Hard Drives : Computer Nerds, Stop Worrying: Your Obsession Can Make You a Better Human Being

For a long time, computers were good for a laugh. Through the first decade of the personal-computer age, from roughly 1981 through 1991, the idea that these frustrating machines would make America more productively efficient had become a standing joke. The more computer magazines huffed and puffed about “new productivity tools”--the latest souped-up spreadsheet, the newest laptop computer four ounces lighter than its suddenly “hefty” predecessor--the harder economists had to struggle to detect any benefit to American business from the computer revolution.

Just to give one example from a mountain of academic findings, Gary Loveman, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, surveyed American companies that had invested heavily in computers between 1978 and 1984, when the revolution was just getting under way. He found that the money spent on computers might just as well have been thrown away; it had less impact on productivity than money spent on almost anything else.

Now the same experts who brought us the productivity paradox are back to say: Oh, never mind. They have come up with new ways of measuring business productivity, and guess what? The companies that spent the most on computers were right all along!

There are many explanations for this turnaround. In some industries, the experts didn’t notice early gains in productivity because the gains weren’t there. In these cases, computers did not become truly valuable until other technological bottlenecks were removed. Until telephone companies finished installing high-volume lines in the late 1980s, for instance, banks couldn’t move data from place to place fast enough to support a nationwide network of automatic-teller machines.

Some analysts now claim that the problem was (surprise!) all the government’s fault, because the way it measured productivity was too crude and old-fashioned to detect the surge in computerized productivity that was under way. Ronald Schmidt, of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, has pointed out that the “productivity” challenge in the modern automobile business has very little to do with the sheer output rate of vehicles--a simple figure the government knows how to measure. These days, productivity involves things like product reliability, customer satisfaction and quick response to shifting market demands. Computers have helped companies improve performance in all these areas, but none of that shows up in output-per-man-hour terms, which is how productivity is normally defined.

The pendulum has swung so far that a new school of thought--much like some very old schools of thought--now worries that computers are making us too productive and account for the “jobless recovery” under way now, in which companies can increase output and profits without hiring new people.

Nowadays I take it for granted that, when I finish this article, I can send it in less than a minute, by modem, to the magazine. Barely a dozen years ago, I would have been scrambling to the Small Parcels desk of the nearest airport, checking schedules to see how I could get the manuscript on the next plane west. Or I might have lived the nightmare of dictating the entire piece over the telephone, a routine ordeal in those days. I take it similarly for granted that, when I’ve run out of ideas for revising this article, I can print a clean final copy without having to type a whole new draft.

With my computer, filing income taxes has become a matter of running a program at the end of the year and finding out how much I owe. (This is assuming, of course, that I’ve logged in payments and checks through the previous year, as they occur.) My desk may be littered with manuscripts, magazines and moldy coffee cups, but it is blessedly free of little yellow stick-on notes and scribbled phone numbers. All such info sits tidily--and retrievably--inside the machine. I take it for granted that when I want to see what the manager of a Matsushita plant told me in Osaka five years ago, I can find it within seconds on my machine. My office is even free of those cursed sheaves of greasy, curly fax paper. Incoming faxes go right into the computer. I can print them out (on normal paper) if I choose, but most of them I simply read on the screen, then save or (usually) erase.

Enough already. Anyone who is observant should have realized by now that computers are indispensably “productive.” But anyone who is honest must also admit that the weird allure of computers isn’t much related to productivity at all.

THE FASCINATION WITH THE COMPUTER, THE IMPULSE THAT KEEPS people buying computer magazines and sitting at the monitor late into the night, has very little to do with productivity, just as the romance of the automobile has little to do with today’s reliable engines, long-lasting tires or rust-resistant fenders. People use computers because of the ways in which computers are productive, but they love computers for the ways in which they are not. Let me explain.

Computers are unproductive in three main ways. Two are related to other forms of human weakness and frivolity. The third helps human beings play their assigned role in the cosmos.

The first pitfall of computers might be called “compu-porn.” It consists of the endlessly excited craving for new possessions, which can be satisfied, but only momentarily, by consummation of the desire for a new chip, hard drive, laptop or monitor.

The vehicle of compu-porn is, of course, the computer press, with its glossy paper, its soft-focus photography, its mainly male readership and its unvarying message that you really should be enjoying something younger, sleeker and more exciting than what you have around the house.

Compu-porn is like other forms of pornography in that reading the magazines and ogling the offerings is more exciting than actually making a commitment to any of the products. A 486/66 with VESA and a high-speed cache! What I could do with that! And check out the Pentium and the 17-pages-per-minute LaserJet on the next page! But once you leave the realm of fantasy and actually lay down money for a new model, you’re quickly filled with remorse for all the possibilities you’ve missed.

There are two strategies for dealing with this side of the computer culture: stonily ignoring it or simply giving in. I have switched back and forth between strategies through the last decade, refusing to read compu-porn for months at a time and then letting myself wallow in it shamelessly. For the last two or three years, I’ve implemented a sustained-titillation policy. By making sure that one part of my computer system is always slightly inferior to all the rest of the system, I manage always to have one new purchase to dream about as I thumb through the glossy pages.

What this policy means in practical terms is that I rarely buy a “new” computer but am constantly refurbishing my system from within. I bought my last completely new machine nearly four years ago. But soon after I brought it home, I was thumbing through the magazines again. First I bought a new hard disk and controller (a high-speed SCSI, for nerd readers), to hold many more files and get at them more quickly. The new controller required a new motherboard (EISA, again for nerds), which in turn required more memory so as not to be held back. Then I wanted a new operating system (OS/ 2, the multi-tasking miracle) to put all that memory to use--and a new power supply to keep everything from browning out, and an XGA-2 video card for super-high-resolution screen images, and a speed-doubling chip, and on and on. The only parts of the computer that are original equipment are the trusty old fax board and the external metal case, which lulls the rest of my family into thinking that I’ve stuck with the same old machine.

I rationalize my behavior in a number of ways: by saying that the cost is just about covered by the computer’s real productivity gains, by reassuring myself that I’d be blowing much more money if I were interested in sports cars or the ponies, and, crucially, by neglecting to tell my wife exactly what is going on. You will notice that I am not writing this article for my hometown newspaper.

The second non-productive aspect of computers is their role as sheer distractions. Ernest Hemingway was once asked how to write a novel. His answer was, “First you clean out the refrigerator, and then you wash the car.” In fact, it was probably someone other than Hemingway who said that--I can’t be sure, since I don’t have the reference info here on a disk--but the point remains. People have always looked for ways to avoid useful work, especially writing, and in the computer age, they can find distractions without even getting up from the chair.

If Hemingway were around to answer the same question now, he would probably say, “First you check out the CompuServe forums, and then you de-fragment your hard disk.” Today’s computers offer a thousand ways to seem busy without actually getting anything done.

E-mail, in the form of CompuServe, Prodigy, Internet, MCI Mail and so on, is the sharpest example of the double-edged sword offered us by the computer age: the tremendous potential for pure productivity, the tremendous temptation for pure time-wasting. If you have some control over your impulses, e-mail can be more dramatically efficient that any other single aspect of the computer age. You can convey data to people in Hong Kong or Buenos Aires for a tenth the cost and a hundredth the time of even the fastest courier services. You can pull information out of arcane databases. You can often track down busy people more easily through e-mail than on the telephone, with a much better chance of getting a reply. Radio ham Rush Limbaugh, for instance, gets about 300 CompuServe messages per day and says he answers several dozen of them. None of these fans would be able to reach Limbaugh on the phone. You cannot pick up your telephone and talk to William F. Buckley, but you can reach him on MCI Mail.

But oh, if you are not disciplined about e-mail, abandon all hope of a productive life. CompuServe makes a fortune off arguments waged in its “forums.” Otherwise sensible people, who would be embarrassed to waste time talking in the office about tiny differences in this or that computer program, can exhaust themselves with on-line tirades about whether the NumLock key should always be turned off when the computer boots up or whether the “graphical user interface” is a step forward or back for mankind.

I have faced the harsh truth that I have no power to resist these arguments. If I know that there is an on-line discussion about, say, the merits of Microsoft’s Windows NT versus IBM’s OS/ 2 2.1, I have to find some way to suppress that knowledge; otherwise, I’ll spend all day reading messages and weighing in myself. I have learned that it is a mistake to rely on my own willpower. I have rigged up a little program that will automatically disconnect me from CompuServe if I’ve logged on within the previous 24 hours.

Even without a modem, the computer offers vast possibilities for distraction. With Windows or OS/ 2, you can spend all day changing the color scheme, the fonts, the icons, the look and feel of your screen. You can use one of the countless “diagnostic” programs to see just how fast your hard disk is really running (as if you would notice the difference) or how many “hits” your disk-caching program is attaining or how much demand your programs are placing on your central-processing chip. In the days before I got OS/ 2, I could while away hours on end running an “optimization” program (non-nerds can skip to the next sentence) that shifted TSR programs to different points in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files, to eke out precious Ks of “low RAM.” It is this vast possibility for distraction that makes an empty house or office suddenly feel inhabited once the computer is switched on.

Stephen Manes, a novelist and co-author (with Paul Andrews) of a recent biography of Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, named this kind of program “fritterware.” In the universe of fritterware, nothing is more perilously addictive than the constellation of “font” programs--the software that lets you determine whether you’re going to have Arial, Garamond, Goudy Old Style or plain old Courier type coming out of your machine.

I know of no final answer to the distractive temptation of computers. My short-term strategies involve a variety of steps to reduce temptation. I erased the game Tetris from my hard disk after admitting that I was powerless to stop playing it. I keep the computer’s chassis bolted on extra-tight, so I’m less tempted to experiment with DIP switches and video settings. In the long term, I strive for a pose of worldly tolerance. Sure, I may have blown two hours changing all the icons on my OS/ 2 desktop so that they resemble members of “The Flintstones” cast--Fred for my word processor, the talkative Wilma for the telecommunications program and so on. But all work and no play would make me an even duller boy, hard as that may be to imagine.

Software upgrades--the endless small improvements that make you re-buy and relearn programs you have already bought and learned--might seem like other forms of compu-porn, creating an insatiable desire for new purchases. And, like other forms of computerized distraction, they take your eye off the ball. But in fact, they introduce the third and most admirable form of non-productivity, the one that links computers to something fundamental in our souls.

EARLY THIS YEAR, ON A trip with my wife to Southeast Asia, I had a moment of recognition that clarified this part of the computer’s appeal. We were visiting a couple in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where we had spent several sleepy and happy years. Over dinner at a restaurant, we made a stab at discussing the Big Themes of modern Malaysia, from the growth of its economy to the strains on its political system. Then we returned to our friends’ home, and as we passed through the door an expression of eagerness and joy lit up the husband’s face. Half of his living room was occupied by an unbelievably elaborate model train set, with countless sidings, junctions, flyover crossings and signal lights.

As the proud proprietor showed us all the things his trains could do, I suddenly understood my own predicament completely. The satisfaction came not from the completed project but from the thousands of intermediate steps that had been necessary to make it work just so--to have one little car cross in front of the other, to be able to control all the action from one master bank of switches. The completed system was ultimately meaningless. Indeed, to watch it function for more than a minute or two was a bore. But as my friend talked about the fine-tunings and improvements he still planned to make--smoothing out one junction, automating another track change--I recognized a soul mate. This is how I felt when learning a new programming language. The reward lay not in the finished product but in the struggle to make everything work.

In retrospect, that was one of the forces at work on the fateful day when I decided that I had to have a personal computer, even though they had barely been invented yet. It was in January, 1979, and I had just finished retyping the fourth or fifth draft of a long article that contained the name “Zbigniew Brzezinski” several dozen times. I was an eager young journalist at the time, but I realized that my fingers would never hold up through a full career at this rate.

My solution, in those days before the first Macintosh and the first IBM PC, even before the first Kaypro and the first Northgate, was to buy a small computer that was normally used to control a peanut-sorting line. That’s right: It controlled an electric-eye device that inspected the nuts as they streamed by in a line and kicked out the ones that were the wrong color. This machine, the Processor Technology SOL-20, seemed to have enough raw computing power to run a word-processing program, but there were a few glitches to work out. (“Let me get this straight,” said the engineer I bought the computer from, in a little machine shop in rural Ohio. “You want it to display both uppercase and lowercase letters on the screen?”) In those days, “saving” a relatively brief document meant an agonizing 20-minute process of storing it on normal audio recording tape. Now I get peeved if my computer takes more than a second to store a book-length manuscript.

But this productivity marvel pales when compared to the thrills and chills that went into making it all happen. When I brought my first crude peanut-sorting computer home from the industrial warehouse, all it could do was run a word-processing program called The Electric Pencil and the programming language BASIC. To create an excuse for myself to learn BASIC, I decided that I needed to set up my computer to do my taxes. After just a month or two of tinkering with “IF-THEN-ELSE” commands, I had succeeded in writing an automated tax program. I would save precious minutes the next April 15!

In the intervening years, I re-created that process, from scratch, nearly a dozen times--after BASIC with Visicalc, then with a real business-accounting system called the Boss, then with R:Base, then Paradox, then Knowledgeman, then 1-2-3 and, for the last few years, with a sublime data-management program called Agenda. (Agenda, like another indispensable program called Magellan, has been orphaned by Lotus Development Corp., which originally sold it. Much of the software business now seems like Detroit in the 1970s, pushing flashy, overweight behemoths while neglecting sporty and well-engineered alternatives.) Since I have stuck with Agenda for the last few years, the tax-preparing routine has finally become genuinely efficient--but if I measured all the hours I’d spent learning programming routines over the last decade and compared them to what it would have cost to hire an accountant, I’m sure it would seem that I had wasted my time.

Yet I haven’t wasted my time, since the effort to solve each new puzzle was in fact the point. The payoff was that magic moment when, like the little railroad in Kuala Lumpur, my program would do exactly what I intended it to--and at that point, of course, I’d itch to find a way to make it do something more.

Anyone who has coped in even the simplest way with computers knows this feeling. Losing “productivity” is the least of it; you lose sleep and human companionship as you stay up all night trying to figure why a program is not branching, filtering, printing or displaying the way you think you’ve told it to. You cannot leave the machine until you have figured out what is going wrong. You find yourself reading macro-language manuals in your spare time, irritated at the arcane grammar of computer langauges you simply have to memorize but exhilarated by the moments when you discover a command or trick that lets you accomplish your wishes through the tools the computer makes available.

I have undertaken this apparently wasted effort in scores of different ways. My experience, unrefuted to this date, is that no program can arrange research data as effectively and powerfully as Agenda can. But Agenda is no longer interesting to me, since I know its commands and routines by heart, so I trudge through each new database program as it comes out, learning it from scratch only to conclude, in the end, that it doesn’t really offer me more than what I already have. My computer was working perfectly well, as far as I could tell, with plain old DOS, but when I heard that a new version of OS/ 2 was available, I felt compelled to learn it from scratch as well. Many hundreds of hours of manual-reading, disk-formatting, error-trapping and e-mail-sending later, I had an OS/ 2 setup that was vastly superior to what I had done under DOS. Productive in overall terms? Probably not. Yet satisfying in a way I have come simply to accept.

In fairness to OS/ 2, let me point out that ordinary civilians could probably load the system onto their computers, get it set up and have it running in an hour or two, rather than the eons that I spent. If my main goal had been simple productivity, I would have done that straightforwardly, too. But, as I have tried to make clear, the joy of figuring it out was in its way as satisfying as finally having it work.

Why do I claim that the endless struggle to tinker and figure out is any better than the compu-porn craving for new equipment or the computer’s role as a distraction from real work? Because the fundamental effort involved, that of solving one puzzle and going on to solve the next, is closely connected to the purpose human beings serve on Earth.

I know, I know: There are other definitions of human purpose. One of the most familiar is Sigmund Freud’s; he said that humanity’s two basic drives were for love and work. Those obviously play their part, but somewhere high on the list should come another compulsion: to know , to figure it out. Human beings in this sense are not so different from cats. With our godlike distance from the life span and interests of cats, we can watch as they prowl the Earth and think, “This is interesting, but it is all in vain.” In the long run it doesn’t matter if they catch whatever they are pursuing at the moment or not. Yet they define themselves by exercising their powers--stealth, surprise--and if they stopped trying, by allowing themselves to think “this is unproductive,” they would have lost much of their reason to exist.

Human beings exist to love and to work (that is, to be “productive”), but we are also here to figure out. Command of language is what makes human beings human, and when children are learning to speak, they cross a crucial threshold the first time they put words together in a sentence they have never heard before. Something similar goes on in the much more limited realm of computer language. The moment of satisfaction in coping with a program comes when you can put commands together in a way you have not copied or seen before.

Working crossword puzzles, trying to guess the outcome of mystery novels, breaking secret codes--these activities are all fundamentally like playing with the computer. Once you solve the problem, it becomes uninteresting. But while the mystery is still there, our full powers are engaged.

If you’re worried that puzzle-solving activities are unproductive, then exercise these powers by learning Japanese and Russian and Arabic, and go promote American products overseas. My advice is not to worry. To figure out the problems computers pose to us, again and again and again, is our role and our nature.