European Home Computers by Donald Phillipson (Ottawa) 8 Nov. 1987 When recently in Europe, I was surprised by several aspects of home computing there. Following are some notes, semi-organized in two groups, the commercial market and the public domain. National Markets for Home Computers Retail prices for computers in England were about what I had ex- pected, e.g. 500 pounds ($700) for the new Amstrad PCW 9512 Z80 system (including monitor and D.W. printer), 800 pounds ($1136) for a cut-price XT clone, or 1300 pounds for an AT clone with a 20 megabyte hard disk. Amstrad 1640 MS-DOS machines, currently advertized in Canada for $1300 (one floppy and mono screen), sell in England for less than $1000 and the cheapest HP LaserJet printer for 1500 pounds ($2130). The pound sterling has inflated unbelievably (to someone whose first wage was less than four pounds a week, now the price of four pints of beer) but soft- ware seems cheap. Most Borland packages advertized at $99 (U.S.) sell in Britain for 49 pounds (less than $90 U.S.) Holland was the big surprise - I got the impression there that one can buy many machines we are familiar with, e.g. MS-DOS clones, Atari ST, Amiga etc., for the same figures in guilders as we would pay here in Canadian dollars, but the guilder stands at about 70 cents! A Phillips- made MS-DOS machine costs 2800 guilders, including monitor, and an in- ternal modem 350 guilders. $2200 Canadian seems quite reasonable. By contrast, prices in Denmark are just incredible, $380 (1900 Danish crowns) for a Commodore 1541 disk drive, or $1220 (6100 crowns) for the Amstrad Joyce, one of the most popular European CP/M machines! My collection of magazines and advertisements does not show any prices for MS-DOS clones in Denmark, but I imagine they are similarly high. Friends there use a British-made Ferranti (flaky and not recommended) and a Commodore PC10 (reliable and good value, possibly bought in Germany anyway.) The obvious point of technical difference is that cassette drives are still being sold in Europe for mass storage. New floppy drives sell in Europe for $200 or more, and used ones for $100. It might be because the floppy drive is American technology and the cassette European, or because of market prices of drives. But we have had the benefits for five years, while Europeans are going blind keying in software from mag- azine listings (see below). I made no attempt to survey stores systematically, but there was an obvious difference between Holland and England. Conditions in The Hague reminded me of Ottawa, a cluster of cut-price clone houses and a few IBM and Apple list-price stores downtown, and a substantial sprink- ling of neighborhood computer stores in the suburbs, with Commodores and clones. There were plenty of clone stores in Oxford, and a number of Amstrad and similar machines in hi-fi shops. In London, by contrast, I noticed no neighborhood stores in the one suburb where I stayed, and hardly any in the downtown shopping district (e.g. along Oxford Street from Selfridges as far as London University). The eye-catcher in the English capital was two or three Computerland signs, each standing over an empty and deserted store. Am I right in thinking that Computerland sold a lot of Apples in North America? Apples demonstrate important differences between the European and American markets. They never caught on in Europe the way they did in North America, apparently for the reasons of language and price. In England, where language presented no obstacle, Apples were high-priced in the late 1970s because the dollar stood high. Operating systems such as Sinclair and the BBC computer competed directly with Apple. Apple is now marketing Macs energetically, but I have no impres- sion that the company has yet made much of a mark in Europe. In countries like Germany, Apples encountered no domestic competi- tion when new on the market, but the different language did delay the marketing process for several years, so that Commodore 64s and CP/M machines seem to have occupied on the continent the market niche filled by the Apple II here. Denmark seems to be recapitulating the pattern in Germany and Benelux, only a couple of years later and at higher prices, because the Danish-language market is so small. By the way, documenta- tion in European languages is always expensive, I saw Dutch and Germany translations of familiar items, e.g. Peter McWilliams's books for begin- ners and the Osborne CP/M guide, but at about double the prices we have to pay. The best German magazine I saw with any CP/M content, Happy Computer, cost me 18 Dutch florins or more than $12. In London the lar- ger and better Personal Computer World cost 1 pound 20 pence or less than $3. Book prices in England have doubled in recent years. The stock I saw there was skimpy by our standards and the prices a shade higher, both for English and American computer books. In Holland there seemed to be almost as many English-language man- uals (from Britain as well as the U.S.A.) on sale as those in Dutch or German. Relevant factors here are that English is so well taught in continental high schools and that both operating system commands (viz. CP/M, MS-DOS) and programming languages such as Pascal BASIC are English- oriented. Many users may find the quality of a manual more important than the language in which the text is written. Operating Systems There are interesting contrasts here. In general, although there are new CP/M machines in Dutch and English stores, they are obviously games-oriented (color monitors, joysticks, etc.) Except for the Amstrad line (called Schneider on the continent) I saw no CP/M business machines. More generally, MS-DOS dominates the continental market for home as well as business micros much as it does here. OS/2 has barely peeked over the horizon, Commodore 64s seem to be common for kids, and there is a small demand for 68000 machines, but not for business purposes. Local conditions of hardware sales and staff training seemed to my eye much the same as here. Not least, nine out of 10 store salesmen recommend the MS-DOS system to all customers for all purposes. (My businessman brother-in-law happened to be pricing a new system during my visit. I was vastly intrigued by his old outfit, a Sharp Z80 machine with no disk operating system at all! The whole thing ran in interpreted BASIC, and its word-processing programme module felt rather like riding a bicycle with ten-sided wooden wheels. At the end of a line, although it wrapped automatically, you had to slow down or else the interpreter would drop characters. You could save a file of more than 66 lines, but printing was done in units of a page at a time, al- though you could concatenate filenames to print a multi-page letter. Its software was an integrated business package, capable of doing job estimates and payroll and taxes all from the same data disks, with total reliability. It probably seemed in 1980 as blindingly fast and compli- cated as the operator, my Aunt Greetje, now feels MS-DOS is. But England is different. Because there are still several compet- ing operating systems in the market (e.g. BBC and CP/M as well as MS-DOS) MS-DOS dominates in business computing but not overall as it does on the continent. In general, I saw fewer computers in British stores, of- fices, libraries, etc. than I had done on the continent. English people with skills are as skilled as any you have ever met, or read in Byte etc. (I think of a crystallographer at London University, who has developed amazing ability programming on an Amiga, in BASID, color pictures of crystal structures to give to his students.) I cannot help feeling that the local environment supports fewer able enthusiasts than ours does in North America. Public Domain and Modems One of the main limitations in the English and European environ- ment, it seems to me, is incredibly simple - there, you have to pay for local telephone calls. This is not a conspiracy of the phone companies but at least partly a mere habit. In France, Germany, England, etc., phone companies have always charged for local calls, as well as charging a monthly line rental fee, and they are not going to change now. But this is a disincentive against telecomputing in two respects. Fewer people have domestic telephones in Europe than here, so that there are fewer people to call. The charge for local calls is a small but concrete deterrence against many types of activity with which we are familiar, whether just calling up the local university library cata- logues, or checking in once a week with the half-dozen boards each of us monitors, let alone feverish hackers calling up every database they can discover, just to explore. To the extent that there is simply less of all these types of ac- tivity in Europe than here, there is proportionately less to encourage beginners (all of us were beginners at some time or other) to buy modems and use them. The local environment for amateur computing is less rich and less rewarding than in North America. There is more than one reason for this. The lack of an European (let alone world-wide) technical standard for data transmission is obviously very important. But I still think that the relative scarcity of telephones and charges for local phone calls in Europe are by themselves fundamental. The consequences are general. There are far fewer free public bulletin boards in Europe than here. Ottawa, with a half-million people, has for several years supported more than 60 boards. London's 7 million people had 33 boards available to them in October, according to PC World. Admittedly half the boards we can call for free are by and for kids and few last long. But they provide irreplaceable personal experience in systems maintenance and, sometimes, programming and debugging. (I am reminded of the difference between the North American and European armies in the Second World War, where it made a very practical difference that the typical American or Canadian soldier could drive a car or truck, while the typical English or German soldier could not, having never had the chance to practice.) The salient point is that, here, any kid with a computer, a phone line, and the minimum level of skill can open up a bulletin board with the expectation that someone will call in, since it costs nothing. If almost no one does, the operator has still (we hope) learned something, at no cost except his time. In Europe, you could never escape the know- ledge that calling in costs your callers hard cash. The material en- vironment of bulletin boards is thus fundamentally different. I have no figures with which to back up these opinions, but I judge that, for the same general reasons, there is less public domain software in general circulation in Europe than here. What's there is as good as what we have but there is much less of it. In combination with unsatis- factory technical standards, this may even affect the hardware market, by reducing economies of scale. We can buy, new in a store, a 1200 baud modem for $100 or less. English prices are more than five times that. If we can afford the long-distance charges, we can phone anywhere among 250 million people in the expectation that we can make a good connection. There is not yet any agreed European technical standard for 300 baud data transmission and, reciprocally, demand is so much less that standards are being negotiated with glacial slowness - possibly in part because Britain was the first country to promulgate a national standard for 300 baud that is incompatible with Bell's 103 standard. European computer users know what modems are, of course, but they seem to be stuck at the present speed of development. If there were a single dominant operating system, or a known source of free public domain software, or adequate technical standards, the cost of telephoning might no longer be a significant bar- rier to telecomputing. So long as none of those incentives is present, cost remains a strong disincentive. There is some familiar public-domain software around. Names like QMODEM and functions like SQueeze or file-handling, but there is a dif- ference in the pattern. "Shareware" is a familiar concept, but LiBRary and ARChive seem not to be - at least in the commercial ads I have seen for public domain software. Such distribution is not particularly cheap, from 2 pounds per program (which seems high) to 6 pounds a disk which, if full, is reasonable. My impression is that most of the mail-order public domain software is for MS-DOS only. It looks like an extension of the PC-SIG distribution system, priced 30 per cent higher. In England at least, high-quality and cheap computer magazines seem to compensate in part for the shortage of bulletin boards. England has talent, demonstrated in software, emulators and add-ons for Macintoshes etc., and a national style, exemplified in the BBC and Amstrad machines. Both prefer color monitors, even on Z80 machines, their buyers are wil- ling to put up with slow cassette loading on cheaper machines, and both offer RAMdisk software in high-capacity CP/M systems to compensate for the absence of a second disk drive on most standard units. The English national style in software seems to be exemplified in the PC World magazine's "Program of the Month" for October 1987. Written by a college biochemist, it seems to do very well what it sets out to do, viz. draw diagrams of proteins. It is practical in its orientation to cheap dot-matrix printers and simple MS-DOS clones (using a RAMdisk to speed up disk operations.) While well-structured and commented, the program is in BASIC and interpreter BASIC at that. Finally, it is dis- tributed as 700 lines of code to key in yourself, no reference is made in the magazine to availability over the phone or on disk. German and Dutch magazines also take for granted that their readers are willing to key in long chunks of code. Through such devices, CP/M is still alive in Europe. Version 3 of CP/M is the commonest OS of choice on English Amstrads and continental Schneiders, which are the same machines. I should guess that we in North America could still profit from the quality of the best European CP/M programming and the Europeans rather more from any greater interchange, because of the sheer quantity of public-domain CP/M software we enjoy (some 50,000 programs or more being available by estimates of knowledgeable observers.) This last point is a sort of hobby-horse of mine, because I am a cultural historian, specializing in the history of science for a number of intrinsic and professional reasons. One of the themes of this spe- ciality is the unique "economics of knowledge." There are economic laws that seem to govern the supply and price of material goods pretty well and even "services," such as laundry, pop music, politics, teaching, etc. "Knowledge" is different, not least because it is divided. Technological knowledge (typically patentable information, trade secrets etc.) varies in value according to scarcity and demand, like goods, but not scientific knowledge, which seems to follow a completely different set of rules. The most important scientific truths are those that everyone "owns." i.e., their value is not correlated with scarcity but with how widely they are diffused. This seems to apply to a number of other aspects of culture, such as Shakespeare, the Bible, architecture, etc., which are not valued by scarcity but by how many people share them. Brain-work, such as programming, looks like technological knowledge but computer programming has developed in a divergent and paradoxical way. A few people like Mitchell Kapor (founder of Lotus) proceeded by inventing something good, deliberately monopolizing its distribution for profit, and became rich and one hopes happy. Others like Kemeny and Kurtz, Richard Conn, Ward Christensen, Irv Hoff, etc. have written soft- ware that has been (I dare say) of equal social value and just given it away free, for fun, to anyone who wanted to use it. This is an important social phenomenon, not necessarily new, but neglected by some of the theoreticians I know (who have been grappling with the processes of invention, valuation, and distribution of scienti- fic knowledge.) Starting as a totally naive computer user, I have been materially helped and constantly cheered by the amount of free help I got from users as well as programmers, who possess knowledge and are glad to give it away for nothing. People still writing public domain software, and even I dare say Sysops, still belong to this elect band, who persist in doing real work, for no economic reward, because they en- joy it, whatever Adam Smith or John Kenneth Galbraith might say about it. The phenomenon is not unique. It goes on all over the world, from church bazaars to old men who take children fishing. But in the special case of computers, I suspect that the vast pool of free knowledge shared by Canadian and American users has both a positive social value today and for all I can tell, economic value in the future as well. It is not an absolute thing, but when you compare the social in- frastructure of home computing here with that in Europe, it is impossible not to conclude that we are far better off, for a combination of reasons ranging from free local phone calls to the real work done by programmers, Sysops, and people willing to sort out strangers' problems with their new computers. It is an intellectual puzzle for the professional historian of culture and a moral point too, because if the benefits of this "un- economic" activity are as great as they seem to be, we ought to spread the word so that everyone can join in if they feel like it. I have no great insights yet, but would welcome comments! end