My grandpappy was born in 1890; I suppose that some of the sights in 1970 would have affected him the same way.
But I liked the fast new world and would have been happy in it if I had not been so bitterly lonely so much of the time. I was out of joint. There were times (in the middle of the night, usually) when I would gladly have swapped it all for one beat-up tomcat, or for a chance to spend an afternoon taking little Ricky to the zoo . . . or for the comradeship Miles and I had shared when all we had was hard work and hope.
It was still early in 2001 and I wasn’t halfway caught up on my homework, when I began to itch to leave my feather-bedded job and get back to the old drawing board. There were so many, many things possible under current art which had been impossible in 1970; 1 wanted to get busy and design a few dozen.
For example I had expected that there would be automatic secretaries in use-I mean a machine you could dictate to and get back a business letter, spelling, punctuation, and format all perfect, without a human being in the sequence. But there weren’t any. Oh, somebody had invented a machine which could type, but it was suited only to a phonetic language like Esperanto and was useless in a language in which you could say: “Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through.”
People won’t give up the illogicalities of English to suit the convenience of an inventor. Mohammed must go to the mountain.
If a high-school girl could sort out the cockeyed spelling of English and usually type the right word, how could a machine be taught to do it?
“Impossible” was the usual answer. It was supposed to require human judgment and understanding.
But an invention is something that was “impossible” up to then-that’s why governments grant patents.
With memory tubes and the miniaturization now possible-I had been right about the importance of gold as an engineering material-with those two things it would be easy to pack a hundred thousand sound codes into a cubic foot. . . in other words, to soundkey every word in a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. But that was unnecessary; ten thousand would be ample. Who expects a stenographer to field a word like “kourbash” or “pyrophylilte”? You spell such words for her if you must use them. Okay, we code the machine to accept spelling when necessary. We sound-code for punctuation . . . and for various formats . . . and to look up addresses in a file . . . and for how many copies . . . and routing and provide at least a thousand blank word-codings for special vocabulary used in a business or profession-and make it so that the owner-client could put those special words in himself, spell a word like “stenobenthic” with the memory key depressed and never have to spell it again.
All simple. Just a matter of hooking together gadgets already on the market, then smoothing it into a production model.
The real hitch was homonyms. Dictation Dairy wouldn’t even slow up over that “tough cough and hiccough” sentence because each of those words carries a different sound. But choices like “they’re” and “their,” “right” and “write” would give her trouble.
Did the L. A. Public Library have a dictionary of English homonyms? It did…and I began counting the unavoidable homonym pairs and trying to figure how many of these could be handled by information theory through context statistics and how many would require special coding.
I began to get jittery with frustration. Not only was I wasting thirty hours a week on an utterly useless job, but also I could not do real engineering in a public library. I needed a drafting room, a shop where I could smooth out the bugs, trade catalogues, professional journals, calculating machines, and all the rest.
I decided that I would just have to get at least a subprofessional job. I wasn’t silly enough to think that I was an engineer again; there was too much art I had not yet soaked up-repeatedly I had thought of ways to do something, using something new that I had learned, only to find out at the library that somebody had solved the same problem, neater, better, and cheaper than my own first stab at it and ten or fifteen years earlier.