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.

Normally, The Computer Chronicles highlighted consumer software and hardware. Stewart Cheifet often described his role as doing the legwork on behalf of the viewer so they knew what products to buy. This particular episode, however, goes in a somewhat different direction. The subject is simulator software, but aside from the opening host segment, the episode is largely devoted to proprietary software used in non-consumer applications.

Flight Simulators – Computer Game vs. Training Tool

Cheifet and Gary Kildall opened the episode by playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 on an IBM Personal Computer. Cheifet noted this was a good example of how you could use a computer to simulate real-world situations. Foreshadowing one of the episode’s guests, Cheifet added that simulation software could also be used in architecture and urban design. Cheifet asked Kildall that given everything a computer does is essentially a simulation, what do we mean by “computer simulations.” Kildall replied that it’s about generating scenes or a situation that someone wants to experience, which requires graphics and a lot of computing power. But it’s ultimately less expensive to do than the real thing. For example, it’s cheaper to run a simulation of a 747 landing than to land an actual plane.

We begin this episode of The Computer Chronicles from February 1984 with Stewart Cheifet plunking on an unspecified model of Casiotone keyboard. Cheifet remarked to Gary Kildall, “This is an example of computer music,” which was this week’s subject. Cheifet added that the Casiotone could play special ROM chips that contain “popular songs” in electronic form.

Cheifet asked Kildall to explain how a computer makes music. Kildall replied that while the Casiotone was not a “general purpose computer,” contemporary personal computers like those manufactured by IBM and Commodore have “tone generation capability.” Essentially, the user could write a program to produce a series of tones and add information regarding their frequency and duration. Indeed, there was now software available that was comparable to word processing programs, but for music instead of text.

There was apparently a roughly two-month gap between the taping of episodes of The Computer Chronicles in late 1983 and their initial airing in early 1984. Looking back 37 years later, this gap may not seem that significant. But in just the second broadcast episode, it may be that Chronicles unintentionally provided information that was already out-of-date to its PBS audience.

Integrated Software — The Descendants of Xerox

The subject of this episode was “integrated software,” i.e., a suite of business programs that all work together. Today, most of us intuitively associate integrated software with Microsoft Office, but that product would not exist for another six years. Indeed, Stewart Cheifet opened the host segment by reminding the audience, “And when we mention integrated software, you probably think of Apple’s Lisa,” the business-focused computer released in January 1983.

The Computer Chronicles debuted as a national television program in the United States in the fall of 1983. The series was the brainchild of Stewart Cheifet, then the general manager at KCSM-TV, a public television station based in San Mateo, California, located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Cheifet originally launched Chronicles as a live, local program in 1981, which was hosted by Jim Warren, the co-founder of the West Coast Computer Faire, an annual computer convention based in San Francisco.

Chronicles-Related Sites

• Computer Chronicles (Archive) – The Internet Archive repository of Computer Chronicles episodes.
• Computer Chronicles Metadata Editor – A project to complete the metadata for the Computer Chronicles episodes hosted at the Internet Archive.
• P.S. A Column on Things – A personal blog by longtime Computer Chronicles contributor Paul E. Schindler, Jr.
• Visual Explorer: Computer Chronicles 1982-2002 Archive – The GDELT Project’s “skimmable thumbnail” version of the Internet Archive’s Computer Chronicles collection.

Additional Blogs, Creators, and Podcasts

• A Critical Hit
• Alan Pope’s Blog
• ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast
• Atari Archive
• BSD Now
• Classic Computer Magazine Archive
• Computer History Museum
• Craig Maloney
• DOS Game Club
• Gaming Alexandria
• Into the Aether
• Late Night Linux
• Ms. Mad Lemon
• Retro Game Club Podcast
• S.M. Oliva
• Tedium
• The CRPG Addict
• The Gaming Historian
• The Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast
• The History of How We Play
• The Homelab Show
• The Memory Machine Podcast
• The Silicon Underground
• The Ted Dabney Experience
• They Create Worlds
• This Week in Retro
• Veronica Explains
• Video Game History Foundation
• Video Game Newsroom Time Machine
• Virtual Moose
• Which Game First