Word: brandings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...impossible task, therefore interesting," says Brand, whose first exposure to computers occurred in the late 1960s, when he worked at the Stanford Research Institute. "Most of the Whole Earth audience has accepted computers, more than any other age group. They've been using technology to mess with their consciousness since they were teenagers. I don't see a tremendous difference between the technology of drugs and the technology of computers, except that drugs are self-limiting and computers appear...
...Brand's analysis may be skewed, but his timing is sound. Publishers are increasingly receptive to computer-related books, and they are paying especially high premiums for critiques of the programs that turn computers into word processors, financial analyzers, list managers, electronic communicators, music synthesizers and video-game machines. Harper & Row has advanced $600,000 to the editors of InfoWorld, a weekly computer magazine, for a six-volume series of software and hardware reviews, and Simon & Schuster paid the same amount for a ten-volume series by the staff of PC World, a monthly magazine devoted...
...with prices ranging from $50 to $500, cannot be readily examined. There may be as many as 40,000 software items on the market, a figure that is expected to double in a year, and stores do not have sufficient space or staff to demonstrate all of the competing brands. Says Peter McWilliams, author of the bestselling The Personal Computer Book, who has been recruited as a contributor to Brand's new catalogue: "The trick is finding the right people to tell you what's good...
...Brand's novel solutions is to go to the networks. These are the hundreds of systems, many of them formed by amateur enthusiasts, that hook computer users together via telephone lines, permitting their members to exchange information, engage in long-distance debates or just gossip. The networks are in effect electronic bulletin boards. "They are the 20th century equivalent of the coffeeshops of Samuel Johnson's day," Brand has said. "Back then, the intelligentsia got loaded on coffee and tried to impress themselves. We'll get loaded on technology and do the same thing...
There are big, formal, commercial networks that sell everything from financial news to legal data to their subscribers, but Brand plans to concentrate on the smaller systems, many of them patched together by computer fanatics. The most notable of these mininetworks, and a prime source of informed opinions about software, is an international collection of more than 1,200 users called EIES, for Electronic Information Exchange System. Operated by the New Jersey Institute of Technology, EIES has counted among its membership Author Alvin Toffler and former Federal Communications Commissioner Nicholas Johnson. Brand will tap the expertise of EIES and invite...