The lights were low, the music soft; the evening rain fell gently outside as I sat mesmerized before a pair of winking red lights. I was testing a program I had written to shuffle the contents of one computer disk to another, and the quiet burbling of the drives took me back to a similar moment long, long ago when I was just discovering the magic and romance of personal computing.

I remember first seeing those activity lights flash ten years ago, when I learned how to do a floppy disk copy. How exciting to see ninety thousand characters of information reproduced flawlessly in a matter of seconds. Back in 1976 Oric, my Vector 1 computer, was a stunning example of the finest technical efforts of the world's most advanced society. In the space of two cubic feet were packed an incredible 32 kilobytes of high-speed memory, two space-age magnetic storage units, and a processor chip that only three years earlier had been a dream only dimly perceived. And it was mine, all mine!

Now, ten years later, I was transferring ten thousand thousand bytes (ten megabytes) in minutes with the help of Oric's successor: my PC, a computer built from spare parts--a computer that makes Oric look like a playtoy.

Consider how far personal computers have come since the lumbering Vectors, Altairs, and Cromemcos of the mid-seventies first captured the imagination of electronics wizards and common folks alike. Today's PC, designed by IBM but built by hundreds of manufacturers, can pack 375 times as much disk storage in the same space as my first disk system, for about the same cost as ten years ago.

Total affordable electronic memory in a typical machine has increased by a factor of 25: from 32,000 characters to over 800,000. 32K, or kilobytes, of Random Access Memory cost $1200 in 1976, and that was a price breakthrough! Now the same capacity costs $5, can be accessed twice as fast, and requires just one chip for every 128 of them in my first machine. And coming soon are memory chips with 16 times the capacity of today's 256K RAMs.

The end is not in sight. The newest Atari computer packs a thousand kilobytes of storage into a space the size of my 48K Atari, and costs less. Soon it may be sold in K-Mart. ("Attention, shoppers . . . For the next five minutes you can buy a graphics workstation with full VT-52 emulation and a megabyte of RAM for just $999.95 . . . .")

We can now stuff 8 million bytes into an IBM PC, and soon will take our Ataris and Amigas up to 16 Megabytes. The newest IBM PC, the RT Personal Computer, has an addressable virtual memory space of one Terabyte: a million million bytes! And even newer, better, faster processors are being discussed in the trade journals as if they're available now.

Yet the personal computing revolution's promise remains elusive. Weren't our PC's supposed to eliminate paperwork? As anyone with a draft printer can attest, computers multiply the volume of paper churned out in the course of a week. The computer industry, ever optimistic, claims a solution is On The Way, this time in the form of laser-based WORM (Write Once, Read Mostly) drives that, in conjunction with a document scanner, can store up to a quarter-million pages of our own data on a 3" compact disk.

Weren't computers supposed to free us from drudgery and repetitious work so we could all Go Play? My weekly dose of keypunching to maintain current records is absolutely daunting. The more I computerize, the worse shape my checkbook is in. Data entry bores me, and so does struggling with my printer to load blank checks. I'd rather write them by hand.

What about the ability of computers to help us access information over phone lines? It's cheap and lots of people do it, but frankly I'd rather read the newspaper or copy someone else's data disk. Modems in general are still too slow, and modem programs too awkward.

Yet the 9600-baud modem is already here, and Pacific Bell is talking about multiplexing two high- speed data channels and seven voice channels onto one conventional telephone line. That may let us chat with friends via computerized videophone as we pool our data on a background channel.

We have gone through two full generations of microcomputers in the past ten years. Now a third generation is appearing, characterized by two classes of machines. One class includes ultra-high capacity workstations like IBM's RT PC. At an initial price of nearly $12,000, the RT is not cheap, but it promises greater performance and capability than we have yet seen in a micro system.

The other crop of new machines, of greater interest to us common folks, includes the new Atari, Amiga, and IBM PC Advanced Technology computers: high capacity personal systems at relatively affordable prices. I like the Atari and Amiga better than the more conventional IBM AT for lots of reasons. They have a graphics-based screen that makes showing pictures as easy as displaying text. They have sound-generating chips that let them speak and play music. They have a mouse-based command system that lets you point to a file or process on the screen. The Amiga even supports multi-tasking, which means it can call a remote computer as a background task while you use it as a word processor.

Admittedly some of the features of the new supermicros are gimmicky or of little immediate use. The mouse, a hand-held puck the size of a cigarette pack, needs an open space on the desk so you can roll it around (and thereby move a pointer on the screen). I have yet to meet anyone with a computer who has an uncluttered desk.

Better, I think, is a keyboard touchpad on which you can slide a fingertip, or a touch-sensitive screen for selecting from menus of options.

Multitasking may prove to be the most overhyped and useless function since talking dashboards. I have trouble keeping my computer busy right now, without asking it to do two or more jobs at once. I'd rather partition memory and select one active job from one or more currently available windows. As computers become quicker, it is less important to have slowpoke processes executing in the background.

But the onset of fast and easy telecommunications could make multitasking a common practice. Imagine instructing your machine to query several remote computers as a background process, for example, without depriving you of the use of keyboard and screen. While you word-processed, your PC could dutifully dial up every data base in the state looking for that elusive "lady keypuncher with significant physical attributes seeking computer-literate male to push all the right buttons" (the dream of every socially deprived, bleary-eyed computer hacker).

Which brings us back to where we started: with magic and romance.

The magic of working with personal computers is that even as they isolate us one from another, they bring us closer together as fellow travelers exploring a strange and magical land. PC users are forever sharing secrets, data, and software.

Romance remains a distinct possibility as well. The proliferation of bulletin board systems, electronic mail systems and dial-in round-the-clock conferences shows that we like communicating with our PC's. Even as we sit staring at a glass screen, bathed in cathode rays, seemingly mesmerized, we are reaching out, not only for information, not only for a taste of the future (it's already here), but for companionship as well. CompuServe's 40-channel CB simulator, for example, attracts a horde of electron-riding thrill seekers who want to chatter through their PC's with strangers from around the country. Some do find romance; at least one marriage has resulted from a random connection of two PC's through a mainframe in Ohio.

The fact is, like it or not, the PC is becoming a focus of everyday life. It is destined to be more pervasive than either the automobile or the television. It is the indispensable engine of growth and change and shared experience that will carry us into the next century and beyond.

Ten years ago the lights flickered, and I watched as 90 kilobytes of information became electrons and danced down a wire. Today the lights wink, and I watch again as half a million pulses per second create an inaudible howl within a delicate ribbon cable. Ten years from now perhaps we will hold our wristwatches together and transfer our favorite books and movies in the twinkling of an eye--to the blinking of a pair of tiny red lights.

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