In a bit of eerie foreshadowing, this episode of The Computer Chronicles from January 1984 opened with a discussion of a global pandemic. Not a real one, of course, but a computer simulation. Stewart Cheifet and Gary Kildall played with a game called Epidemic, released by Strategic Simulations. Cheifet explained this was an example of how someone could use a computer to choose among alternatives, make a decision, and establish a complex strategy for solving a problem. In this case, the problem was a global pandemic caused by a virus brought from outer space by meteors. Epidemic provided the player with information about the spread of the virus and offered alternatives, such as developing a vaccine, for containing the pandemic.

The episode I’m covering today was taped on January 18, 1984, four days before Super Bowl XVIII. That game would go down in computing history for the famous Apple “1984” commercial that announced the launch of the original Macintosh (later known as the Macintosh 128K). As this Chronicles episode aired the week after the Super Bowl, Stewart Cheifet devoted a good portion of the post-show “Random Access” segment to the new machine and what it might mean for Apple for the rest of 1984.

Today’s episode contains what Stewart Cheifet would later describe as one of the classic “near disasters” involving a product demonstration on The Computer Chronicles. The subject was the first Xerox Color Laser Printer, which was actually a prototype not yet available for sale when this Chronicles episode taped in October 1983. Cheifet recounted the event to Tonya Hall of ZDNet in a November 2020 interview:

We introduced the very first color laser printer on the show by Xerox. I figured it’d be a printer–it was the size of two Volkswagens! We had to take the doors off the studio to get this thing inside. And it took three engineers three hours to get this thing hooked up. And I said, ‘Can we test it now?’ ‘Yeah, let’s test it.’ We went to the print button, hit the print button, and smoke came out of this printer. No output–smoke. I said, ‘Look, we’ve got to get this thing to work, guys.’ Finally, another hour later, they pressed the button and I saw the most gorgeous color output I’ve ever seen in my life from a computer.

Computer architecture is usually described in terms of bits. For instance, we often speak of early personal computers from the late 1970s and early 1980s as 8-bit machines. In simple terms, this means that the CPUs in these computers could only address 8 bits of data at a time, with each bit representing a single binary digit (0 or 1). But even when the first episodes of The Computer Chronicles started to air in late 1983, there were already 16-bit processors on the market, such as the Intel 8086, and 32-bit machines had started to become a reality.

Today, we think of networking as synonymous with the Internet–a global interconnected network that encompasses not just computers but also millions of “smart” devices. But in this episode of The Computer Chronicles from late 1983, the focus was on local area networking or LANs. Stewart Cheifet and Gary Kildall talked with representatives from two companies that were at the forefront of developing the still-emerging standards for computer networking.

Cheifet opened by asking Kildall to define a local area network. Kildall noted that ever since we’d had computers, people had beeen trying to hook them up to transmit data back and forth between them. LANs were generally used in office environments and limited to a relatively small geographic area. This limited area allowed for better performance relative to more traditional network systems.

This next episode of The Computer Chronicles from early 1984 examined the status of speech synthesis technology. Stewart Cheifet opened the program by showing off a mini version of the popular Speak & Spell toy. He also demonstrated the Minolta AF-S V, a “talking” camera that could vocalize basic warning messages to the user, such as that lighting conditions were “too dark!” and the operator needed to “use flash!”

Cheifet was joined in the co-host’s chair this week by Herbert Lechner of SRI International. With respect to the Minolta, Cheifet noted the talking feature wasn’t strictly necessary; a blinking light worked fine for most cameras. So he asked Lechner if the use of speech in such devices was a “marketing gimmick” or if there were useful applications for speech in computers. Lechner replied that he found himself not paying attention to the warning lights in his car, yet he paid attention when it talked to him. And there were a number of voice terminals in use today that relied on telephone technology.

In a recent essay for the socialist journal Current Affairs, Matthew James Seidel recounted a story from 2013 where “delivery drivers came up with an unexpected way to prevent robots from taking their jobs. They beat the robots with baseball bats and stabbed them in their ‘faces.’” Seidel quipped that “[s]ome robots got off easy; they were merely abducted and shut away in basements.”

The intellectual–and sometimes physical–battle over the use of robots to replace human labor was the subject of a late 1983 episode of The Computer Chronicles. This program featured demonstrations of two early attempts at making robotics more accessible to students and programmers. There was also a surprisingly in-depth discussion over the long-term implications that robotics would have on society.

Roger Ebert wrote in his four-star review of the 1983 film WarGames, “Computers only do what they are programmed to do, and they will follow their programs to illogical conclusions.” In the movie, Matthew Broderick played a teenage hacker who managed to remotely access the United States missile defense system and initiate a “Global Thermonuclear War” scenario that he mistakes for a computer game. Ultimately, Ebert said the film’s message was, “Sooner or later, one of these self-satisfied, sublimely confident thinking machines is going to blow us all off the face of the planet.”

Since the 1990s, word processing has largely been synonymous with Microsoft Word. Of course, Word didn’t start out on top. It was first released in October 1983. At that time, the dominant word processing program was WordStar, which had already been on the market for several years. The first Chronicles episode to discuss word processors, taped in December 1983, largely framed the discussion in terms of discussing the competitors to WordStar yet made no mention of Microsoft’s new offering.

The first season of The Computer Chronicles was repackaged and marketed to educational institutions as The Computer Chronicles Telecourse. The recording we have for this next episode, and a few more going forward, were part of that telecourse and thus included a series of interstitial segments hosted by SRI International’s Herbert Lechner, whom we met in the first broadcast episode. Lechner’s segments mostly review the key concepts discussed in the regular episode and refer to an accompanying textbook for students to follow. I won’t be discussing Lechner’s segments during my episode recap, as it would be little more than summarizing his summaries, which would be redundantly redundant.