It is 7:30 a.m. As the alarm clock burrs, the bedroom curtains swing silently apart, the Venetian blinds snap up and the thermo stat boosts the heat to a cozy 70º. The percolator in the kitchen starts burbling; the back door opens to let out the dog. The TV set blinks on with the day 's first newscast: not your Today show humph-humph, but a selective rundown (ordered up the night before) of all the latest worldwide events affecting the economy — legislative, political, monetary. After the news on TV comes the morning mail, from correspondents who have dictated their messages into the computer network. The latter-day Aladdin, still snugly abed, then presses a button on a bedside box and issues a string of business and personal memos, which appear instantly on the genie screen. After his shower, which has turned itself on at exactly the right temperature at the right minute, Mr. A. is alerted by a buzzer and a blue light on the screen. His boss, the company president, is on his way to the office. A. dresses and saunters out to the car. The engine, of course, is running . . .
After her husband has kissed her goodbye, Alice A. concentrates on the screen for a readout of merchants' comparative and prices markets. at the local Following eyeball-to-eyeball consultations with the butcher and the baker and the grocer on the tube, she hits a button to commandeer supplies for tonight's dinner party. Pressing a couple of keys on the kitchen terminal, she orders from the memory bank her favorite recipes for oysters Rockefeller, boeuf a la bourguignonne and chocolate soufflé, tells the machine to compute the ingredients for six servings, and directs the ovens to reach the correct temperature for each dish according to the recipe, starting at 7:15 p.m. Alice then joins a televised discussion of Byzantine art (which she has studied by computer). Later she wanders into the computer room where Al ("Laddy") Jr. has just learned from his headset that his drill in Latin verb conjugation was "groovy."
Wellsian fantasy? Verne-Vonnegut put-on? Maybe. But while this matutinal scenario may still be years away, the basic technology is in existence. Such painless, productive awakenings will in time be as familiar as Dagwood Bumstead's pajamaed panics. And, barring headaches, tummy aches and heartaches, the American day should proceed as smoothly as it begins. All thanks to the miracle of the microcomputer, the supercheap chip that can electronically shoulder a vast array of boring, time-consuming tasks.
The microelectronic revolution promises to ease, enhance and simplify life in ways undreamed of even by the Utopians.
At home or office, routine chores will be performed with astonishing efficiency and speed. Leisure time, greatly increased, will be greatly enriched. Public education, so often a dreary and capricious process in the U.S., may be invested with the inspiriting quality of an Oxford tutorial—from preschool on. Medical care will be delivered with greater precision.