COMPUTER THERMIDOR

Dick Pountain/01 December 1996/Idealog 28

If you are of a culinary bent you may at this moment be imagining a personal computer, its tough shell split in half, its innards smothered in a rich pink Bechamel sauce with sliced mushrooms, then grilled under a thick layer of grated Parmesan cheese. Novel as this recipe may be, it isn't what I mean at all. I'm actually referring to the original meaning of Thermidor, namely the 11th month of the French Revolutionary Calendar. At the peak of the French Revolution in 1793 the new authorities, determined to make a complete break with the past, decreed that a new 'rational' calendar would henceforth replace the old Gregorian one. This divided the year into 12 months of a neat 30 days each, with just three 10-day weeks per month - the intention was to infuriate the Catholic Church by abolishing Sundays, but it was scarcely more welcomed by the toiling masses who had got used to being paid every 7 days. The new months were around 18 days out of phase with the old, and had new descriptive names derived from the Latin, like Brumaire ('misty') which stretched from mid-October to mid-November, Pluviose ('rainy') from mid-January to mid-February, and Thermidor ('hot') which was the height of summer from July to August.

You probably think that I intend some parable about the folly of megalomaniacs who try to tamper with established custom, like perhaps a computer company that tries to foist a new and incompatible operating system on its customers, or insists on using different formats from everyone else (like say .CAB instead of .ZIP). Nothing could be further from the truth. A parable, yes, but of a quite different complexion. You see, to historians Thermidor has a special meaning - it was the month in 1799 that the revolution ended.

From 1793 the Committee of Public Safety under its formidable leader Robespierre had whipped the revolution on to greater and greater radicalism, guillotining anyone who dared to stand in its way. On 10 Thermidor 1799 (28th July) Robespierre and his colleagues went to the guillotine themselves, the Terror and in effect the revolution was over - by 1805 the old calendar was restored. For the next few years the populace abandoned itself to silly hair-cuts and sillier clothes, until this short geezer from Corsica came along and sorted them out. Well I've been writing about the 'Personal Computer Revolution' for fifteen years now, and I've just realised that our Thermidor is upon us.

Let no-one doubt that it was a revolution. In 1968 I was a biochemistry student in a spanking new department at Imperial College. We weren't short of advanced equipment; there were infra-red and ultra-violet spectrometers in every lab, some of the first NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) machines, and a state-of-the-art scintillation counter that could measure the radioactive tracer levels in 100 samples at a time. I used this machine to trace glucose metabolism in brain tissue, and the results would come to me on a long, long paper strip like a till roll. Converting scintillations/sec to glucose levels require a complex calculation  for every sample and to perform these I had my very own calculator. It was enamelled a lovely shade of grey-green, had a chromed crank-handle on the side and looked like a cross between a sewing machine and a meat grinder. To multiply you cranked the handle toward you, to divide you cranked the handle away from you till a bell rang, then cranked toward again. Later I was allowed to use the London University computer (there was only the one) called Atlas. A man in a brown lab coat took my results away, and they came back a week later processed. I never did see Atlas.

Now jump ahead a decade. It's 4 o'clock in the morning in a basement flat in Notting Hill, and I'm drooping onto the keyboard of a Commodore Pet with 4 Kbytes of memory. I'm learning Basic, all about strings and arrays and functions and expressions, and I love it. On a few years more: now I have a Sharp MZ80-B running CP/M, a real operating system, and I'm learning an amazing language called Forth that lets you crawl all over the hardware. Bulletin boards are the latest fad but no-one sells any asynch communications software for my Sharp. One Friday night I sit down with a Sendata 700B acoustic coupler and the data sheet for the Z80-SIO chip that powers my serial port. I write a one line Forth program that twangs the registers to fetch a single byte from the serial port, and it works...by Sunday evening I'm logging on to The Source.

Sometime in the mid-80's the power of the computer on my desk overtook that of Atlas, which had long since been towed away in a scrap-merchant's tumbril. Then Windows came along to make computers easier to use. For two years I wrote no programs because its API was just too tedious. Visual Basic freed me again briefly and I could write programs that looked just as good as the shop-bought sort. But the rot continued. Suddenly everything was password-protected and full of LAN configuration crap that I didn't want to know about. Now we are being told that the 'cost of ownsership' for PCs has spun out of control, and that diskless NetPCs will enable the men-in-brown-lab-coats' children more efficiently to manage the 'task-oriented workers' and stop them playing Quake in company time. Thermidor indeed.

Still I'm not downhearted. Thermidor was by no means the end of French history as France went on to a place among the most civilised nations on earth, and to invent croissants, soixante-neuf, the Citroen DS and the Exocet missile.