Alexander “Sandy” Astin was a longtime professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, best known for creating an annual survey of college freshmen. Astin, who passed away this past May at the age of 89, first developed “The American Freshman” survey at the American Council for Education in 1969. He continued the project after joining the UCLA faculty.

Gary Kildall referenced Astin’s 1985 survey in a March 1986 Computer Chronicles episode on “Careers in Computing.” Notably, Astin’s survey of the previous fall’s freshman class found that only 4.4 percent of respondents “aspired to careers as computer programmers or computer analysts, down from 8.8 percent in 1983,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Astin suggested the decrease may have actually been the result of greater exposure to computers by the 1985 freshmen, as they realized computers could be useful in fields other than tech. He further speculated that students “may be misinterpreting the recent, well publicized troubles in the computer industry.”

In 1705, Oxford geometry professor Edmond Halley published a paper, A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets, which proposed that comets observed from Earth in 1531, 1607, and 1682 were in fact the same comet. Based on his calculations, Halley proposed the comet would be visible from Earth roughly every 75 years, with the next appearance expected in 1758. He never lived to see it, having died in 1741, but this prediction proved correct. Now known as Halley’s Comet (or Comet Halley), the celestial object’s most recent Earth appearance occurred in February 1986.

“Expert” systems were all the rage in the late 1980s, as demonstrated by a previous Computer Chronicles episode on their use in law enforcement. But expert systems tended to be expensive–costing tens of thousands of dollars–and thus only available to businesses and institutions. Yet by 1986 there were efforts to market lower-end systems to individual consumers. This next Chronicles episode from February 1986 looks at the meeting of the minds, as it were, between expert systems and another mid-1980s boom market: pop psychology and the self-help movement.

I periodically release my reviews of Computer Chronicles episodes as standalone ebooks. These are epub files without any DRM or copy protection and are distributed under the same Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License as the blog itself. This means you are free to share and adapt these ebooks for any noncommercial purpose, provided you give appropriate credit.

Here are the currently available ebooks:

Volume	Season(s)	Published	Download
1	1983 - 1984	6 June 2022	EPUB
2	1984 - 1985	7 June 2022	EPUB
3	1985 - 1986	5 July 2022	EPUB
4	1986	13 November 2022	EPUB
5	1987	8 April 2023	EPUB
6	1987 - 1988	13 August 2023	EPUB

You can also read these ebooks online at the Internet Archive.

The major theme for this season of Computer Chronicles has been, “Why would anyone actually buy a personal computer?” This next episode from February 1986 looks at one reason–managing your investments. After all, if you have enough money to invest in the stock market, you probably had the disposable income to purchase expensive hardware and software to keep an eye on those investments.

Would You Trust a Computer with Your Money?

Stewart Cheifet and Gary Kildall opened the program with a short demonstration of Wizard of Wall Street, a stock market simulator from Synapse Software. Cheifet noted that while this was a game, more and more real investors were using their personal computers to manage their portfolios and conduct transactions from their homes. Would Kildall trust a computer to tell him how to invest his money? Kildall quipped he’d like to see the results of the advice first. He added that if we all followed the advice of a single computer program, it wouldn’t lead to a very interesting market. On a more serious note, he said there was a lot of value in online services, such as instant stock trading and historical stock information. He would even use a simulator like Wizard to learn more about the market and its terminology.

In the studio introduction for the 1986 Computer Chronicles episode on computers and law enforcement, Stewart Cheifet and Gary Kildall looked at an educational game, Murder by the Dozen, running on the Macintosh. BrainBank, Inc., created the game for CBS Software. Murder was actually one of two BrainBank games marketed by CBS under the name Mystery Master, the other being a sequel called Felony!

The two games essentially played the same. Each came with 12 murder mysteries for a group of between 1 and 4 players to solve. Imagine Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? but multiplayer and confined to a single city. Each player must visit various locations around the fictional city of Micropolis and gather clues by selecting items from a menu.

During this third season of Chronicles, there have already been several episodes dedicated to the impact of computers on specific vocations, including the media, politics, and medicine. (There was also an episode on the legal profession, which is among those still missing from the Internet Archive.) This next episode from January 1986 continues the trend, with a show discussing computers in law enforcement.

Giving Law Enforcement Rapid Access to Information

Stewart Cheifet delivered his introduction from an FBI office. There was a woman typing at a computer. Cheifet said she was a computer scientist for the FBI trying to solve a crime. He noted that law enforcement agencies around the country were now using computers to make police work more efficient and effective.

As enthused as Gary Kildall was about many tech products, notably optical storage, he could be equally grumpy about other subjects, such as artificial intelligence (AI). For instance, back in an early 1985 episode Kildall got noticeably irate at the creator of the Halcyon, who insisted his not-quite-ready prototype of a LaserDisc-based game system had AI. Kildall later wrote that the Halcyon’s botched on-air demo at least demonstrated that “natural languages and computers are not a good fit.”

As we close out 1985 on Computer Chronicles, the discussion returned to a familiar subject–storage devices. This next episode looked at hard disk storage specifically. Keep in mind, hard disks were still not considered standard equipment at this time. The Macintosh, for example, did not come with a hard drive. And while you could purchase an IBM PC-AT with a 30 MB internal drive, many users still had to make an aftermarket purchase to acquire a hard disk, which could run over $1,000. Even at the lower end, you would still pay several hundred dollars for a device that stored a total of 60 MB.

This next Computer Chronicles episode launched the annual tradition of presenting a “buyers guide” for the holiday season. (It’s referred to as a “Christmas Buyer’s Guide” for this first installment.) These episodes would air each December for the duration of the series and typically featured panels composed of regular contributors.

Indeed, this first buyers guide had no in-studio guests aside from the three regular contributors from this third season: George Morrow, Paul Schindler, and Wendy Woods (who made her first on-set appearance). Woods presented one remote segment, but otherwise this episode simply had the hosts and contributors recommend technology-themed gifts to the viewers.