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¶ In New Hampshire, at Ivy League Dartmouth College, more than 96% of this year's graduating class can use computers, which are as freely available as library stacks. The system was set up by Dartmouth President John Kemeny, who might be called the Mr. Chips of computerized education. Says Computer Consultant John Nevison: "Learning to write a computer program must now be considered part of becoming a liberally educated person." Indeed, educational analysts report that high school students are increasingly choosing colleges on the basis of their computer facilities.
¶ In Illinois, at the University of Illinois' Champaign-Urbana campus, a system known as PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) helps teach 150 subjects, ranging from Swahili to rocketry (but not Plato). The student sits in a booth in which he can conduct a Socratic dialogue with the computer via a typewriter keyboard. Its protégés praise PLATO for "kindness" and "personalized attention."
The computer's benign influence extends to the handicapped. The tremendously arduous process of turning print into Braille for the blind has become a relatively simple mechanical routine. In April, Telesensory Systems Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif., will start marketing a game center consisting of eight games for the unsighted; oscillating tones will replace the screen markings for contests like paddle ball; and synthesized speech will be used for other games such as tic-tac-toe, blackjack and skeet shoot.
The home computer has until recently been largely the province of the hobbyist. With basic kits that can be bought for less than $100 (and can easily cost $5,000 or more when sophisticated widgets and gizmos are added), "home brewers," as they style themselves, have taught their devices a diversity of skills beyond the interests of the big computer companies.
It is these basement Edisons, part-time tinkerers and others who own computers for personal or professional reasons who will most probably realize the vast potential of the silicon chip for the consumer. They are an avid, eager-beaver breed, anxious to share technological insights and applications with other chip fanatics. Computerniks have already formed some 400 informal clubs, and these are growing rapidly. Electronic stores are proliferating like fast-(brain)food outlets. They, too, operate as semi-clubs, where employees are as interested in yakking as in selling. Even Montgomery Ward now offers, for $399, a home computer.
The chips are used to compose music, draw Op artistic pictures and write poems. They will never be Marvells or undo Donne—but they are trying. Poet-Novelist Carol Spearin Mc-Cauley notes in her book Computers and Creativity (Praeger) that the well-programmed computer is freed from "the confines of English grammar, syntax and common usage ... The machine's lack of shame, so to speak, frees it to express many things that a writer, by habit used to excluding or censoring the ungrammatical, awkward or ambiguous, would not consider." Marie Boroff, an English professor at Yale, acted as muse to a computer that produced these near-erotic lines:
Opoet, Dream like an enormous flood; Let the work of your bed Be stilled; The night Comes and shines. The earthworms are multiplying; The river Winks And I am ravished.