the microcomputer revolution for historians

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary History

The Microcomputer Revolution for HistoriansAuthor(s): Richard JensenSource: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Summer, 1983), pp. 91-111Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/203518 .

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Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xiv:I (Summer 1983), 9I-III.

Richard Jensen

The Microcomputer Revolution for Historians In 1971 Intel Corporation introduced the 4004 microprocessor chip and launched the microcomputer revolution. Today anyone can buy a sophisticated computer on a chip-like the widely used

Zilog z-80A-for the price of cabfare from an airport, and a

stripped-down system like the Timex-Sinclair Iooo ready to plug in for the price of two nights at a motel. The little Timex, for a total cost of about $S5o, has the processing speed and internal

memory capacity of the smaller versions of the IBM 360 mainframe machine that revolutionized computing in the I960s. The

press has given extensive coverage to the microcomputer revolution, and historians in generations to come will be called upon to decide whether the microcomputer had as much impact upon society, economy, and culture as the locomotive or the automobile. What are the implications for historians in the I980s?

For perspective, consider how historians have used giant mainframe machines. Perhaps 500 historians in the United States, and a few score in Europe, have used them chiefly to process large, static data sets. Typically we conduct statistical analysis on census data, collective biographies, reconstituted families, election returns, or economic and demographic time series. The major effort goes into locating suitable sources, drawing a sample, de-

vising a coding scheme, and coding the data. Keypunching the data is an outside expense of some magnitude. With the help of a consultant, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (spss), the Statistical Analysis System (SAS), or a similar package of canned

programs is used to create a machine readable data file. The

package is used to manipulate the variables and to run all the statistical analyses that the user can think of, and the work is done. Very few historians write their own programs, because

they know too little about FORTRAN, operating systems, or the

potential of the computer. Practically all the reports on original programming that appear in our literature deal with complex data

Richard Jensen is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

0022-I953/83/OI09I-21 $02.50/0 ? I983 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.



92 RICHARD JENSEN

collection projects, like those of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) or the Philadelphia Social

History Project, that have enough funding to support their own

computer staff. Historians with severely limited budgets would

prefer to make one more trip to a distant archive rather than hire a computer consultant.

The free consultants available on campus must be baffled by the strange requests made by historians. At most universities, not to mention smaller colleges, it is difficult enough to find a consultant who knows SPss, let alone the subtleties of missing data, new statistical procedures appropriate for historical work, or the

ways complex printouts must be interpreted. The tiresome processes of explaining over and over again, of jockeying for place in student queues, of waiting out turnaround time in a dreadful basement wondering what error messages will appear next, all

conspire to frustrate historians who know that somehow the

computer must have the answer. Will microcomputers become the magic solution? Perhaps.

Their advantages are twofold: they are accessible financially and

psychologically. Historians have started buying their own machines. Some affluent departments already have word processors; soon the poorer departments will realize that they need cheap machinery to take over expensive routine tasks like typing, copy- ing, managing lists, mailings, and budgeting. The same machines that handle these jobs well and cheaply can also be used for

sophisticated research and innovative teaching. The need for campus computer centers, with their expensive

overhead, is rapidly fading. Microcomputers will never be as

powerful as the IBM and Control Data mainframes that large universities have. But they do not need to be. Machines already on the market for under $5,ooo have all the speed and capacity that any historian could ever need. The hardware is in place, and the software is coming along rapidly. Prices, furthermore, are

dropping steadily. The question is whether the history profession is psychologically ready for the opportunity at hand. The chief barrier is confusion about the vast array of equipment available- over 200 models are on the market in I983, priced from under $ioo to over $20,000oooand uncertainty about exactly how it can be used.

At the bottom of the line, game-oriented machines like the



MICROCOMPUTER REVOLUTION 93

vIC-20, the Timex:Iooo (the Sinclair zx-8i in Britain), the Atari

400, the Radio Shack Color Computer, the Texas Instruments TI-

99/4A, and the Acorn and Sinclair Spectrum in Britain are heavily advertised and sell for $50 to $300. They plug into a TV set

(preferably color) and an ordinary cassette recorder, and will work

immediately. The Radio Shack Color Computer may be the best of a strong group. Like the others it has a small memory (expandable at extra cost), excellent graphics, and a friendly de- meanor highly tolerant of mistakes. It does not damage easily, and Radio Shack has the competitive advantage of having dealers

everywhere who can help if something does go wrong or, more

likely, if the user wants to expand and upgrade the system.1 Historians can actually do advanced statistics on little "game"

machines-they should not be confused with television video

game devices or with "dumb" terminals that are merely remote

keyboards linked to big machines. They all contain powerful microprocessors, and they can be augmented with modems ($Ioo to $I50) to make them remote terminals, with cheap ($200-$500) but fast printers, and with disk drives ($400-$600 each) that will store reasonably large historical data sets. (A disk is analogous to an LP record, a drive to a turntable.) All of these machines will

help historians learn BASIC programming, and could be used ef-

fectively in classrooms. The chief limitations are that the software available is mostly games, word processing is difficult, and up- ward expansion is costly. Indeed, a fully configurated "game" system will cost as much as an Osborne ($I,700) and do much less.

Serious research, teaching, and administrative work require more expensive systems consisting of a computer, keyboard, monitor, two drives for floppy disks, and a printer, together with a good operating system and some software. A hundred or more such computers are available. Anyone new to computers is

strongly advised to work with a dealer, who can explain how a

I I have not included the "pocket computers" which have specialty uses, but cannot

compare in terms of general utility. Terminals that provide remote connections to a mainframe computer do not have their own computing power; however, nearly all the

microcomputers can be used as remote terminals at the cost of a $I20 modem (a telephone hookup device) and a software program (about $ioo). The Micro-Professor II, made in Taiwan, is a widely distributed expandable machine with cartridges that provides BASIC

commands in English, Spanish, German, French, Arabic, or Chinese.



94 RICHARD JENSEN

system works, fit the parts and peripherals together, give advice on software, and, above all, provide help when something goes wrong. Mail order houses have lower prices, to be sure, but offer no service. Even small towns now have retailers who can put a complete system together at prices from $2,000 to $7,000. (Ed- ucational discounts are available from Radio Shack; many universities and state education departments have discount arrange- ments with other dealers.)

The three biggest sellers are the Apple II, the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III, and the IBM Personal Computer. At the lower end of the full-feature line are the Atari 800, the TRS-80-III, and several copies of the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, the Commo- dore 64, and new Japanese imports like the Sanyo MCRI6oo. At the upper end are the TRS-80 Models II and 12, the Xerox 820, and the Zenith z-o9, and many machines marketed primarily to businesses, like the Altos, the Apple III, the Apple Lisa, and the Vector Graphic.

The "best buy" is undoubtedly the Osborne I, with superb software and two disk drives included for $1,700. Only a printer (and perhaps a bigger monitor) need be added. The Osborne is

portable and is very popular on college campuses; however it has an annoyingly small screen that displays only part of a page, and

early models had limited disk capacity. The free software, however, is actually worth more than the machine. The KayPro II is a portable matched against the Osborne in price, with a full-size screen and large capacity disks. Morrow and Sanyo are also com-

peting aggressively with Osborne. All of these machines are 8- bit processors (i.e. each character of memory and each word of internal processing is done on a unit of eight binary digits), and have operating speeds of from I million cycles a second (the Apple II) to 4 million. The Apple II currently has the best software

available, and with the Atari 800 the best graphics. The original Apple II and Radio Shack Model I were the model Ts of the

microcomputer revolution-cheap, widely available, easy to

learn, and fun to use, but also slow, limited in disk capacity, and soon obsolescent. So many have been sold to colleges, schools, businessmen, and professors, however, that they will be around for quite a while. The Franklin Ace oo000 and Ace 1200 are im-

proved versions of the Apple II+ that will handle all Apple software (and CP/M software on the I200) and yet cost less. In I983




Apple finally brought out a new model, the IIe, with many of the features that users were demanding. The TRS-80 models II, 12, and III have the best distribution system, through thousands of Radio Shack dealers. The software available by mail order is growing rapidly and may soon surpass the Apple II in everything except graphics; unfortunately, Tandy has a very restrictive policy that prevents most Radio Shack outlets from carrying software or hardware made by other companies. The Radio Shack Model 12, which replaced the Model II in I983, is primarily an office machine, with excellent word processing, list management, and statistical and accounting software; its large capacity disk drives are especially convenient for holding large data sets or long manu-

scripts (350,000 words can be on-line at once, using only two

disks). Most microcomputers are sold with the very useful CP/M-8o

operating system (exceptions are the Apple, Atari, and Radio Shack machines, each with its own system). Apart from graphics routines (like video games, new fonts, maps, and statistical

graphs) most of the interesting software is written for CP/M-8o. The Commodore, TRs8O-III, TRs80-II, TRS80-I2, and Apple/ Franklin can be fitted with CP/M-8o at a cost of two or three hundred dollars.

Microcomputers are evolving much faster than did big com-

puters in the I95os and I96os. The next generation of machines, which will take us through the I98os, is already here. Several dozen microcomputers, based on I6-bit processors like the Intel 8088 or Motorola 68000, are now available, including the IBM

Personal Computer, the DEC Rainbow, the Zenith z-Ioo, and the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 16. Exotic new systems blaze across the pages of BYTE every month. Many of the new systems are

copies of the IBM Personal Computer, which business analysts expect to be extremely successful because of the power of IBM as a corporation.

The I6-bit microcomputers are expensive machines sold primarily to businesses who need large amounts of internal memory to handle spreadsheet programs like VisiCalc. The various "Calc"

packages ($50-300) are able to track sales, prices, profits, etc. for numerous items for numerous months past and into the future; the more memory, the more items and months that can be in-

corporated. Since spreadsheets are more versatile than anything



96 RICHARD JENSEN

easily accessible on mainframe computers, their availability permitted 8-bit machines, especially the Apple, to penetrate corporate headquarters and small businesses alike, even in the face of hos- tility from data processing executives.

The use of sixteen rather than eight bits as the basic character length ("byte") allows slightly faster operation, and much larger amounts of internal RAM (random access memory) that can be handled. The 8-bit machines can address a maximum of 64K RAM

(I K = 1,024 characters), whereas I6-bit machines can potentially address up to i6 million. The IBM Personal Computer, and most of the other i6-bit machines, use the Intel 8088 microprocessor for I6-bit internal processing, but only eight bits for communi- cations with memory; they are therefore not as fast as they could be, and are limited to 256K or 512K of RAM. The Radio Shack Model I6, Hewlett-Packard 200 MI6, and the new Apple use a much superior microprocessor, the Motorola 68000. It commu- nicates with sixteen bits but uses thirty-two bits for internal work. Since little software is yet available for the 68oo000, these machines also contain a z-8o chip to handle screen displays and other house- keeping chores, and to run old 8-bit programs that have not been translated for the 68000. The DEC Rainbow and Zenith zioo also have two microprocessors (a z-8o and an 8088) so that they can run either 8-bit or i6-bit programs. Smart styling, good prices, and the dual processors have made the DEC and Zenith very popular among experts; Clarkson College of Technology now requires all students to buy the Zenith. Add-on chips are available for the Apple to turn it into a i6-bit 8o88 machine; and for the Radio Shack Model II to make it a Model I6.

What little software is available for I6-bit machines usually consists of simple translations of 8-bit programs that exploit only the additional memory; little improvement in speed is noticeable. For years to come 8-bit computers will dominate simply because of their lead in software. Indeed, the software gap is so serious that a z-8o card ("Baby Blue") is sold to IBM users to downgrade the machine to run 8-bit software. IBM is selling well primarily because of its name. With the rapid advance in chip technology, a 32-bit microprocessor cannot be too far away, although the challenge of programming and producing one inexpensively enough for the micro market will surpass the effort that Kidder chronicled in The Mind of a New Machine (which was a 32-bit




Data General minicomputer selling for hundreds of thousands of

dollars.)2 The main value of a computer is the fast processing of large

amounts of data. To utilize this capability the user must have a convenient method to store and retrieve data. Mainframes use IBM cards (obsolete), magnetic tape (slow), and disk packs (expensive). The cheapest microcomputers use ordinary audio cassette tape players. They work, albeit slowly and intermittently. Serious work requires floppy disks and a disk drive. Each com-

puter has an appropriate disk drive (at $400-$1,200). The disks are not standardized. The floppies themselves are cheap ($2-$6) but they come in 5s/4-inch and 8-inch sizes, use one or both sides, have single or double densities, etc. To compound the frustration, the various computers have different disk operating systems. The

storage capacities of a single disk range from 75,000 to 1.25 million characters, or the equivalent of I,000 to 15,000 IBM cards.

Historians, with insatiable appetites for data, should look for the largest capacity disks available. Very fast "Winchester" hard disks are now available for microcomputers, at a cost of $I,ooo to $5,00o. They plug into the microcomputer and hold 3 to 30 million (or more) characters, or the equivalent of 40,000 to 400,000 IBM cards. The prices of the hard disks are falling fast (in early I983 they provided from 1,500 to 8,ooo characters per dol-

lar). No matter what system one starts with, the discovery is soon made that there is not enough memory. The convenience of having enormous data storage, plus the much faster speed of statistical programs on them will make the use of hard disks

commonplace for most academic users in a few years. The disk operating system provides the linkage between the

computer and the floppy or hard disk. The systems are so highly automated that a beginner can use them easily. For 8-bit machines, CP/M-80 ("Control Program/Microcomputer for z-8o or Intel

8080") has become the de-facto standard, even though it is not

easy to use, its error messages are cryptic, and the manuals are

impossible to understand. But it was first out of the garage, and a large assortment of serious programs are available for it. How- ever, much software is written for the exclusive use of the operating systems of the Apple/Franklin or the TRS-8o-III and will not

2 Tracy Kidder, The Mind of a New Machine (Boston, 1981).



98 | RICHARD JENSEN

run under CP/M. For the futuristic I6-bit machines an upgraded version of CP/M-80 called CP/M-86 (oriented toward the IBM Per- sonal Computer) and variations of the multi-user (and very ex-

pensive) Western Electric system UNIX are emerging as the main disk operating systems.3

At present the chief weakness of microcomputers from the historians' viewpoint is the difficulty in transferring programs and data from one machine to another. Most BASIC programs that run on one system will run on another with only minor modifications, if any. The problem is how to move the program from one

computer to another. When most machines were used by hob-

byists or in small business offices, the problem was not serious. However a nationwide network of scholars, each with different equipment, will have to come up with a solution. The wide variation of disks and disk-operating systems precludes easy transfer of a disk from one system to another. The most difficult and most error-prone method of transfer is to retype the BASIC code letter by letter. Much better is to hook the two computers to-

gether by telephone (each computer with its own modem) and transfer the program, or the data, in "ASCII code," which all machines can handle. The process is slow-inexpensive telephone modems operate at only 300 baud (i.e. 300 bits per second, or 2,250 characters per minute). This speed is adequate for transfer-

ring programs of a few thousand characters, but phone charges mount with data sets that involve hundreds of thousands of characters. An easy solution for academics is to use the mainframe

computer on campus for temporary storage; data are sent by phone to the mainframe and then recalled by a second micro-

computer, which can be anywhere in the country. Emulation services are being established that, for a modest fee, will translate a disk from one disk format to another. The Osborne already has the capability of reading disks from some other systems.

Printers, fortunately, are reasonably well standardized; they can be easily fitted to the computer used. In the last two years

3 The best guide, for beginners or experts, is David E. Cortesi, Inside CP/M: A Guide for Users and Programmers (New York, 1982); for step-by-step help at the elementary level, see Judi N. Fernandez and Ruth Ashley, Using CP/M: A Self-Teaching Guide (New York, I980). See any issue of BYTE or InfoWorld for announcements of new releases and critical reviews of both software and hardware.



MICROCOMPUTER REVOLUTION [ 99

inexpensive, high-quality Japanese printers have swept the market. The dot-matrix impact printer positions a print head over the paper and then selects a particular combination of wires to strike in a particular pattern of dots to form a letter, number, or

graphics symbol. A 9 X 9 dot pattern produces reasonably good letters; true correspondence quality is possible through a back-

space-and-overprint procedure. The daisy wheel printer operates like a toy typewriter-a

wheel with raised characters on the circumference moves across the paper, stops for an instant, spins the proper letter into posi- tion, and prints it when hit by a hammer. The daisy wheel printers produce crisp copy, somewhat superior to an IBM Selectric typewriter. They are moderately fast (twelve to fifty-five characters

per second), are limited to the characters on the print wheel, have little or no graphics capability, and are quite expensive (from $600 to $3,000).

The dot-matrix printers are much faster (sixty to 300 characters per second), much more versatile in terms of graphics and fonts (for example, Greek letters on the NEC and C. Itoh, double- size letters, stretched-out letters, etc.), but produce a somewhat less attractive printout. They are also much cheaper. The highly popular Epson MX-80 F/T with graphics retails for $5oo-$6oo; the Gemini, NEC, C. Itoh, and Okidata printers are slightly faster and

cheaper. Furthermore, they all can print complex graphic designs (especially when the Apple/Franklin is used), and can print mul-

tiple copies of a document as fast as a small photocopy machine and at a lower cost.

How much programming does the historian need to know? None at all to use the packaged programs available. However, an

outstanding advantage of microcomputers is that all of them, even the cheapest, permit the user to write and run original or copied programs.

Several languages are available for these computers. The most universal and the easiest to use is BASIC. It was created at Dart- mouth College in the I96os to encourage humanities students to learn computing. It resembles FORTRAN and is capable of doing everything that the historian needs. The software houses (especially Microsoft) that adapted BASIC for microcomputers left out the matrix algebra functions, which are important for multivariate



I00 I RICHARD JENSEN

statistics. These functions can be written easily in the BASIC that is available, and listings of useful programs are in print.4

Microcomputer BASIC is an interpreted language: the com-

puter takes each line of instruction, translates it into machine

language, then performs the desired operation. As a result BASIC

is easy to write and the bugs easy to correct, but the execution time is relatively slow. Compilers are now available for $Ioo to $400. They slowly translate an entire program into machine lan-

guage only once; thereafter the compiled program runs much faster, but the user cannot modify it without going back to the

original code, changing it, and recompiling it. Except for very complex matrix inversion problems (involved in, say, estimating a multiple regression with thirty variables) and, especially, sorting or alphabetizing lists, the speed advantage of compiled over in-

terpreted BASIC is trivial-a few minutes or so. BASIC is now taught in most high schools, and soon college professors can routinely expect that most freshmen will be able to program in that lan-

guage. FORTRAN, the old and obsolescent standby of statistical pro-

grams, is also available for microcomputers ($30 to $300), but

only as a compiled language, which makes it difficult to write

original FORTRAN programs. But no one needs to program in FORTRAN any more since new programs are written in BASIC or one of the new languages, but not in FORTRAN. FORTRAN does not handle text well (hence the word processors on mainframe machines are inferior to those on microcomputers), and does not handle input and output easily. The only procedure available in FORTRAN which is lacking in most versions of BASIC is matrix

manipulation. An inexpensive COBOL, a business oriented lan-

4 Many introductory BASIC texts have appeared, none of striking superiority. For a somewhat more advanced treatment see John P. Grillo and J. D. Robinson, Techniques of Basic (Dubuque, 1981). Useful statistical routines appear in Lon Poole and Mary Borchers, Some Common Basic Programs (New York, I979). For the early history of the language see Thomas E. Kurtz, "BASIC," in Richard L. Wexelblat (ed.), History of Programming Languages (New York, 1981), 515-546. Texts are beginning to include disks with examples and

copies of the programs (which are otherwise tedious to type by hand); see, for example, Ted G. Lewis, The TRS-80 Means Business (New York, 1982). The only statistics book with companion disk is Paul F. Velleman and David C. Hoaglin, Applications, Basics and

Computing of Exploratory Data Analysis (Boston, I98I). EDA is off-beat statistics that uses medians in place of means; the one job that microcomputers do not do as well as large computers is sorting a long list into numerical order, which is the basis of EDA.



MICROCOMPUTER REVOLUTION 10I

guage which is good at handling lists, is also available, although it is unlikely to be of use to historians.

The most important new language is Pascal. Instructors in computer science prefer its streamlined structure, although students find the language rather difficult. Pascal is compiled, does not have the versatility of BASIC, and is more difficult to use for statistical analysis. Unfortunately, it is the only computer language approved by the College Board for Advanced Placement courses in elite high schools.5

The rigorous structure of Pascal forces the author to think out every step before writing a program, and patches or improve- ments are difficult. In business, where most of programmers' time is now devoted to patching or upgrading old FORTRAN and COBOL programs, this limitation may be an advantage. In the fast moving world of microcomputers it is a severe disadvantage. One excellent version of Pascal is available at a very low price ($30) for CP/M machines. The more expensive UCSD Pascal system includes its own disk operating system, and claims that its programs can easily be moved onto different machines.

Other languages that excite computer scientists today, and may become important in the future, include FORTH, ADA, C, and LOGO, the children's language. (Assembly language, or machine language, is not exactly a language, but is rather a numerical code that operates the microprocessor directly; all the languages have

procedures that translate an author's intentions into machine lan-

guage instructions.) Languages are for linguists historians will protest. What are

their practical uses, especially in terms of studying a quantitative data set? How can the data be entered, manipulated, and analyzed? Historians have three ways of organizing their data into a form readable by microcomputers. First, a relatively simple BASIC program can be written explicitly for the data at hand, and the data can be keyed in from the computer keyboard. At present few historians are comfortable enough with BASIC to attempt such a

procedure. Fortunately, software is appearing that promises to automate

the more difficult aspects of writing BASIC programs to handle

5 An excessive number of Pascal manuals exist; a critical introduction for those who know BASIC is Peter Brown, Pascalffrom Basic (Reading, Mass., 1982).



102 RICHARD JENSEN

data entry and analysis. "The Last One," an English import available (for $300 to 500) for most microcomputers, is an ingenious programmer's design aid that generates ordinary BASIC code. It takes the user step by step through a flowchart to decide what the data look like, how they should be entered, how they should be checked for errors, what calculations are desired, and what the output should look like. It then automatically writes a "bug-free" BASIC program that does everything required. The resulting program can be used on any machine. "The Last One" creates attractive menus, and provides some graphics capability (for Ap- ples), but it does not generate the sort of subscripted variables, like A(3,5) that are needed for matrix operations. The resulting programs are long, cumbersome, and difficult to alter. Neverthe- less historians should be able to create BASIC programs, without knowing much of the language, that will handle typical historical data sets.

The use of an automatic program writer for teaching and research could be as follows: the goal might be to have students collect and analyze data directly from the entries in the manuscript version of a national or provincial census for a particular year. A screen would be designed that looks something like the original manuscript, and the user would be prompted to copy in all of the data from sampled entries. Each person, or family, or household in the census would comprise a record. The records could be selected on the basis of complicated criteria ("select all the laborers under age thirty-five") and their characteristics analyzed ("compare their children's schooling with those of clerical workers under thirty-five").

Large computers running spss do this type of analysis very easily and cheaply. What they do not do is enter the data. At

present a researcher designs a particular coding scheme to fit the census, then pores over the microfilm reader to code the data onto worksheets. The sheets must later be keypunched (at perhaps $200 per I,000 IBM cards), spss formats must be designed, and the data cards entered onto tape.

With a microcomputer on the right and the microfilm reader on the left a researcher or student can enter the data directly, do immediate printouts and runs to check for suspicious cases, and refer back to the microfilm to correct erroneous data. With keypunched data entered into mainframes, the data are not only



MICROCOMPUTER REVOLUTION | 03

expensive to acquire but troublesome to recheck days or weeks later when the microfilm has already been returned. Teams of students could divide up the census using the same program, then pool their files into a research quality sample of an entire city or province. Over a period of years a teacher could build up a comprehensive sample data set for all the censuses of interest, and could easily share the data sets with other researchers and with data archives.

Despite the flexibility permitted by program generators, most historians will want to use the second approach to data entry-packaged software that completely eliminates the need to create original programs. Very good statistical packages are available for all machines at reasonable prices ($30 to $500). A-Stat ($150) for the Apple/Franklin and Microstat ($300) for CP/M machines are both highly versatile, powerful packages that are easy to use. Nothing yet rivals spss or SAS for a mainframe, although SAS is converting its package for microcomputers, and SL-Stat uses almost exactly the same syntax as SPss, albeit with far fewer procedures available. The new i6-bit machines have enough RAM

to handle the complete sPss or SAS package. Any statistical package comprises two parts, a data base man-

agement system and a series of statistical manipulations to run on the data base. Statistical packages allow keyboard entry of data, rather in the manner of a pocket calculator, but this manual procedure hardly exploits the capability of a computer. One or more floppy disks can hold the labels for an unlimited number of variables, and the values on each variable for an unlimited number of cases. If the data all consist of integers, for example, each variable for each case can be stored in two characters. Twenty variables for I,ooo cases would consume 40,000 characters of space on a single floppy disk, with pleity of space left over even in the smaller systems. One of the large 8-inch disks could store 200 integer-value variables for each of io,ooo cases. If more space is needed, more disks can be used, or all the data moved to a Winchester hard disk.

Once the data are stored, each statistical package offers a variety of options for data manipulation. Labels can be assigned to each variable and each value. The user can edit, delete, sort, rank order, lag, select subgroups with IF statements, designate missing value codes, transform old variables, and create new



104 RICHARD JENSEN

variables by means of arithmetic combinations of old ones. Since most of the time in a quantitative project is spent either entering or recoding and manipulating the data, these packages are well worth their cost. The manuals usually are brief and assume that the user understands statistics. Unfortunately, there is no one

package that handles all the manipulation routines, although the trend is toward rapid expansion of capability through low-cost

upgrades for owners of earlier versions. With the data file suitably organized, the analyst can under-

take descriptive statistics, measures of significance, crosstabs, multiple regression, Box-Jenkins "ARIMA" time series analysis, analysis of variance and covariance, factor and discriminant anal-

ysis, and the like. Indeed, some advertisements are claiming that SPss for the microcomputer is now here.

Historians have been fascinated by statistical maps ever since Frederick Jackson Turner taught his graduate students how to

design and interpret county maps shaded to represent demo-

graphic, economic, and political data. These choroplethic maps demand considerable cartographic skill to draw by hand. How- ever, they can be generated quickly and with little effort by the

MicroMapII software package for Apple/Franklin machines. Game paddles ($30), or an expensive graphics tablet ($750) are used to enter the boundary outlines of each county in a state. A data base management routine is used to create and manipulate a file of statistical data for each county. A third subprogram then

generates colored or textured-area choroplethic maps that can be

displayed on the screen (in color or black-and-white), stored on

disks, or printed out on a dot matrix printer. MicroMap also

produces line and bar graphs, proportional circle maps, and three dimensional perspective views of statistical maps (for example, each county is represented by a prism the height of which is

proportional to some variable, and the whole map is tilted so that

every county can be seen).6 Some of the general purpose statistical packages also generate

attractive bar, line, and pie graphs of publication quality; free-

standing graph packages, like VisiTrend/VisiPlot, ApplePlot, Ap-

6 The MicroMap package is available from Morgan-Fairfield Graphics, Box 5457, Se- attle, Washington 98105, for $350. Like many purveyors of fine software, they provide a demonstration disk ($20) with 20 maps and a programmed introduction.



MICROCOMPUTER REVOLUTION 1 105

pie Business Graphics, TRS Business Graphics, Ultra Plot, StatsGraf, pfsGraph, and Graphit, among others, are also available. The speed, complexity, and variety of procedures in the different packages vary widely. Critical evaluations of the performance of the packages will obviously be demanded.7

More elaborate than the file management features of the statistical packages are the data base management systems (DBMS) for microcomputers. They are simplified versions of mainframe software that are very costly. The micro packages range from $25 to $900. They allow the user to define the data, set up specialized screens that will speed up data entry, and permit rapid sorting and searching procedures. The DBMS typically are designed for business rather than scholarly applications. They are designed for

sorting lists and rapidly retrieving particular cases. They would be very useful to a department in keeping a record of students'

grades, courses, recommendations, and warnings; to a journal editor who needs something better than little cards to remember articles, reviews, and subscribers; to a small professional organi- zation to handle its membership; to a local museum for its arti- facts; or to a genealogical project.

Increasingly the DBMS are expanding their statistical capabil- ities. The JINSAM package for the Commodore and IBM Personal machines, for example, has a reasonably powerful statistical option with which to manipulate data. It can handle cross-tabulation, linear regression, and simple analysis of variance. Statpro is a similar package for the Apple II; it offers excellent graphics, and is one of the first packages written in Pascal. The dBASE II program for CP/M machines is perhaps the most popular system (at $500- free with some Osborne sales); it is flexible enough so that a user could write elaborate statistical routines; it also interfaces with the Abstat statistical package ($300), permitting a wide variety of spss-like operations. The chief limitation of dBASE II is its restric- tion to sixty-four variables per data set.

The third method of obtaining data is to call upon national

7 The Political Science Micro Review, published by North Carolina State University since I982 for $25 a year, has begun to review programs from the point of view of social scientists; each issue also contains an Apple disk with original programs. Dealers do not know much about statistics or graphs, nor do they usually stock more than one or two programs; the cost-conscious user would do as well by following the reviews, especially in Info World, and by buying through the mail.



io6 | RICHARD JENSEN

data archives, like the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at Michigan, the SSRC Data Archive at Essex University, the Zentrum fur Historische Sozialforschung at the University of Cologne, the Roper Center at the University of Connecticut, or the Social Science Data Archive at the University of Iowa, among others. All of these institutions make data sets available to scholars, although until now they have only provided IBM cards or tapes for mainframe and mini computers. As researchers begin requesting data in micro-readable format, they will develop suitable distribution facilities. Most of the data archives have IBM or Control Data equipment and can provide the data on 8-inch disks or in Apple-format 5I/4-inch disks. The Re- formaTTer software program, available (for $200) for TRS-80

Model II and CP/M machines, can translate the IBM or Control Data disks into or out of Model II/TRSDOS or CP/M readable disks. Thus, all of the data at the ICPSR are immediately available to the

microcomputer user.8 For classroom purposes, analysis of original data sets is not

the only possibility. Programs that simulate historical processes could be developed. Creative Computing Software now has a series of fascinating and inexpensive ($25) programs suitable for advanced high school social studies classes with Apple II equipment. "Hail to the Chief" has the student making campaign decisions as a presidential candidate; "Ecology Simulations" ana-

lyze pollution, epidemics, and the growth patterns of animal

populations; "Social and Economic Simulations" follows the "Limits to Growth" model of the Club of Rome. Longman, a British publisher, has introduced a series of even more sophisticated learning aids for economics, geography, and the sciences.

They include a full-scale simulation of the British economy over two decades (given the I970s, the student is expected to control fiscal and monetary policy for the I98os). Longman's promises a

8 ICPSR, Guide to Resources and Services: 1982-1983 (Ann Arbor, 1982). As an example of the codebooks prepared by the Zentrum fur Historische Sozialforschung, see Manfred Thaller, Stratification and Mobility in Vienna During the First Republic (Cologne, I98I);

compare John G. Kolp, Family and Society in Colonial America (Iowa City, I978), which is a full-scale teaching guide. Other guides are available for medieval Florence and the Iowa frontier: Marc Baer, The Pre-Industrial City: Population and Society in Renaissance Florence

(Iowa City, 1978); John G. Kolp, The American Frontier: 1850-1880 (Iowa City, 1977). Two valuable serials are SSRC Data Archive Bulletin (Univ. of Essex), and Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung/Quantumn Information (Cologne).




history package, and Science Research Associates, an IBM subsid-

iary, is seeking original historical simulations to market. At present, however, the only educational software involves memory drills of names, dates, and places-the old history revitalized?

Possibly, because students who answer enough questions cor-

rectly are immediately treated to a "star wars" game on the com-

puter. People who do not use computers much think of them as

devices for the fast handling of large quantities of numerical data. The fallacy is to suppose that the data have to be numerical. The

computer chips operate as complex switches for electrical currents; what the currents represent to the user is irrelevant. The electrical circuits can manipulate currents that the user perceives as letters just as fast as it manipulates "numerical" currents. IBM

finally realized this fact in the I96os when it introduced very expensive word processing software to go along with its very expensive computers. By the early I970s, rivals like Wang and Lanier were introducing word processing systems built around medium-sized computers ("minicomputers"); a small system might have cost $30,000, but it could easily have doubled the

efficiency of a typing pool. By the time microcomputers achieved

48K memories (in I980) it became possible to squeeze word processing software into them. Programs now cost anywhere from

$50 to $500 and are available for every machine bigger than the Timex.

The most popular of several dozen software systems are ScreenWriter for the Apple/Franklin, WordStar for CP/M equipment, and Scripsit for Radio Shack machines. Scripsit is more "user friendly," which is to say that the instructions are reasonably simple, the features are adequate for most uses, and it is difficult to make a disastrous mistake. ScreenWriter and WordStar are more versatile, with a remarkable range of options. Academics with free access to computer systems via terminals often use text-

editing programs (like WYLBUR), but their performance, even on a multi-million dollar system, is significantly less satisfactory than that of a microcomputer. (The biggest problem is how to obtain attractive printout promptly.)

For anyone who can type ten words per minute, a word

processor provides remarkable advantages in terms of setting out, editing, printing, and revising short letters or long documents.



io8 RICHARD JENSEN

No knowledge of programming whatever is needed to operate the systems. The texts are kept on floppy disks and can be easily duplicated to avoid the unpleasant, albeit infrequent system fail- ures ("crashes") that can happen. The most distinctive character- istic of word processing output to the reader is right justification of margins (an option); the second is dot-matrix printing, with its computerized look. More expensive printers do produce more attractive copy.

Word processors are much more useful than pretty printout generators. Scissors and paste can be discarded thanks to the ease of moving or inserting words, sentences, bibliographical entries, paragraphs, footnotes, or entire pages. Portions of a document can be brought together or reorganized. The "Perfect Writer"

package ($300, but included free with the KayPro II) automatically renumbers footnotes and positions them at the bottom of the

appropriate page. It splits the screen, showing two separate pages simultaneously and can automatically generate an index. Line

spacing and margin widths can be changed between paragraphs on most systems, so that quotations and footnotes can be set

apart. Section headings and titles can be printed in bold face and centered, titles underlined, and pages automatically numbered.

Portable machines like the Osborne, KayPro, Compaq, Otrona, and Epson can be carried by hand into libraries or archives and used like typewriters to take notes (which can be filed and sorted easily) or to enter data from statistical sources. The DEST Workless Station ($7,000) actually reads common text fonts from the printed page, thereby automatically generating computer files of text without typing. Photoduplicating machines-not to mention carbon copies-become less necessary, for the printer can reproduce multiple copies of a letter or paper as fast and as

cheaply as a copier. The revision of an old document no longer necessitates repeated retyping or repeated proofreading to catch new errors in old text. Anyone who writes or edits as little as ten

pages a week will marvel at the increase in efficiency. Editors of journals and newsletters of the sort that are pro-

liferating so rapidly in academe can now produce handsome

camera-ready copy without the use of secretaries or typesetters. The author mails in a disk, or sends the text by electronic mail. The editor revises the text and prints it out on a good printer. Software that can link microcomputers to professional typesetting



MICROCOMPUTER REVOLUTION | 109

equipment will soon be available to short-circuit a major expense at university presses. The reduction in production costs, together with the lightening of editorial chores, should provide further impetus for more publications.

The exponential movement of postage rates will interest editors in the possible use of electronic mail delivery. This is now technically feasible. Nationwide common carrier services, such as

CompuServe and The Source, can link together any two microcomputer users by telephone, regardless of the machine or operating system that they use. Not enough historians yet own microcomputers to make electronic mail feasible, but that may well change by the end of the decade as more and more homes are equipped with two-way video systems that can handle electronic mail.

Spelling checkers that will quickly look up every word of text in a dictionary are available ($50 to $200) for most word processors. A word not found is marked so that the user can correct its spelling or add it to the dictionary. Some versions count words, list unique word usage, and calculate the maximum and average lengths of sentences and paragraphs. This may be essential for the narcissistic author, or the one trying to reach an elementary or secondary school audience. Going one step further is "Grammatik" (for CP/M at $75). It searches for pesty typos, (unbalanced parentheses, double double words, careLEss capitali- zation, lots of informal terms, fairly vague adverbs, unproper usings, unnecessary, repetitious, or superfluous verbiage, and overlong sentences. It even suggests suitable rephrasings. "Gram- matik" includes a sexism option that will automatically replace "chairman" with "chairperson." Although few historians will ad- mit that they need such a stylistic aid, it could do wonders for undergraduate papers.

Acquaintance with microcomputers for most academics will come through their departmental office. The preparation and up- dating of form letters, announcements, posters, grade reports, lists, syllabi, bulletins, letters of recommendation, and mailing lists consume enormous amounts of boring labor. As budgets freeze and secretaries escape to warmer financial climates, departments will have to resort to technology to improve or maintain their services. Academic settings are likely to be more favorable to the introduction of advanced technology than businesses,



10 RICHARD JENSEN

where many secretaries fear the loss of their jobs. (The expected demand for secretaries is positive, and their salaries are catching up with those few assistant professors of history who are newly hired.) Affluent departments have already started buying IBM Dis-

playwriters, Wangwriters, or other high quality, expensive single- purpose word processors. For less cost they could be buying more flexible equipment that will help as much with research, teaching, and office work as with typing. Indeed, with microcomputers available for use in individual offices, or to take to classrooms, libraries, and homes, faculty members will do much more of their own typing. Real efficiency requires short-circuiting the multi-

stage process whereby a manuscript is drafted by one person, typed by a second, corrected by the first, and retyped by the second.

Historians-both faculty and students-need individual access to microcomputers. Multi-user systems are available (such as the Altos) that hook up several terminals to one microcomputer and a hard disk. Given the multiple activities around a history department, it would be best to have separate computers; money can be saved by having only one good printer. A minimal system (Osborne or KayPro plus dot-matrix printer and free software, total cost $2,200, or an Apple IIe plus two disk drives plus printer plus software at $2,500) can handle word processing, data base

management, statistical research, and teaching chores for quantitative history. The Apple system can handle graphics, statistical

maps, and can even teach the user how to type. It also runs all

Apple games, which means that no work will be done the first two weeks after it arrives (almost no games are available for CP/M machines like the Osborne).

A practical entry system for a department with eight to fifteen

faculty members might be two portable machines, possibly one

large capacity hard disk, a telephone modem, a dot-matrix

printer, and the appropriate software. The total cost would be

$4,500 to $7,500. One obstacle might emerge from the univer-

sity's central data processing office or computer center. In many corporations the central office seeks to keep control of all data

processing, dismisses microcomputers as toys, and is aghast when executives sneak in their own Apples anyway. University com-

puter center directors have to be more tolerant, but they much

prefer that everyone use their big machines. Some universities are



MICROCOMPUTER REVOLUTION III

wired so that every office can have a terminal hookup to the main

computer. Unfortunately the terminal costs nearly as much as a microcomputer, the few programs available for big machines are much more limited than the many available for microcomputers, word processing is far more difficult, and the user has to learn a

complex operating system and depend on technicians to handle data tapes.

The impact of the microcomputer revolution is analogous to the impact of the personal automobile on the passenger transpor- tation system. Before, every traveller had to accept the schedules, routes, and fares of steam or street railroads. They were very large, bureaucratized, and politicized corporations that yielded little flexibility or voice to the user. The Model T allowed people to travel wherever and whenever they chose. The lower cost per passenger mile of the big system was overwhelmed by the convenience, privacy, and outlet for self expression provided by the

individualized system. Big computers will eventually assume a role like that of airlines, providing for very long or extremely complex trips made by people who mostly use small machines.

Historians perhaps have an anti-technological streak-not re- flected in resistance to photocopiers or airplanes, but related to the "two cultures" tension on campus. Computer centers run by engineers or mathematicized social scientists represent the polar opposite of the library and the archive. Historians tend to be upset to learn that the card catalog will be replaced by terminals.

Microcomputers are much friendlier. There is no need for a tech-

nological infrastructure that controls access to the machines. The most humanistic historian, after using a word processor for a few

days, will begin to glimpse something of the power, the versa-

tility, and the limitations of computers-not a bad lesson for teachers who lecture every day on the nature of society.



the microcomputer revolution for historians

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