_RCN_ID:20704&CALLER=
    EN_UNIFIEDSRCH 
----

This article originally appeared on Telepolis:
http://www.telepolis.de/english/inhalt/te/15807/1.html
---------------------------------------------------------------

[4] [Editors Note: The following case study was written before
Roh Moo-hyun won the presidential election in South Korea in
November 2003. The critical factor in his winning the presidency
was the support and active participation of the South Korean
netizens movement. OhmyNews is reported to have played a
significant role in that movement.]

               OhmyNews.com: A Case Study
                          by K. Jean Min
                          kjean@kgsm.kaist.ac.kr

"The Net is vast and infinite," mulls a cyborg agent, Kusanagi,
in a cyberpunk anime Ghost in the Shell before she jumps into the
Net with her newfound body. Oh Yeon-ho also dreamed of jumping
into the Net someday with a slightly different idea; recruit a
corps of young cyber reporters from the vast and infinite Net.
For his master's degree in mass-communication during his stay in
United States, he wrote a paper on the start-up of a news media
business. He aspired to publish a news media powerful enough to
compete with major newspapers or broadcasting stations in terms
of agenda-setting power. But doing so required a huge sum of
capital investment and hundreds of seasoned professional
reporters. With the meager money he raised from his pocket and
that of a couple of other investors, he realized the only answer
lay in the Internet.

So was launched OhmyNews.com, the first Korean vernacular
Internet news service made purely by Netizens. Within just two
years it has earned a rock-solid reputation as one of the most
influential Internet news sites among Korean netizens. Last year
it was ranked as 8th influential news media in Korea by the
annual Sisa Journal survey, a fast and unprecedented success in
the fierce Korean news business. Currently it is enticing more
than a million visitors everyday, an all time high number
throughout its short life.
		

Company Overview 
-------------------------------------------------
|-Founded; February 22nd. 2000                  |
|-Initial capital; KRW 200M won ($170,000)      |
|-Product/Service: On-line daily news provider  |
|-Major income source:                          |
|     banner advertising(70%),                  |
|     journalism school (20%),                  |
|     news contents sale (10%),                 |
|     OhmyNews 2002 (Weekly News magazine),     | 
|     classified ads                            |
|-Market value: not listed yet                  |
|-Competition: no serious contenders in general |
| on-line daily news category except Pressian   |
-------------------------------------------------

Turn-Off

How did it grow so fast? First of all, venturing into a news
business, especially print news requires a huge initial
investment. You have to build a massive printing plant, hire at
least a couple of hundred reporters and establish a national
distribution network in a single month or two. Even if you
execute this daunting job quickly and flawlessly, there is no
guarantee of success whatsoever. This is because such powerful
media giants as Chosun Ilbo, Joongang Ilbo and Dong-A Ilbo
already dominate the Korean news market with their combined
market share hovering around a whopping 70%. Moreover they wield
exclusive power over their critical national distribution
network.

It is virtually impossible to penetrate into the news market to
say nothing of surviving as a major player even if you possess
unlimited resources. In other words, the Korean print news market
was heavily fortified to protect the dominance of the incumbent
players.

The clear evidence is Hyundai's failed endeavor. Hyundai group
founder Chung Ju Young tried to set his foot into the news
business by introducing Munhwa Ilbo with a hidden aim of using it
as a political leverage during the upcoming presidential election
in 1992. Neither he nor his beloved Munhwa Ilbo succeeded in this
bold endeavor though he poured hundreds of billions of wons until
he finally sold his stake in the paper. Munhwa Ilbo was ranked
way below OhmyNews in the same survey conducted by Sisa Journal
last year.

Turn-On

OhmyNews learned a lot from the fate of Munhwa Ilbo. It realized
that venturing into the newspaper market was an insane idea and
decided to create a daily news media existing and operating only
in cyberspace. That way it could save tons of money which
otherwise it had to provide by borrowing or fund-raising.

Secondly it opened its news gathering web server to all Netizens.
Anyone who has something to tell or bits of news whom it calls
News Guerillas can log on to the OhmyNews server, type in his or
her story and upload related pictures. Dedicated editors in
OhmyNews scan them and evaluate quality and validity of each
article a netizen has reported and select ones that satisfy the
preset guideline. Each netizen reporter will be rewarded with
cyber cash depending on the number and importance of selected
articles. That way OhmyNews could produce enough news content
without hiring a bunch of dedicated reporters.

The validity of such a radical idea had already been proven.
Countless numbers of cyber writers were flexing their editorial
muscle on various web-logs, bulletin boards or their own
homepages. OhmyNews was confident that a lot of talented writers
are out there starving for public recognition. That is exactly
what OhmyNews provided; public cyberspace where an amateur cyber
writer can express his or her writing skill in the eyes of
hundreds of thousands of netizens with some cash rewards as a
bonus.

The cash reward per each article offered by the editing desk is a
meager amount. Depending on the level of news space hierarchy
that each article had occupied, the cyber reporter was paid one
thousand, five thousand or ten thousand won respectively (from
$.85 to $8.50). Nonetheless, cyber reporters or columnists did
not care much about the money. After all, they were rewarded
already when their editorials, columns or reports were given a
little shaft of floodlight.

Since the news space of OhmyNews was professionally presented in
terms of the look and feel and design esthetics compared with
other amateur web-logs, cyber writers were generally more
satisfied than elsewhere. OhmyNews started with 700 plus news
guerillas when it was launched back in Feb. 2000 but quickly
gained thousands of new guerillas month after month until it
reached over 18,000 as of May 2002.

On the other hand, as the futurist Alvin Tofler once predicted in
his book Future Shock, these netizen reporters could be deemed as
true 'prosumers' in that they participate in the production of
news stories that they would consume themselves. This strategy
again reinforced readers' loyalty to OhmyNews since it assured
them that their voice was heard.

      Demographics of News Guerillas
           (As of Nov. 2001)
-------------------------------------------
|Sex           Number         %           |
|                                         |
|Male          11189        74.40%        |
|Female         3838        25.60%        |
|                                         |
|Age          Number          %           |
|                                         |
|10~19         1593         10.60%        |
|20~29         6782         45.10%        |
|30~39         4872         32.40%        |
|40~49         1454          9.70%        |
|50~59          258          1.70%        |
|60~70           56          0.40%        |
|70~79           17          0.10%        |
|                                         |
|Occupation		  Number     %    |
|                                         |
|Undergraduates		   3515	   23.40% |
|Others			   2408	   16.00% |
|White Collar		   2276	   15.10% |
|Journalist		   1391	    9.30% |
|Small Business		    750	    5.00% |
|Self employed		    720	    4.80% |
|High school student	    696	    4.60% |
|Graduates		    582	    3.90% |
|IT		            564	    3.80% |
|Middle school student	    527	    3.50% |
|Teachers		    481     3.20% |
|Public servant		    375     2.50% |
|Arts			    234	    1.60% |
|Homemaker		    199	    1.30% |
|Medical		    124	    0.80% |
|Armed force	            106     0.70% |
|Farmer			     60	    0.40% |
|Legal		             24	    0.20% |
-------------------------------------------

Lastly, it redefined the scope of news itself. OhmyNews shattered
conventional wisdom that only stories about the who's who in
politics, economy and cultural arena can merit being treated as
"news". Why should ordinary people be fed with tons of irrelevant
news they have no use for?, it asked. This Copernican about-face
on the concept of the news came as a shock to the majority of
Korean netizens. Since the majority of news consumers were deeply
dissatisfied with the autocratic voice and arbitrary editorials
of the Big Three newspapers, this iconoclastic approach to news
created a stir among young readers.

Take off

As OhmyNews gained attention and became the talk of the town, the
number of newly joining news guerillas as well as daily visitors
began to explode. To make these first-time visitors come again,
and hence retain them as permanent readers, OhmyNews devised from
its inception another hook named Readers' Voice.

Readers' Voice worked this way. Each visitor can jot down his or
her comment below each article. If he likes a certain article, he
can show his preference by clicking into an accompanying banner.
The first attempt of this kind in the news business. Each click
translates into 50 won (4.25 cents) additional reward for the
netizen reporters. To earn as much money as possible netizen
reporters should do their best to produce quality news. And some
readers would visit OhmyNews with a single purpose of enjoying
readers' comments.

Often, Readers' Voice quickly escalated into the de facto
Readers' Forum as readers chatted and fought among themselves.
Some hotly debated topics would casually draw more than a
thousand reader comments, a phenomenal number for a fledgling
Internet news media. That gave another boost for its page view
performance. Readers' Voice became so popular among netizens that
even OhmyNews' powerful archrival Chosun Ilbo decided to adopt
this service into Dizzo, its Internet equivalent. Readers' Voice
proved an ultimate device to exploit the interactivity of the
Internet.

All these efforts combined with occasional scoops brought
handsome rewards to OhmyNews. Visitors and page views of the site
literally exploded. They marveled at 100,000 plus daily visitors
during the first year when OhmyNews reported a comical sit-down
demonstration of former president Kim Young Sam for 24 hours.
This incident epitomized the potential of the Internet as the
most favored news media to deliver "history as it happens".

Soon this record was broken when OhmyNews reported the fuss over
the U.S. Presidential Election in late 2000. Record after record
was broken to create new heights of daily visitors statistics.

Live cast of the historic event as it actually happened glued the
readers to the site creating a powerful stickiness factor. There
was an increasing pattern of daily visitors as well as website
ranking since its foundation in Feb. 2000 up until May 2000.

As time went by, the news content by news guerillas was stacked
up to produce a huge amount. OhmyNews published several books
containing ordinary stories by ordinary news guerillas. Some
prominent news guerillas were even approached by a publishing
agency for possible publication of their columns or articles that
appeared on the news site. The increasing off-line presence of
OhmyNews boosted on-line power again making it the 10th and 8th
most influential news media in Korea in 2000 and 2001
respectively in a survey conducted by Sisa Journal.

Using the ever-increasing number of visitors and its influence as
leverage, OhmyNews intensified sales of its ad space and also
sold its news content to DAUM, the largest Korean portal site.
Its major revenue source was comprised of ad sales (70%),
journalism school (20%) and news content sales (10%) as of 2001.

Live web casting from the Ruling Party Presidential Caucus

However, as is the case with other Internet ventures in Korea,
the phenomenal success of OhmyNews would have been impossible
without the world's highest level of broadband penetration in
Korea. The rapidly expanding number of broadband subscribers
provided OhmyNews another jumping off point. It realized video
and audio rich content could be easily carried to netizens' PCs
via this fat pipe.

In early March 2002, OhmyNews experimented with live web casting
by airing real time pictures from the ruling party's caucus in
Kwangjoo to elect a presidential candidate. It turned out to be a
huge success. The OhmyNews server counted over three million
unique page views in a single day, another record to be broken to
reach five and six million figure each new month.

With the full swing broadband environment firmly in place,
OhmyNews could become anything, be it a daily newspaper,
occasional broadcasting station or live web radio. By that time
the dedicated reporters in OhmyNews began to call themselves a
multimedia news agency.

Transformation

As a progressive and politics-oriented news media as OhmyNews is,
it has a certain limit in terms of expanding its readership
potential significantly. Establishing itself as a firm news media
without losing the allure of an iconoclastic underdog is a tricky
game. OhmyNews will lose its loyal readers once it tries to
satisfy as many politically varied segments at once as possible.
We would rather recommend it to expand the scope of its news
stories significantly without deviating from its progressive and
center-left biased political color.

Publishing OhmyNews 2002, a weekly off-line equivalent of
OhmyNews also helped. Off-line readers clicked into the on-line
OhmyNews and vice versa. That way it could expand its readership
foundation significantly creating on-off synergy. Focusing on
covering the presidential election campaign might also help this
year. The lion's share of its readership comes from the age group
ranging from late twenties to early thirties, the most
politically dynamic demographic segment in Korea.

If it maintains this strategy we believe it can certainly jack up
its ranking significantly as the most influential news media in
Korea. Let's wait and see this November, when Sisa Journal
conducts its annual survey named 'Korea's most admired and
influential News media'.

Summary & Lessons:

* Netizens want their voices to be heard; they are prosumers
instead of passive consumers.

* OhmyNews made the most out of existing Internet infrastructure
eliminating the need of a huge capital investment.

* Find a way to translate huge viewership into a profit machine:
banner advertising, classified ads, news contents sale, off-line
publishing and shopping mall for readers.

* Differentiate your image to establish political identity then
stick to yourself to maintain a lasting brand entity
------------------------------------------------------------------------

[5]         Will the Internet and Netizens Impact 
             the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election?
                                 by Ronda Hauben
                                 ronda@ais.org

For a while Howard Dean's campaign for the Democratic Party
nomination in the U.S. seemed to startle political observers.(1)
His use of the Internet and his volunteer campaign staff of
netizens were succeeding in unexpected ways to change campaigning
procedures and practices. Many of his volunteers have been
recruited via the Meetup.org online web site, and his campaign
staff sponsors a "Deanblog for America" web site that allows
readers to comment on his campaign articles.(2) There are other
web sites like blogforamerica.com which provide both articles
from the Dean campaign and comments by supporters.(3) Dean's
campaign also surprised other contenders for the nomination by
raising significant campaign funds online.

As the campaign for the Iowa caucus votes and then the New
Hampshire primary gathered steam, the news media in the U.S. is
focusing less on the potential of the Internet to help candidates
gain the Democratic Party nomination. Instead the conservative
media organizations are encouraging the old means of campaigning
that has led the Democratic Party to become increasingly harder
to distinguish from the Republican Party. Negative or positive
campaign ads on television, leaflets in mailboxes, newspaper and
television editorials, and televised debates are forms of
campaigning that bring the old guard of the major political
parties back on the political stage they have dominated for so
long. This is the kind of politics that led to the situation in
the 2000 Presidential election where the distinction between the
major party candidates was so slim that the Supreme Court was
allowed to decide the election.

Can the Internet help overcome the barriers to defeating an
incumbent in the 2004 U.S. Presidential election? Observers of
the role played in the South Korean Presidential election by
netizens and the Internet are wondering if the success of their
efforts are a phenomena that can be repeated in the upcoming U.S.
Presidential election. In 2002, a South Korean netizens movement
was able to effectively challenge the political old guard by
waging an Internet campaign first to nominate and then elect Roh
Moo-hyun as the South Korean President.(4) Netizens challenged
the previous forms of campaign strategy. Critical to the success
of the South Korean netizens was an online press that welcomed
discussion of its articles by online users. Even more important,
however, was the way it promoted the practice of "Every citizen a
reporter."(5) The most notable of these is the media organization
OhmyNews. This organization started online in February, 2000 with
little money and four full time reporters. The publisher, Yeon-ho
Oh welcomed articles from volunteer reporters he called "citizen
reporters". The online newspaper soon had contributions from 737
citizen reporters and the interest of a growing number of
readers. By September 2003, the number of professional
journalists working for OhmyNews had climbed to 53, and there
were 26,700 citizen reporters contributing articles. Citizen
reporters are paid a small fee for their articles. They
contribute their articles to make OhmyNews a force to challenge
the conservative news organizations that had previously
monopolized Korean politics.

There is not a similar kind of news media organization in the
U.S., though the different Democratic candidate campaigns,
especially the Dean campaign, are using webblogs to promote
communication among their supporters.

A recent event in China, however, demonstrates the power of
participation online. Recently the Chinese online press described
the death of a Chinese peasant and the injury of several others
in Harbin, the capital of the Heilongjiang Province in Northeast
China. The woman, Liu Zhongxia, was killed after a BMW driven by
Su Xiuwen hit her. The BMW had had its rearview mirror slightly
damaged after Liu's husband Dai Yiquan, who was driving a
tractor, swerved slightly to avoid hitting a vehicle that was
coming into him on the narrow road.(6)

The driver of the BMW got out of her car and reportedly
threatened Dia and his wife. Then Su got back into her BMW, and
instead of backing away from the accident, drove the car forward
killing Liu and injuring several of the bystanders. The case went
to court and the BMW driver was given a suspended sentence. The
fact that none of those injured, or who had been bystanders
testified at the trial, however, was part of the troubling
circumstances that led to a public outcry over the events of this
case. Dai and the others injured received cash settlements from
the BMW driver's husband. In exchange, they agreed not to speak
about the case.

Chinese netizens learned of the case, and the court verdict and
began posting to Internet forums. Soon there were 70,000 comments
on the news web site Sina.com, a famous Chinese web portal.(7) By
the second week in January, 2004, the Washington Post reports
that there had been over 310,000 messages posted at the Sina
portal, when the Chinese government had the site delete 20% of
the messages as being too critical of the government. By
Thursday, January 15, 2004, the 250,000 messages that remained
were deleted as well.(8) By this time, the case had achieved
international attention. It had become a symbol of the growing
gap between rich and poor in China and of the frustration among
the Chinese population with the corruption in government
accompanying the government's pro business policy.

Even in a country censoring Internet use, like China, netizens
have demonstrated the power that online discussion forums can
provide for the grassroots. Those discussing the BMW incident
online, have been able to bring the case to the attention of the
national and international media and are seeking to have the case
retried. Can the Dean campaign or the campaigns of other
democratic candidates vying for the nomination tap this power of
the Internet and of netizens to achieve what seems unachievable?
An online press welcoming and encouraging citizen contributions
of articles and discussion of those articles would help. In
China, netizens are finding ways to counter the censorship of
online discussion. In South Korea, netizens were able to create a
vibrant online netizens movement to elect the candidate they
supported to the South Korean Presidency. The upcoming election
in the U.S. is a challenge to U.S. netizens to learn from the
experience of others around the world and in the U.S. to be able
to tap the power of the Internet to make a significant impact on
the 2004 Presidential election.(9)

(1) http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/16503/1.html
(2) http://www.deanforamerica.com/
(3) http://www.blogforamerica.com/
(4) http://www.seoprise.com/technote/read.cgi?board=min&y_number=106&nnew=2
(5) http://www.japanmediareview.com/japan/internet/1063672 919p.php
(6) http://www1.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2004-01/18/content _300105.htm
(7) http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/forumpost.shtml?toppid=39672
(8) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21197--2004Jan15.html
(9) http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netizens2004.txt

This article appeared on Telepolis and can be seen at: 

http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/16613/1.html. 

It also appeared in Korean and English on OhmyNews at: 

http://www.ohmynews.com/articleview/
article_view.asp?menu=c10400&no=148854&rel_no=1&adcheck=1&index=1
------------------------------------------------------------------------

[6]     Fifteenth Anniversary of the Amateur Computerist

Two thousand and three marked the 15th year of publication of the
Amateur Computerist newsletter. To commemorate those 15 years the
staff held a reunion. We reprint in this issue three letters
connected with the reunion and eight articles reprinted from our
earlier issues. Back issues from all 15 years are online in PDF
format at http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/Back_Issues.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

[7] Letters

Letter from the Amateur Computerist

Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 22:18:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jay Hauben
Subject: Amateur Computerist 15th Anniversary

Dear Friend, 
   Begun in 1988, 2003 marks the 15th Anniversary of the Amateur
Computerist.
   For these 15 years the Amateur Computerist has championed love
of computing, universal access, netizenship, defense of the net
as a public domain and progress toward participatory democracy on
and off the net.
   Sending out the Amateur Computerist for 15 years we have
occasionally received comments, suggestions and criticisms from
our readers. These are always welcomed and helpful in our work.
   We would be especially happy to receive comments and greetings 
via email from any and all of our readers on this occasion.
   In 1988 when we edited our first issue the whole staff lived
in the Detroit area. Since 1994 we have edited our issues using
the Internet because we no longer live close enough to meet in
person. We did have a reunion in 1998 to mark the tenth
anniversary. This weekend August 1-4 we will again have a
reunion. This time to mark the 15th anniversary of our
publication.
   The reunion will be in the Harrisburg region of Pennsylvania
in the USA If any of our readers in that region would like to
greet us in person, please send me email and I will try to make
arrangements. I will be reading my email until Friday morning
August 1.

Take care.
For the Amateur Computerist,
Jay Hauben
----------

Letter from Germany

Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 09:44:10 +0200
From: Ronald J. Bartle <RJBartle@t-online.de>
Subject: AW: 15 year anniversary

To the Staff of the Amateur Computerist on the Occasion of the 15th Anniversary.

Hi to you folks.  I am a British (Royal) Air Force war disabled veteran
who has generally speaking, been through a bit in life and as a result
have some opinions and views that I had for many years not found much
opportunity to express. Not many of us are blessed with the ownership of a
newspaper-publishing house or have the wherewithal to set up a TV Station.
On the other hand many of us have quite legitimate reasons to feel
strongly about this or that matter of concern on the political front and
are keen to see a bit more real democracy practiced. In the early 80's I
was encouraging discussion by distributing progressive literature on the
Streets of SW London and backing this up by regular debates via CB Radio.
Then as if destiny had seen the frustrations of folks such as myself along
came the Internet. Not surprisingly with my background in military and
other professional communications I personally found it not too hard to
get online and became one of the early subscribers to the Amateur
Computerist. One had become well aware of the potential for real
advancement in the lot of mankind that the net _could_ mean if it was
maintained, preserved and defended as a modern-day Forum in the old
democratic Tradition of Greece and Rome.

Not only because of climate -- many of our modern
industrial-nation cities do not really offer much of a physical
forum where the citizens can sit around and discuss the affairs
of the day and formulate a common position, which would then come
to the notice of the ruling classes. If there is a widely
accessible Forum -- today it would tend to be on-line and still
needs to be made more accessible to a broader proportion of the
general public globally. As you will be well aware -- it is just
such considerations as these that the Amateur Computerist has
been pursuing and upholding down the years and one can only hope
that the readership will extend and that its influence will
expand. I congratulate you folks on your faithful support for
this important project down the years and trust you will find
fulfilment and occasionally even some fun while continuing to do
so.

Ronald J. Bartle
(Computer and Internet Consultant to the German Federal Association of
Psychiatric Survivors -- www.bpe-online.de)
--------

Letter from Australia

Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 15:11:27 +1000
From: Geiselhart, Karin
Subject: 15th anniversary

Dear Jay and Ronda,

Sorry I could not be with you for the anniversary of the Amateur
Computerist. My thoughts were with you, and I hope it was a great pleasure
for all concerned....

My latest work project (local broadband content) is at
http://creativecanberra.net. My contract here finishes mid-September, then
I might continue the project with community groups. 

Much love, 
Karin
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

[8] [Editors Note: To mark the 10th anniversary of publication
online of the seminal article the Net and Netizens, Pier Luigi
Capucci, Director of Noema, in Italy and his students reformatted
the article and put it on their web site. The following is
Capucci's Introduction to the article at: http://www.noemalab.
com/sections/specials/netizen/main.html]

                Net and the Netizens Commemorated

This is a draft, originally in text format, which led to the book
Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet,
by Michael and Ronda Hauben, published by the IEEE Computer
Society in 1997 and which also appears in an online edition.
"Netizen" is today a common and widespread term. We can find it
on many occasions, debates, articles, essays, art exhibits,
political acts (like the Netizens Protection Act introduced by
the U.S. Congress against online spamming in 1997)... search
engines can show about 100.000 instances of this word. The
"Netizen" concept involves a new and extended vision of our
society, which we are hardly shaping and redefining with many
social, ethical, political, cultural issues to be aware of.

Michael Hauben, who coined the term "Netizen" and gave it a
meaning, posting his research on Usenet just ten years ago, died
suddenly in New York on June 27, 2001, at 28. His research,
starting from the origins and development of Usenet to the
diffusion of the Net (he participated in online communities since
the early 1980s), is fundamental for understanding the current
information society, from sharing information to online
communication and participation, from the rising and diffusion of
the Internet communities to the net policies. He is one of the
pioneers who can envisage the future and help us to find the way.
With Michael we believe in a vision of the online world as a
powerful and positive place.

We greatly thank Ronda Hauben for the permission to republish
this draft and the help in this Noema issue on the Netizen idea.

Pier Luigi Capucci, Noema director
------------------------------------------------------------------------

[9] Reprints

In honor of 15 years of the publication of the Amateur
Computerist we are reprinting some articles from our early
issues.
-------------

[10] [The following is reprinted from the Volume 1 number 1 issue
of the Amateur Computerist.]

                               INTRODUCTION

This newsletter is to inform people of developments in an effort
to advance computer education. Workers at the Ford Rouge Plant in
Dearborn, MI. were denied computer programming classes. There was
an effort by administrators of the UAW-Ford program at the
Dearborn Engine Plant to kill interest in computers and computer
programming. We want to keep interest alive because computers are
the future. We want to disperse information to users about
computers. Since the computer is still in the early stage of
development, the ideas and experiences of the users need to be
shared and built on if this technology is to advance. To this
end, this newsletter is dedicated to all people interested in
learning about computers. We welcome articles, programs, reviews,
etc. We want this newsletter to help people use their computers
in ways that will be useful and fun. 
--------------

[11] [The following is reprinted from the Volume 1 number 1 issue
of the Amateur Computerist.]

                            DAWN OF A NEW ERA

From the Age of Darkness to the Age of Enlightenment from the
Machine Age to the Mind Age, here we are. Let not any force or
forces keep it under wraps. Let it be free to circulate in the
Public Domain. Let us base it upon principle, not on price, like
Truth or Love. From the Great Wall to the Great Pyramid, from the
hieroglyphics to the screen of the computer, mankind is still
progressing. So make the new born science, that has given us the
computer for the amateur and not as a prerogative of the
professional to be shrouded in secrecy from humanity, the choice
of the individual, not an election of a minority. From the
falling star to the falling apple, from the minute to the
multitudinous, from secrets to disclosure, I am pleased to
endorse the amateur method. Therefore I implore all to plan and
to participate even though I have been on disability for 26 years
and have not had the opportunity to participate in the great sea
of knowledge that has flowed over the Dam of Secrecy since I was
inactivated physically and mentally in my advanced years and
state of general debility I still see the mind of man the
greatest computer of all So Let Us Continue to Make Use of It to
the Advantage of the Masses Come, Let Us Reason Together. With an
open mind and a free spirit. Let me reiterate, there is so much
more to know, that what we do know, is still insignificant. It
gives me great pleasure to endorse this free-for-all program of a
restless mind.

Floyd Hoke-Miller, UAW Retiree and Flint Sit Down Striker
(1895-1990) 
---------------

[12] Cartoon (see http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACn12-1.pdf)
---------------

[13] [The following is reprinted from the Volume 1 number 3 issue
of the Amateur Computerist.]

                        COMPUTERS AND FREE SPEECH
         	                      by Michael Hauben 

Should there be unlimited freedom of speech? Should the Supreme
Court or any other federal court have the right to censor? Does
EVERYBODY have freedom of speech? These are some of the questions
based on freedom of speech. When Hitler came to power in Germany,
he limited freedom of speech by ending constitutional law. When
the Chairman of the opposing party made a passionate plea, Hitler
said, "Late you come, but still you come...during the time we
were in the opposition...in those days our press was forbidden
and forbidden and again forbidden, our meetings were forbidden
and we were forbidden to speak, and I was forbidden to speak, for
years on end. And now you say: criticism is salutary!"(1)

For our society, freedom of speech is part of the Bill of Rights
of our Constitution. Many of the states that ratified the
Constitution did so with an understanding that a Bill of Rights
restricting the power of the federal government would be adopted.
Patrick Henry was one of the many to demand the Bill of Rights.
He argued successfully for the Bill. The different freedoms,
including freedom of speech, protected by the Bill of Rights have
been and still will be defined through various cases brought up
in federal courts.

The concept of freedom of speech has a long history. It expanded
to speech on paper in the 15th Century when Johannes Gutenberg
invented moveable type in Europe. Books that were cheap and
common replaced the valuable, rare manuscripts immediately after
the press was introduced. Information could now be delivered to
all who could read, instead of only to those within earshot of a
speaker. In England, the governing body thought the power of the
printing press dangerous enough to assign a censor.  That
censorship was shut down by Parliament and then reinstalled after
a flood of licentious and seditious literature came out of the
mighty presses. Many of these new uncensored books were
politically or theologically based.

John Milton, a 36 year old poet and a classical scholar of known
reputation, published on his own and without a license in the
17th Century, an answer to the Parliament's censoring of printed
materials. He called it Areopagitica. In it he says "First, the
decision of a censor cannot be trusted unless the censor is
infallible and beyond corruption. No mortal possesses such grace;
therefore no mortal is qualified to be a censor. Second, since
anything may tend to evil if misused, an effective system of
censorship will end up suppressing everything even music,
dancing, windows, balconies, eating, drinking, clothes and `the
mixt conversation of our youth, male and female together.' Third,
if a scheme for issuing licenses be instituted, what does one do
with books already printed and in circulation? Fourth, the job of
censor is so dull and unsatisfactory that no able person will
want it."(2)

In the five parts of Milton's text, he talks about the types of
people for whom he is writing this book. The main type, the
humanist, is devoted to the debate and the discussion of things
like freedom of speech. He was the man of learning that Milton
had in mind. Milton knew that the person who talks about freedom
of speech requires freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech has been a topic widely debated around the
world on university campuses. For example, in 1964 on the
Berkeley Campus of the University of California, there developed
the Free Speech Movement which was a forerunner of the
student-based civil rights and anti-war movements that were
active for the next ten years. From Berkeley came several leaders
for the up and coming computer Homebrew movement which was the
beginning of all personal computers we know today. In the last
two years, there have been student revolts against the political
system in China and France.

Freedom of speech is still freedom of speech even for bad causes.
In North Carolina, and several other states, one can pay $5.00
for an "open sesame" password onto the Aryan National Liberty
Net, an electronic Bulletin Board. It contains the latest in
neo-Nazi thought offering sections entitled "Know your Enemies",
"ZOG Informers" and "Patriotic Groups." One of the main concerns
is that of kids who like to hack into closed computer bulletin
boards. They are the most vulnerable to this type of hate
propaganda.

An important vehicle in the fight for free speech is the personal
computer. The personal computer can be a facilitator of free
speech because it is an information machine. It grew out of the
supporters of the anti-war movement who wanted a personal
computer for the masses. At the time, the computers available
were the mainframes made by IBM and other big manufacturers,
affordable to only huge companies and the government, and the
mini-computers manufactured by DEC (Digital Equipment
Corporation) and others. The minicomputers were more of a people
computer because universities could afford them and make them
available to students.

Many clubs formed that had people interested in a people's
computer. California's Homebrew Club was one of the famous ones.
Many important founders of the personal computer blossomed in the
Homebrew Club. The first couple of real personal computers were
made exclusive, because the manufacturers wanted to make profit
from them. The hackers soon defeated the exclusive rights that
these manufacturers wanted. They figured out and standardized
different aspects of the machines to fit the hacker ethic, which
stated everything should be in public domain so that people could
learn something from, be able to benefit from, and finally be
able to enhance it. As a result of these pioneers, IBM was
forced, when it entered the personal computer market, to conform
to the pioneers and to make an open, public machine. IBM of all
companies! IBM was the Godfather of the Mainframes. These
pioneers achieved a victory for free speech!

In 1987, on the campus of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor),
free speech was again brought into question. On an electronic
bulletin board available to the University community, a file of
ethnic, racial and other jokes offensive to specific groups was
made available by certain students. The file kindled the fire of
debate on freedom of speech and computer propriety. After the
student who started the file, was pressured to close it, more
debate flourished. Some students started files with page-long
essays on the evils of bigotry, while others started new joke
files. So some students answered the discontinued joke file,
while others restarted it. Now that's definitely freedom of
speech!

Even more debates have been started about whether to limit what
people can say by computer, whether bad jokes should be allowed
as a category. "Some schools such as Dartmouth and
Carnegie-Mellon have imposed a code of ethics for students using
their computers, with violators facing removal from the system.
Dartmouth specifically prohibits offensive material in a code
that warns: `Obscenities should not be sent by computer nor
stored where they could offend other users'."(3) Supporters of
the joke file say that no one was forced to read the file and
that they had to go out of their way to read it. Isn't there
always a temptation though? Robert Parnes, programmer of the
software used for the electronic bulletin board, said that he
thought that the students would try to test the bounds of
decency.

Our world would have to be made better to have unlimited freedom
of speech. Most people in the world who have a type of Bill of
Rights have some protection of their freedom of speech. As
Barbara Amiel writes in her article "Censoring One, Censoring
All", "You either have free speech for everybody or you do not
have free speech"(4), you have to have unlimited freedom of
speech or you are discriminating against a viewpoint. The result
of unlimited freedom of speech is that if someone exercises their
freedom and expresses their viewpoint on a matter, a person of an
opposing viewpoint would be able to answer the first person's
work. This way everyone could hear all sides on that matter and
make up their own minds on what they agree with.

								
1. Barbara Amiel, Censoring One, Censoring All, MacLean's, April 15, 
   1985, p 11.
2. Irving Younger, "What Good Is Freedom of Speech?", Commentary, 
   vol 79, Jan. '85, pp 45 - 46.
3. Isabel Wilkerson, "Ethnic Jokes in Campus Prompt Debate", New 
   York Times, April 18, 1987
4. Barbara Amiel.
----------

[14] [The following is reprinted from the Volume 2 number 4 issue
of the Amateur Computerist.]

                           TRUE HEROS
                                by Michael Hauben

A hero is not someone who only appears a hero in our eyes, but
one who achieves good for the common man, against the will of the
establishment. This person must be able to stand up against the
common bad, instead of pleasing somebody. Often this person will
either have all or most of society going against him. The hero
must be able to stand up for what he believes in and not succumb
to outside pressure.

Galileo is a good example of a hero. He challenged the Church by
publishing his scientific findings, which were against the then
current and less accurate Aristotelian science. He kept on
studying and his mind was unchanged even after the Inquisition
challenged him. So in the end, when the Inquisition tried to
silence him by putting him under house-arrest, he still got his
writings out to the people. Galileo would not be silenced by the
Inquisition because in his search for the truth he was not afraid
to oppose authority!

Gary Kindall is another hero or at least part of a heroic
movement. He was the creator of CP/M (Control Program for
Microprocessors), the first operating system for micro-computers.
CP/M was developed during the beginning of the micro-computer
revolution. Before micro-computers were developed, IBM
(International Business Machines) and other big companies
produced the only computers available. The computers that they
marketed were incompatible mainframes and mini-computers which
only big businesses and big universities could afford. What the
micro-computer revolution brought together was a community of
people who wanted to bring the power of computers to the common
people, instead of just to these institutions. This community
succeeded in making the personal computer. They insisted that the
personal computer have an open architecture and be compatible.
CP/M played a big part in making the personal computers
compatible. After a while, IBM wanted to get into the
micro-computer market, so they introduced a micro-computer that
was incompatible with everything else. No one would have anything
to do with this machine, so IBM was forced to come out with a
more compatible and open machine! IBM went to Gary Kindall and
asked to use a version of CP/M for the IBM PC (Personal
Computer), but first they wanted him to sign a non-disclosure
agreement. He wouldn't agree to IBM's requirement of secrecy
because that would be breaking the micro-computer principle of
keeping everything open and available to all the people. So IBM
didn't use CP/M. Instead they used something that was almost
exactly like CP/M except it was developed especially for IBM's
PC. Gary Kindall and the people who brought the micro-computer
into existence are heroes! They brought the secret of computer
power from IBM and other big companies to all the people!

Sports heroes and celebrities are not true heroes because they
cannot bring about real changes. People like Galileo and Kindall
are real heroes because they make a significant change in the
world benefitting the common person. All ages have untrue heroes,
but true heroes are rare. 
--------------

[15] [The following is reprinted from the Volume 4 number 4 issue
of the Amateur Computerist.]

     The Impact of the Computer on Society: Two Views The Future
                                             Trond Andresen
                                             ta@itk.unit.no

If I should discuss "the future", I would take, not a 10-20 year
perspective, but a 200 year perspective. I would ask myself: What
is the real LONG RANGE trend in the economy, and what sort of
real LONG RANGE target is made possible by that? Having decided
on a 200 year perspective, I would use that projection as a
premise for the course I would want society to follow in the more
near future (0-10 years).

What then is the fundamental trend in the economy, seen from the
perspective of 200 years? The answer is of course trivial: An
immense increase in productivity. And I will say: We have just
seen the start of this, what with automated manufacturing,
process control, expert systems, and in the not-so-near-future,
Artificial Intelligence. I disagree with environmentalists saying
that increased productivity is impossible because of
environmental constraints. I agree with their mental alarm about
the constraints, but I think that automation, robots, and so on
will make us a better society for all, at the same time REDUCING
the strain on the environment.

Now comes the next point, which is not trivial at all: What sort
of society should we strive for in the light of the enormous
technological potential that a lot of us agree on?

Here is my scenario: A society where a small percentage of the
population oversees automatic processes in administration,
manufacturing and commerce. The industry will be running nearly
without human work-hours. So what do the other 95% do? Before I
answer that question, some thoughts about "the meaning of life".
Why do we need industry? Is it an end in itself? (Listening to
politicians and industrialists in the media, one is led to
believe that.)

In my view, industry is only a means TO GIVE PEOPLE MORE TIME FOR
WHAT THEY REALLY WOULD LIKE TO DO. The remaining 95% of the
workforce in my future society would have the following jobs:

- Kindergarten teachers and nurses, 2 adults per 5 children.
- Teachers, in classes with less than 10 children in each class.
- Sailplane instructors, scuba-diving instructors, football
  trainers.
- Teaching kids mountain-climbing 
- Rearing horses. 
- Drama instructors, singing instructors, actors, singers,
  musicians, painters, etc. - Health personnel, one doctor per 50
  persons. Free hospitalization for everybody. 
- Researchers in anything from flowers to chess to astronomy to 
  historical masks of the South American Indians. A very big part 
  of the population in university-level education and research
  ecologically sound agriculture and animal husbandry, which, by
  the way, may be MORE labor-intensive than today's 
  industrialized attack on the environment. 
- Ecological managing and rebuilding of the world. Reforestation 
  is one important example.

OK, you can see where I'm going. And I would also stress:
Mandatory work-hours in this society are in the range of 2 - 4
hours, if they are mandatory at all. But people will be on the
job a lot more, because they will LIKE what they are doing. No
problem.

This far future scenario has the following consequences for
shorter-term policies:

- Automation is a good thing.  
- Higher wages which lead to more automation is a good thing.  
- Shorter work hours accompanied by job-sharing is a good thing.  
- Less people in industry and more people in education/health care/culture
  is a good thing.
- More people employed taking care of other people - and this cannot and
  should not be "automatized" - is a good thing.

In countries with publicly financed health care and education,
like my own country, this means the public sector taking a BIGGER
piece of the GNP. This, in my view, is a sign of an advanced
society, and I therefore find the persistent wailing from
industry, finance and the political right against growth in the
public sector totally reactionary and lacking any long term
perspective. 
----------------------

[16] [The following is reprinted from the Volume 3 number 1 issue
of the Amateur Computerist.]

			  The Spirit of Babbage
				Chapter ONE

In the beginning The Spirit of Babbage created the software and the
hardware.
   And hardware was expensive and low-tech; and incompatibleness was on
the face of the hardware.
   And The Spirit of Babbage said, Let there be a micro, and there were
micros.
   And The Spirit of Babbage saw the micro, that it was good: and The
Spirit of Babbage divided the Micro from the Mainframe.
   And The Spirit of Babbage called the micro Mark 8, and the Mainframe he
called the IBM.
   And the evening and the morning were the 1st day.
   And The Spirit of Babbage said, there be a firmament in the midst of
the common elements, and Let it divide the transistors from the ICs.
   And The Spirit of Babbage made the firmament and divided the common
elements which were ICs from the common elements which were transistors:
And it was so.
   And The Spirit of Babbage called the Firmament history. And the evening
& the morning were the 2nd day.
   And The Spirit of Babbage said, Let the common elements from recent
history gather together unto one place and let the clubs appear: and it
was so.
   And The Spirit of Babbage called the new clubs, homebrew clubs; and the
gathering together of the common elements Zilog: and The Spirit of Babbage
saw that it was good.
   And The Spirit of Babbage said, Let the Hardware be programmed after
Jacquard's kind: and it was so.
   And the Hardware was programmed: and The Spirit of Babbage saw that it
was good.
   And the evening and the morning were the 3rd day.
   And The Spirit of Babbage said, Let there be microcomputer companies to
divide the 4 bit from the 8 bit microprocessor, the 8 bit from the 16 bit
microprocessor, and the 16 bit from the 32 bit microprocessor.
   And let them be for the existence of versatility in the world: and it
was so.
   And The Spirit of Babbage made two great companies, the greater company
to dominate the business world, and the lesser company to rule the
graphics world: and The Spirit of Babbage made the competition too.
   And The Spirit of Babbage set them in the Fortune 500 to make sure they
could be versatile: and The Spirit of Babbage saw it was good.
   And the evening and the morning were the 4th day.
   And The Spirit of Babbage created the Altair, which stored data on
paper tape, And every Commodore Pet which stored data on cassette tape
after his kind: and The Spirit of Babbage saw that it was good.
   And the evening and the morning were the 5th day.
   And The Spirit of Babbage said, Let the Amateur Computer Clubs bring
forth the microcomputer, which stored data on disks, called Apple: and it
was so.
   And The Spirit of Babbage said, Let us make IBM PCs in our own image,
after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the Altair with paper
tape storage, and over the Commodore Pet with cassette tape storage, and
over the Apple with disk storage.
   So The Spirit of Babbage created the IBM PCs in his own image, in the
image of The Spirit of Babbage created he it; XT and AT created he them.
   And The Spirit of Babbage said, Behold I have given you every
programmer, who are in the clubs, and of every piece of software, who
wrote all of the pieces; to you it shall be meat.
   And to all of the other computers with paper tape for storage, and to
every computer with cassette tapes for storage, and to every computer with
disk drives for storage, wherein they work, I have given all pieces of
software for meat: and it was so.
   And The Spirit of Babbage saw everything that he had made, and, behold,
it was very good. And the evening & the morning were the 6th day.

				Chapter TWO

   Thus the hardware and the software were finished, and all the host of
them.
   And on the 7th day The Spirit of Babbage ended his work which he had
made; and he rested in the seventh day from all the work he had made.
   But The Spirit of Babbage rested by playing computer games on all of
his creations.
   And The Spirit of Babbage decided to bless this day by creating a place
for him to play computer games peacefully. And The Spirit of Babbage said,
Let there be a Charles Babbage Institute. And there the Spirit of Babbage
awaits.
     To be Continued...in the future.
							Michael Hauben
-----------

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

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

Ronda: Tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the introduction of
the IBM personal computer on August 12, 1981. Also, one of our
staff members, Michael Hauben, is leaving Michigan to go to
college in N.Y. Therefore, it seemed an appropriate time to look
back on the past 10 years and to review how the introduction of
the personal computer has affected our lives. Michael is now 18.
In 1981 he was 8 years old and already involved with computers.
Michael is not only one of the beneficiaries of the computer
revolution. The computer revolution was carried out, not so much
by companies like IBM, but more importantly, by computer
hobbyists like Michael Hauben. Thus in honor of the computer
hobbyists, who gave birth to and developed the personal computer,
we would like to review some of your experiences, Michael, with
the computer.

William: How did you get started with computers?

Michael: The first place I really saw computers was at an exhibit
in Toronto over 10 years ago. There was a robot that was like the
4 axes machine that auto workers use. They also had a computer
exhibit. I don't remember what kind of computer was on display
but they were just a bunch of computers running different kinds
of programs set up there at the Canadian National Exhibit. That
really peaked my interest somehow.
   When I was 8 (in 1981), I took a computer class at Schoolcraft
Community College, in what was called the Kids College. It was
part of what they called the TAG (Talented and Gifted) Program.
The teacher's name was Mrs. Brown. We learned on the Apple II+'s.
The first day of class, Mrs. Brown lifted the top of the APPLE
and said, "There, that's all there is to it, There's nothing to
be afraid of." That was a very good introduction to the computer
because it showed there was nothing to be afraid of. That we
could completely control it. I learned BASIC there. I took
several other classes in that program. I think I took three. I
didn't take all the BASIC language classes offered. But I took a
test that they had for their normal BASIC college level classes
and I wound up getting three college credits for the BASIC
language class. And I didn't do so good because I ended up only
getting a B on the test. But the experience was interesting and
from then on whenever there was a computer available I tried to
use it.
   After the trip to Toronto, I always wanted to buy a computer.
There was the Texas Instruments 99/4a (TI 99/4a) and I don't
remember how much it cost, but it was expensive. There was the
Timex Sinclair 1000 (TS 1000) and that was much cheaper. My
family and I had seen Sinclair computers in England when we
visited. These computers could be hooked up to a normal t.v. set.
I saved up my money and bought a TS-1000. Using it I more
thoroughly learned BASIC. My father and I programmed a lot in
BASIC with only 2K memory. We never seemed to run out of memory.
We just played around and tried to do lots of different things,
tried writing little games, graphics and we dabbled a little in
machine language, not a lot however. Whenever I had the chance,
whether it was summer camp or in a computer store, I'd try to do
something with the computer. I learned BASIC, I learned LOGO on
the TI-99/4a in Camp, and I played around with APPLES and with
Commodore PETS. In my elementary school, there was a terminal
hooked in with the mainframe of the Dearborn Schools. At that
time there were many programs on the mainframe. They had BASIC.
They had games like the OREGON TRAIL, etc. I subscribed to two or
three magazines for the TS-1000. I bought books, did all the TRY
THIS type of small programs. Those were always fun because there
would always be problems with the programs. There would always be
bugs. The books and sample programs were exciting somehow. I
haven't found many books similar for programming on the IBM PCs
today, books that I have found exciting for a hobbyist. And this
is sad.
   Soon after I bought the TS-1000, it couldn't have been more
than a couple of years, I was trying to choose between the
TS-2068 and the Commodore 64. I think the Commodore was more
expensive. The TS-2068 had better color, and a more developed
version of BASIC. The Commodore 64 was better in that it had a
disk drive and the TS-1000 only had a tape drive you could use.
The Commodore also had a real keyboard, while the Timex utilized
raised chicklet keys. I bought the TS-2068. Then I had my first
real lesson in the computer world. Three months after I bought
the TS-2068, Timex stopped selling it and supporting it. Timex
made a deal with Commodore. There was an agreement to sell the
Sinclair in England and Europe and Commodore in the United
States. That was a shock because I thought I made a better
choice, but it turned out the better deal is not always the best
choice.
   And my father and I did programming on that, but not really as
much as we did on the TS-1000. It was a lot less, even though
there was the added attraction of the color and the sound and the
joystick port. And so I still did things and I tried to pick up
on things whenever I could.
   Christmas of 1984, we bought a Sanyo MBC-550-2 which was a
MS-DOS compatible, but not an IBM compatible, machine. The
operating system was IBM compatible, but the graphics were
different, the sound was different, and the BASIC was different.
The Sanyo was a better machine for graphics, I think 640 x 400
with 4 colors if not 16. And WordStar worked. That's why my
family got it as a wordprocessor. I learned MS-Dos. I got more
into the PC world. We subscribed to a Sanyo magazine for a while.
We went to the Sanyo Users' groups for a while. We occasionally
went to SEMCO (Southeast Michigan Computer Organization), but
somehow that was already oriented toward business and they
weren't very interested in helping us. Then in 1985, through
INACOMP, my mother won a Compaq Portable. It was one of the
earliest to come out that was fully IBM compatible. It was a
luggable portable, and it weighed about 20 pounds, if not more.
And that's how I really got into IBM. We had a choice between a
modem and a hard drive. We got a modem. It was a breakthrough.
The hard drive seemed important but the modem was more important.
We wound up getting a hard drive later on. With the modem, it
lets you connect to the outside world. With your own little
system you'd be like a hermit, but in connecting with the rest of
the world, it's other people's opinions, different discussions
about computers, about current events, debates about what's going
on in the world and just general BS also. And you came into
contact with people, you came into contact with different files
to use with your computer, with what was going on with the
computer scene and so somehow it was like a replacement for a
user group. And depending upon the time, there was either a lot
going on or a little going on.

Ronda: What do you mean?

Michael: Well right now not many boards I know have much debate
on them. There are two that I am on. Both of them have debates
on-going. I'm sure there are others, but I just haven't had time
to look. But for a while I was on many of the boards and at one
point many of the boards were silly contests to see who could
post the most numerous messages.

Ronda: Do you have a sense what you were looking for on the
BBS's? You used to spend a lot of time on them.

Michael: Well at first I wasn't on local BBS's. Originally, I was
on COMPUSERVE.

William: Free time?

Michael: Well, the first two hours were free. I almost became a
beta-tester for Infocom through COMPUSERVE. I sent in the
application forms. I then received a congratulations letter, but
Infocom never sent me any games to test. The only response was a
Christmas card. That was a soured Compuserve memory. I found some
local BBS numbers listed on Compuserve and from my father and
some friends of his from work. For a while I was mostly on
Commodore BBS's and not many IBM boards. But then I started
calling the IBM boards. It was new for me when I started.
Modeming was a connection to the outside world to other people
with similar interests. It was interesting the debates about
current events. Somehow there was the possibility for
intellectual discussion which I couldn't find elsewhere besides
my parents and a few friends like Floyd Hoke-Miller. But among my
friends at school or neighbors, there wasn't much of a
possibility.
   When we lived in East Dearborn, our next door neighbor, Tom,
had an Atari and a Commodore 64. He shared an interest in
computers with me. He was my friend, even though there was a
large age gap, because we were both interested in computers. He
let me come over and try some things on his computer and I'd go
with him to computer stores.

William: Another thing about modems you can't tell the age.
Treats you more like an equal.

Michael: There's an anonymity. You don't know anything about the
other users. So you are more willing to accept them. There are
still first impressions. If you act like a real idiot, people
won't like you. But the full element of first impressions is left
out. And people tend to rank you or be friends with you on how
you act on-line, what you speak about. It does help. You tend to
get to know the people and there isn't as much blocking. And my
first handle was Wizkid. I changed my handle 2 or 3 years ago to
Sentinel. And there was one person who signed on and said it was
great knowing you. He was one of the people who knew me as
Wizkid. There was a "Remembering the OLD Days" theme area on one
of the BBS's and someone said, "remember that Wizkid." And I
said, "that was me." And he said he didn't know that. When people
change their handles, it's public but somehow people don't always
realize it. When I changed my handle, I decreased my activity.
When I decreased my activity it was because there were just silly
messages that didn't mean anything, or they just seemed juvenile,
and I don't know if that's because the people calling were
younger or they were more juvenile. The way people accept you is
based on your maturity on-line and your maturity showed through
more than your age. And there was one debate where someone said
you are just a kid. And I used to have the handle Wizkid. But it
didn't matter what your age was, it was more how mature you were.
He was trying to say "Well you're just a kid, you can't know
anything." But he was wrong. So there is less age discrimination
on the boards.

Ronda: Why did you decrease the time you spent on the boards?

Michael: I had to spend more time with school, with friends, with
my job. Whenever I used to come home from school, I used to spend
2 or 3 hours, but then my mom said, "We need the phone." So I
didn't spend my free time before homework on the modem. And then
with work, I wasn't even home on certain days to use the modem.

Ronda: But it seemed you were also a little disappointed. There
were user parties, but it seemed the computer world didn't extend
outside of the modem.

Michael: It did to a certain extent, but it didn't include
everyone. Like some people were friends before. There were modem
parties where people from the boards got together, whether it was
a software swap or a party.

Ronda: There weren't many, were there?

Michael: Well, what happened was the main person who had the
parties was from a TAG board in Taylor. He had his computer
stolen after the 2nd or 3rd party. So he stopped holding them.
Then there were multiuser boards. There was M-Net which was a
multi-user. The general ages of the users on M-Net was older than
on the other single-user BBS's. And it was more serious. It was
more a UNIX board. It was a different bunch. It was not the home
but the people in school, in Ann Arbor. It seemed like the
multi-user boards made it easier to hold parties because users
could chat live one-on-one. And when AMUSERS (a multi-user board)
closed down, I didn't get on other multi-users that were like
AMUSERS. Some people already were friends but you didn't end up
doing much so it was a little disappointing.  Cause it didn't
seem like there was any it didn't get anywhere it was just
on-line so that was a little disconcerting. It was disappointing
because that was where I had found more intellectual people but
it didn't go anywhere. And things like COMPUSERVE cost a lot of
money. There's COMPUSERVE, there's Delphi, there's Geni, there's
PC Link, there's Q-link, there's a couple of services but they
all cost money, so that's hard to deal with. And then there are
bigger boards that exist. But they all cost money. There's the
WELL. That's in California. You also pay per hour like
Compuserve. So it's harder to be on. It's like M-Net. It's the
same software as M-Net. And maybe I did find it disappointing. It
used to be there would be lots of new BBS's popping up. But they
were interesting. And now there still are lots of new BBS's
popping up. But they're silly. So it's gone downhill a little
bit. And also BBS's are similar to the CB or the Ham radio in
that people voice their opinions, or have discussions or chat or
there used to be DDial's all they were were multi-user, people
chatting, but they were 300 baud so they were super slow. Some of
those you had to acquire membership. But they were linked up
across the country. There were things called LINKS that would
connect you to other DDial's around the country. So that way you
could talk to people.
   Somehow the thing about BBS's was it was the ultimate vehicle
of Free Speech, uncensored speech. For the most part things were
not censored. What you posted was left alone. It was like
everyone's Letter to the Editor was allowed to be printed. There
would be letters debating other previous letters. Different
SysOps had different rules and some would delete messages that
contained profanity or were only personal attacks or something.
BBS's are the greatest form of free speech. The problem was you
needed a modem and a computer to get into it. So it's not as free
as it might be, but compared to the newspapers, the newspapers
print what they choose, whereas on BBS's everything is printed,
everything is published. It's more of a dynamic medium than a
static medium because depending on the board there's different
forms of dealing with messages. For example, some boards after
the first 50 messages go by, the first message is deleted, so
it's a dynamic thing. Unless somebody prints out a copy or saves
it to disk, it doesn't stay static. Like on M-Net, things aren't
deleted. They are deleted when the message SysOp of the area
decides no one is interested anymore. That's more of a choice
method of deletion, than where it deletes messages or the new one
pops in, the old one pops out and it's deleted. And even
depending on what happens, it's still an important medium.
   There was, for example, just a debate about the war against
IRAQ on BBS's. Usually you didn't see where there was dissent.
Whereas on the computer, if people wanted to, they could debate
it and there was debate about it. A free medium. It's open
access. Not closed. It's also a field where the hobbyist still
exists. There are people who develop ways of using the modem,
whether it's different compression techniques where you can send
more and larger files quicker, or whether it's different file
protocols that send them faster over phone lines. Those are
constantly developing. That is a hobbyist frontier now. Maybe
there are less people than when the computer started out. But it
still exists. It's a frontier that's not closed up yet. It's not
definite yet. New things are continuing to come out. For example,
higher speed chips for the serial ports in the computer so that
the computer can talk to the modem at a higher speed and
everything.

                             Part II 

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?
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