The computer age

A friend of mine, a sports writer and one of the best, writes a prose that is fast, shrewd, bristling with the most racy and telling idioms. He's a Texan and you might guess from the general vivacity of his stuff and its cheeky charm that he was an American of the generation of new journalists that came up after the incomparable Tom Wolfe invented, 20 years ago, what they call 'the new journalism'.

Yet, this man is crowding sixty and he performs on an old, manual typewriter that he's been clanking away at ever since he left Fort Worth 30-some years ago. He said the other day that every time he passes a shop window that displays a manual typewriter, he has an urge to dash in and buy it, 'because,' he said, with mock seriousness, 'they may not be making them much longer'. Well, we may soon discover that there's nothing mock about this seriousness.

Forty years ago I bought a camera which was, and still is, the best landscape camera I've ever owned. With the advantage, which I believe does not belong to any of the most swagger Japanese or German cameras, of producing a direct print on a transparency of 44mm, not 35 – a big help to accurate colour blow-ups. Alas, not only does the camera no longer exist, I mean they don't make it anymore, but they don't make the film. So I've given up landscape photography long ago and now, no doubt a sentimental function of early senility, I concentrate on filming people with a cheap little camera at about six feet.

The top of the bookshelf behind the chair in which I'm at the moment talking to myself is cluttered with photographs that nauseate my young, intelligent friends – snaps of friends, daughters, sons, grandchildren, a favourite caddy and a photograph taken on the seventh hole at San Francisco Golf Club where the last duel fought in California took place. I mean a duel with swords – a photo of me with Bing Crosby whose last letter to me ended with the memorable sentence, 'My golf is woeful but I will never surrender'.

Well, I'm authoritatively told that the manual typewriter is doomed. Dan Jenkins and I may well be the last, living practitioners. Already my eldest grandson who's all of 13, a courteous boy, can barely suppress a chuckle when he sees me clacking away at a portable I've had for, I should guess, 30 years.

I've been up in Vermont for Thanksgiving with my daughter and her brood of five children of whom the eldest is that same 13-year-old grandson, the youngest a piping, but blessedly placid, eight months. A restful time, you can imagine, was had by all.

At any rate, in the restful intervals, my grandson attempted, with heartbreaking patience, to instruct me in the use of his word processor. He's had it for three or four years now and whereas in the beginning he played games, shooting down Russians in outer space – and don't tell him the Russians haven't been working on Star Wars forever – whereas, I say, he used to amuse himself with the 1985 equivalent of cowboys and Indians, as we all know the Indians originally came across the Baring Strait from Siberia – ah ha!. He now does his homework on the word processor and pursues his hobby on it which is astronomy. And, whereas he once worked out the constellations from a book and a T-square, he now taps keys and watches Venus and Scorpio tell him the date when they will conjoin the parallax with the portisfriggis, or something very close to it.

My grandson has the tact not to suggest that I invest in this gadget, though it was hinted to me a long time ago by, on the contrary, a tactless friend that I really ought to junk my manual and buy an electric typewriter. He kept pressing me on this till one day I was forced to say testily, 'But they don't write better prose! Dickens did pretty well with a quill pen'. Since he, himself, writes indifferent prose to this day on a word processor, I've heard no more from him.

I hope I don't sound like an old fuddy-duddy reactionary, except in the matter of doing my own work in my own way. On the other hand, I am agog at what the computer age can do to ease and speed up some of the more tedious necessities of life, like figuring out your bank balance. The other day I had my monthly statement from my bank. A deposit I'd made of, shall we say, $2,000 was plainly registered in my return in a smart print out as $200. I could find no such deposit when I went through my books. I called up the manager. 'That's all right!' he said, 'It should have been two thousand. We took note of that, but the computer tends to get the digits wrong.' 'Great!' I said, 'Could you arrange next time to have the computer make a mistake in my favour?'

And I ought to say that I have two friends, one of whom owes his life to the development of the CAT scan and the early diagnosis of a serious disease. The CAT scan, maybe I should explain to oldsters, is shorthand for computed axial tomography – in American, computerised. Nobody in America has his house burgled, it is burglarised. Well, this machine displays by radiography the details in a selected plane of the organs of the body and shows which are normal and which are not.

I should not have to say any more about it to a British audience, anyway, because it is one of the triumphs of British science. It was developed at Harrow. Not, I hasten to say, by schoolboys, but in the EMI labs in the town of Harrow.

A year or two ago, the CAT scan was so new, so chic and so expensive that rich Americans from Beverly Hills to Palm Beach would catch a cold and insist on a CAT scan. This urge has now been replaced by another. There has arrived the MRI, the magnetic resonance imager and while the cost of putting your body under it is now high, ranging from 400 to 900 dollars for one exposure, the cost is expected to come down dramatically. And since MRI is also expected, in the fullness of time, to replace both the CAT scan and even X-rays, the federal government has already started to pay for its use on elderly people under the national health insurance programme to which everybody over 65 is entitled.

The process of the MRI is dramatic and, to people like me brought up on gargles and a doctor's fingers tapped on the chest, it's a dazzling bit of magic. The patient is put in the middle, the actual centre, of a very large circular magnet. The nuclei of hydrogen atoms in his/her body are then excited by radio wave impulses. After a time the pulses shut off. The excited nuclei are delighted to relax and they emit radio signals picked up by an antenna and fed into a computer. The computer, then – hey presto – produces a picture on a television monitor and, there, the doctors can get a clear picture in depth, not merely of organs, but of various kinds of normal and abnormal tissue.

And one of the happy consequences of this marvel as it affects the government's outlay for Medicare, a huge item in the budget which, by now, no president dare shave any more than he dare abolish social security, a happy thought is that the general use of the MRI could actually, in the end, save money by making unnecessary a great deal of exploratory surgery that keeps patients in the hospital for anything between five to ten days. Anyway, that's what this government says.

I was told the other day, and it cannot today be the wild rumour it would have seemed ten years ago, that all the notes and statements and minutes of the meeting at the Geneva summit are being fed into a computer. It won't come up with a formula for universal peace and we all pray it doesn't finally bang out, 'Go back to square one!' But it could digest, it seems, not only all the factual statements and various opinions but, I'm told computers can do this, the emotional tone of what was being said.

This may be too hopeful a development but even in the early days, I remember doing a talk on the first big brain over 30 years ago, even then computers couldn't get excited and sulk and otherwise reflect indigestion at the amount or the complexity of what the feeder was feeding in. And there's the rub.

I, myself, have not yet been convinced that the results of a computer's machinations are better than the intelligence that's using them, except, that is, in the matter of doing elaborate calculations. We've all heard that Einstein's famous formula could have been isolated by a computer in a few minutes, whereas putting together all the elements of the formula and working out the mathematics on a blackboard took several years.

However, let's hope they're right about the emotional tone, since that is the root of the long Soviet-American conflict. We don't trust each other and from that distrust springs and grows the nuclear arms race and not the other way round.

Mr Reagan, it appears, has finally come around to seeing this and it was he who insisted to Mr Gorbachev that to meet again next year and then in 1987 would keep alive the possibility that two powers with radically different systems of belief in government, in human dignity, in what keeps a society stable, the possibility that they can come to trust each other enough not to want to blow each other's system and each other's peoples apart.

In the meantime, back beneath the stratosphere, the computers at three famous airlines are chattering away just now to obey a humiliating settlement ordered by the United States district court to pay back in later flights, not in money, $30 million that the court says Pan American, Trans World and British Airways owe about two million passengers – people who would have flown cheaper than they did if these airlines had not, together, managed to run Sir Freddie Laker out of business.

The only anxiety of those two million hurt, emotionally hurt, passengers must be that the airlines computers get the digits right.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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