A flood of information arrives at home via computers
For most families, household utilities usually mean electricity, the heating system and a supply of fresh water. But when middle-income New Yorkers next month begin moving into a newly completed 52-unit condominium at 260 West Broadway in Manhattan's Tribeca district, they will find not just sinks, tubs and electrical outlets, but builder-installed computer terminals. The inconspicuous machines, which look like small television sets with a keyboard, are hooked up to a McLean, Va., firm that styles itself an "information utility." Its daunting name: the Source.
The Source and its 12,000 nationwide customers are part of the still small, but explosively growing, new business of consumer data banks. For fees that can amount to as little as a few cents a month, the data banks are using computer technology and telephone lines to provide household subscribers with the opportunity to summon up-to-the-minute information on everything from the action on Wall Street to the best shopping bargains available from brand-name discount houses around the country.
For years major corporations have earned extra income by marketing the sort of research and scientific information that routinely get produced and then filed away in the normal course of business. Data banks buy the information, put it in their own computers and then resell it either to other corporations or perhaps to large research institutes.
One such bank, DIALOG Information Services Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., buys reports, statistics and doctoral dissertations from some 140 different corporations, universities and even the government. When using the service, a subscriber dials a toll-free 800 number and connects his telephone receiver to a coupler device that links his office computer to the DIALOG computer. He can then transmit queries and receive the answers within seconds. Cost for such services can run as high as $300 an hour, a sum that businesses can afford much more readily than the average individual can.
But the mushrooming popularity of personal computers has now begun to spur the development of data banks specially tailored for individual consumers. The Source, which is a subsidiary of Reader's Digest, offers subscribers everything from financial planning to word processing. Source subscribers can monitor the schedule of current legislative activities in the Congress, check the latest changes in airline schedules and send "electronic mail" to other subscribers by using Source computers as a kind of space-age postal system. Gerald Reinen, a Massachusetts business consultant, reports that not only does he use the Source for business applications at the office but his children use it at home when they want to look up movie reviews.
Another consumer data bank, CompuServe Inc., of Columbus, offers electronic copies of stories in ten major national newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times on the same day that the newspapers hit the stands. Also available is current news from the Associated Press wire service. Through its Microquote data base, CompuServe provides constantly updated information on any of more than 40,000 different stocks, bonds and commodities.