Dr. Edward Fry, then a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said in a 1987 report that young school children should be taught keyboard typing as opposed to cursive writing. This was a fairly radical notion for 1987 as computers were not yet commonplace in the home. And there was a feeling among many educators at the time that learning to write cursive was an essential step in promoting literacy itself.

The topic of “computers and the arts” today largely focuses on the use of artificial intelligence to suck up the work of artists–often without their permission–and regurgitate it based on text prompts. No doubt the goal of many of these venture capital-funded projects is to eventually replace the human artists altogether.

Such concerns were still more science fiction than dystopian reality back in March 1987, when this next Computer Chronicles episode first aired. But the ever-wise George Morrow nevertheless cautioned that we should always ensure that machines serve the humans, not the other way around. Stewart Cheifet opened the program by showing Morrow, this week’s co-host, a series of black-and-white sketches produced by artist Harold Cohen using a plotter hooked up to a computer. Cheifet noted that some artists believed computers and art didn’t mix. What did Morrow think? Morrow disagreed. He thought that critics of using computers in the arts were getting the hardware mixed up with the software. He cited the film Star Wars as an example of artists creating effects with software. In art, there were a lot of repetitive tasks. Computers could be a marvelous tool for helping automate those tasks–provided the software was made by the artists and not some computer scientist.

Unlike many people who cover computer history, I generally avoid talking about prices “adjusted for inflation” when discussing older products. For example, one of the products demonstrated in this next Computer Chronicles episode, the Zenith Z-181 portable computer, originally retailed for $2,399 in 1987. If you run that figure through an online inflation calculator, it will tell you that this is the equivalent of $5,395.60 in “purchasing power” in December 2022.

I see a couple of problems with talking about computer prices in these terms. First, a computer is not like a quart of milk or some other commodity that has remained relatively consistent in terms of quality over the years. The Z-181 had 640 KB or memory. The laptop I’m typing this post on right now–a roughly 10-year Dell Latitude E7240 that I paid about $250 for refurbished–has 8 GB. If you were to price both machines on a “per-kilobyte” basis, the old Dell is infinitely cheaper than the antique Zenith.

While annual-release franchises are now a common feature of computer games–think Madden or Call of Duty–the practice arguably originated with tax preparation software. After all, tax laws (and tax forms) in the United States change every year, so the software must be constantly updated. This fact made tax preparation a lucrative field for small software companies to enter during the 1980s, when the personal computer market was still struggling to find a foothold in the home.

On December 19, 1984, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom signed a “joint declaration” with her counterpart from the People’s Republic of China, Zhai Siyang, formalizing the return of the British colony of Hong Kong to China on July 1, 1997.

The United Kingdom first claimed the island of Hong Kong as a colony in 1842 after imposing a treaty on China’s Qing dynasty following a conflict known as the First Opium War. After a subsequent conflict–the Second Opium War–the British forced China to cede adjacent territory on the Kowloon peninsula in 1860. In 1898, the British demanded even more land for their expanding colony, which led to a 99-year lease agreement for what became known as the “New Territories.” Although this lease technically applied only to the New Territories, the 1984 joint declaration provided for the return of the entire colony, which only made practical sense since by the 1980s most of Hong Kong’s population resided in that area.

The second part of Computer Chronicles’ two-part look at online services to open 1987 has a strong sense of deja vu. That’s because there’s a repeat guest, Roger Summit, who previously appeared in a 1984 program to discuss Dialog, which is also why he appeared in this episode. Dialog was one of the earliest online database services. And while the previous show focused more on the nascent market for commercial online services like CompuServe and QuantumLink, here the emphasis was more on what Stewart Cheifet described as “high-end databases.”

An ad in the October 6, 1985, edition of The Scrantonian announced an upcoming meeting of the Scranton (Pennsylvania) Commodore Users Group on October 8 that would feature a demonstration of QuantumLink, a “new computer information network.” The people who attended that meeting could not have known this, but they were likely among the very first members of the general public to see what a few years later would morph into America Online, one of the dominant online services of the 1990s.

The star of the November 1986 COMDEX show was the Intel 80386 microprocessor. As I discussed in my post about the Chronicles episode covering that event, Compaq and Zenith were among the first companies to announce their own 386-based PCs. This allowed these “clone” makers to get the jump on IBM, which was continuing to drag its feet on its own next-generation PC, the PS/2, which would not come out until August 1987.

Email is one of those technologies that has seemingly always been around in one form or another. The earliest electronic mail systems date back to the 1970s. But before the rise of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990s, the vast majority of computer users–to say nothing of the general population–had no access to email. There were several reasons for this, including the costs of additional hardware and email services, as well as the learning curve for using specialized communications software.

The second annual buyer’s guide episode of Computer Chronicles aired in early December 1986. Although the Intel 80386-based PCs were the hot items coming out of COMDEX a few weeks earlier, the Chronicles gang chose to focus their gift-giving ideas on the software and small-scale hardware side of the computer industry.

On that note, Stewart Cheifet opened the program by showing George Morrow–sitting in for Gary Kildall for the second week in a row–the Selectronics PD-100, a credit card-sized computer with a keypad and 2 KB of memory that functioned as a “personal directory.” Cheifet demonstrated how you could use it to keep a Christmas shopping list. Morrow retorted, “How long did it take you to put all that [information] in there, Stewart?” Cheifet laughingly replied it didn’t matter since he had a “lot of fun” playing with the device.