Villages by John Updike (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📕

over. The geometrical increase of chip capacity enabled each pixel on the line-scan monitor to have an address—coördinates that a simple manual motion hurled in silent storms of computation to the next location, along with all the other pixels in its icon or text block. The inventor, a PARC scientist with the suitably elemental name of Alan Kay, had gotten the idea from watching schoolchildren write and run their own small programs using Seymour Papert’s programming language, Logo, whose commands were all expressed as objects and movements—“turtle graphics.” Children led the way. It would always be the young who had the intuitive connection with this gorgeous toy, this brain in a box, a brain not mired in a messy, bloody animal. Owen was no longer young. He saw, out there on this other coast with its sea cliffs and palm trees and sun-battered, earthquake-resistant, low, glassy research centers and dust-free microelectronic manufacturing units, an alien future, a world of computers as mass-marketable as typewriters, all their elegant mathematics, once the remote province of electrical engineers and Boolean logicians, now buried beneath a cartoon surface as vulgar as a comic book. At MIT and the monitors of the Turkish missile site and in New York at IBM and in the garage behind the clapboarded semi-detached on Common Lane that he and Phyllis had rented their first year in Middle Falls, Owen had felt on the forward edge of a revolution, a new technology’s breaking wave; now, though E-O Data could keep exploiting the expanding number of CEOs who knew nothing about computers except that a modern business had to have them, and had to have programs that would make them work, doing work for which people would be no longer needed, Owen and Ed were like farmers hurriedly working their fields before the rising waters of a newly dammed lake inundated them. Soon every company office boy could program a stripped-down mainframe, and the minimalist, add-on approach of Unix, salvaged by Bell Labs from the GE Multics debacle and licensed to universities at nominal cost, further democratized what had been an arcane craft. Owen must henceforth think in terms of niches, special projects, European clients, and passing flings.

There were more women in the computer world than ten years ago. A few were programmers and engineers; more were installers, support staff, and sales reps for the wallowing giants of the industry—Sperry Rand, IBM, GE, Honeywell. These young women, many of them math majors like Phyllis but some of them reborn out of English and psychology departments, showed up at conferences, and from time to time Owen and one of them explored the opportunities of a night far from home. Jacqueline, Antoinette, Mirabella—they tended to have fancy names, trim bodies, short skirts, long hair, and liberated morals. Until Vietnam ended and Nixon resigned, the ’seventies were an extension of the ’sixties, of the rebellious fever inflicted by irritation from above. But the new decade was more shopworn and hard-eyed. Female bodies were hardening, as exercise and diet became a mode of feminist assertion. Drugs and promiscuity had catered to spiritual health; now physical condition’s turn had come. Owen could not help admiring, as he kneeled on the San Jose hotel’s shag carpet to pull down Jacqueline’s pantyhose, the flat tendony knit behind her knee, the calf-bulge modulating upward into the biceps femoris and the gluteus maximus, so firm to his touch; he had to pause to kiss the dear adductor longus on the inside of her thigh, and she, halfway out of her pantyhose, had to clutch the hair on his head to steady herself. She was, fully undressed, a little solemn-bodied, less flexible than her muscular development promised. Her skin and hair had a sour tinge from day-old jet lag and twelve hours on her feet singing the praises of a DEC PDP-11 with its timesharing software and magnetic-tape units, taller than she even with her impressively “big” hair. Once inside her, he was too tired himself to hold back, and she didn’t accept his apologies. Lack of sleep came with these hasty conquests, and lingered as a faint grogginess, for a week, while the sensation of conquest faded, overnight, to nothing.

Antoinette was a severely thin, tough-talking debugger met at a Saint Louis computer fair—acres of pale metal and convex black-green screens, within a walk of the great arch through which Lewis and Clark opened the West. The fair occupied a vast shed recently erected where a black ghetto had been torn down, its residents fleeing to East Saint Louis, and the fair’s sponsors seemed not to know at whom its glamour was aimed, big business or the private hobbyist who had the patience and hundreds of hours needed to assemble an Altair 8800. In that dusk before Apple dawned, and the hobby computer became a consumer product, even a Tandy TRS-80, out of Radio Shack, cost more than a new Buick, and the cheapest DEC, the PDP-8, went for “only” eighteen thousand dollars. Owen stood guard at the E-O stall, hawking without much heart a packaged games application Ed had insisted on developing. Trying to cash in on Atari’s Pong coup, he had bypassed Owen with a design team of younger employees. But Pong itself was still a matter of a two-hundred-pound box that people in an arcade or a luncheonette put a quarter in to play, like a pinball machine. A home that had a computer in it was one in a hundred thousand. It was hard to believe that video games, requiring sound and color and joysticks, were the future of a device born of a great war and presently hauling numbers for the financial, industrial, and scientific armies of the world. Corporate types in gray and putty suits circulated among the booths with ponytailed computer-heads in old blue jeans and flannel shirts. In another generation, the second uniform would have displaced the former as the height of moneyed fashion, and lawyers and bankers would dress casual to welcome