Erik Sandberg-Diment

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Just a few decades back, the painter Erik Sandberg-Diment was worried about providing for his family so he became a journalist to make money. In 2015, that sentence is enough to make you laugh and cry.

He ended up focusing on computers, tested out so-so cooking software, reviewed the Macintosh with less-than-full appreciation and famously whiffed on the future of laptops. Right or wrong, he was always an entertaining curmudgeon throughout the early PC period, with all its pre-Web frustrations.

Here’s what he said in the NYT in 1985 about computer banking and email:

Central to the new videotex is the concept of home banking. For the vast majority of people and businesses, however, banking-by-computer is about as convenient as fishing pickles out of the barrel with a toothpick. Home banking programs, even the heavily promoted Pronto sponsored by Chemical Bank, have grown far slower than predicted. V IDEOTEX services claim they will eventually include such features as stock brokerage, travel services, catalogue shopping and even housing exchanges. I doubt, however, that many people will give up shopping in person for the chance to buy a new refrigerator or washing machine by pressing a few keys on a personal computer.

This is a nation of tire kickers, after all. I can’t help but shake my head at the millions of dollars being spent on the development of videotex applications by companies that simply do not seem to grasp the fundamental tenets of personal computing. Personal computing is timesaving, money saving and fun. Videotex is none of the above. ”There have been a lot of very high expectations for information services that have not been met by either teletext or videotex,” says Michelle Preston, the technology industry analyst at the investment firm of L. F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin. ”They simply do not offer enough value to really take off.”

Then there is electronic mail, that thoroughly modern offspring of a calcified postal service and a splintered Ma Bell. Currently, the companies promoting this service, nicknamed e-mail, are also offering such added services as a hookup of the subscriber’s personal computer to the Telex network and a two-hour delivery of letter-quality documents to many parts of the country. They have all discovered that electronic mail alone cannot at this stage attract enough customers to stem the tide of red ink.

Electronic mail allows a message to be typed into a personal computer or a terminal and then transmitted variously through cable, telephone-cum-modem, or satellite link to a receiving personal computer or terminal. One of its alleged advantages is the so-called store and forward message. A user may send messages at any time and, unlike a telephone connection, e-mail does not require the recipient to be on the other end of the line. Then again, the old-fashioned postal service does not require that the recipient be there at the time of delivery either.

When all is said and done, electronic mail is no more efficient, in the vast majority of cases, than the telephone or the postal service it is supposed to replace. Nor does it have the flexibility to be able to deliver packages such as spare parts, in the manner of another innovation, the overnight express service pioneered by Federal Express.

In addition, electronic mail faces the problem of compatibility that has plagued the entire personal computer industry since its inception. At the moment, there are about a dozen services, among them MCI Mail, Western Union’s EasyLink, the ITT Corporation’s Dialcom and General Electric’s Quick-Comm – none of which can be linked with any of the others.

The situation is comparable to there being a dozen different postal services, any one of which may or may not be capable of delivering a message to the particular company for which it is intended. Before even sending the message, a company has to determine whether it can indeed be delivered.

The problem is compounded by the fact that there is no e-mail central. Nor is there any universal directory of subscribers to the different services to help a business determine which potential recipient of its electronic letter subscribes to which service. For now, electronic mail’s solution to the dilemma seems to be the hybrid half e-mail, half regular mail represented by MCI’s now familiar orange envelopes.

Chances are that before a universal e-mail network is ever developed, the whole idea of electronic mail, along with those of teletext and videotex, will have been reduced to the span of a few specialized applications. As a general means of information exchange, the concepts are technologically intriguing. But they are economically naive and, more importantly, no more convenient than the existing alternatives.•

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It’s not that personal computers had zero utility before the Internet, but it was sort of like designing a Bugatti solely for the purpose of parallel parking, no paved streets or highways or racetracks yet in sight. The Micro Cookbook, for instance, was software intended to make meals a snap, but it didn’t quite live up to its promise. From a 1984 New York Times article by Erik Sandberg-Diment:

The Micro Cookbook promises a lot on its cover, from the adjusting of recipes for a variable number of servings to nutrition and calorie and food-buying guidelines. On the subject of inventory control in the larder, it delivers a fillip of particular interest to hosts like me who reside in the hinterlands, and to those prone to entertain company after grocers’ hours. “Tell your computer what ingredients you have,” the cover instructs, “and Micro Cookbook will give you all the recipes you need to surprise your favorite guests.” It would be interesting to see if the computer could solve my pre-dawn predicament.

There are two disks to the Micro Cookbook. First the software disk, which runs the program, is fed to the computer. Once that has been ingested, the recipe disk is inserted into the disk drive. The Micro Cookbook is menu-driven, which is not a pun, but computerese for a type of program in which the computer, instead of asking questions, simply presents a lot of choices, from among which the operator makes his selection by filling in the blanks on the screen. The main menu in this case presented me with a number of alternatives. I could be shown the recipe index, an ingredients index, a breakdown of recipes into categories such as “French,” “dessert” and “meatless,” and so on. Submenus could be called up to show actual recipes on the screen, to interpret terminology, and even to print out (if you have a printer) a shopping list for any given recipe.

After experimenting for a while with the various alternatives, none of which I found enthralling enough to distract me from my original goal, I returned to the fillip that had attracted my attention in the first place, mainly, finding something interesting to concoct from the particular ingredients on hand. I entered my choice: “Select from ingredient list.” The screen lit up with a catalogue of ingredients ranging from stew beef to cheddar cheese – white sauce, cognac, pignoli, Bisquick, kasha, white raisins, tortillas and some 150 others being thrown together between these two entries with less organization than that to be found in our Fibber McGee kitchen pantry. Matching what I had on hand with the screen representations, I selected cumin, horseradish and sausage and sat back to see what the computer could cook up.

The word “sausage” didn’t quite fit into the space allowed. But since it was short only the “e,” and since in many programs of this type the software is designed to work with the first half or the first two-thirds of the word, I didn’t give that problem much thought. However, in this case it didn’t work, or maybe the program found the combination of sausage with cumin and horseradish not to its taste. Whatever the case, I was greeted by a rude raspberry emanating from the program: “Serious error … Terminating!” and terminate it did, just like that, everything stopped dead in its tracks and the computer shut down. I checked the “Error Messages” section of the manual, but it would admit to nothing so impolite as terminating.

That meant I had to reload first the software disk and then the recipe disk. Meanwhile, I was becoming really hungry. I entered only the cumin this time, to be on the safe side. “Swiss cheese salad red sauce,” responded the computer, while the video screen asked me to type in which recipe I desired. Since the intriguing, if mysterious Swiss cheese salad red sauce appeared to be my only choice, that’s what I typed in. However, not wanting to take any chances, before I pressed the return key to actually enter the command, I checked the fridge to be sure that there was some Swiss cheese around. I didn’t want to be hit with another termination.

As it turned out, all I could type into the line allotted this time was Swiss cheese salad red. You guessed it–when I entered the command into the computer, the program terminated me once more.•

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Every time I think that dreams are too outré and our predictions too aggressive, I remind myself of “The Executive Computer,” a 1985 New York Times article by Erik Sandberg-Diment which asserted that laptops were limited in appeal, that “the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets.” The opening:

“WHATEVER happened to the laptop computer? Two years ago, on my flight to Las Vegas for Comdex, the annual microcomputer trade show, every second or third passenger pulled out a portable, ostensibly to work, but more likely to demonstrate an ability to keep up with the latest fad. Last year, only a couple of these computers could be seen on the fold-down trays. This year, every one of them had been replaced by the more traditional mixed drink or beer.

Was the laptop dream an illusion, then? Or was the problem merely that the right combination of features for such lightweight computers had not yet materialized? The answer probably is a combination of both views. For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few.

The limitations come from what people actually do with computers, as opposed to what the marketers expect them to do. On the whole, people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so.”

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