It pains me to say this, and I’ve written about it in my Timeline review, but Michael Crichton is a dickhead. Why else would he include a footnote in this book, when he’s making a reasonable point about nuclear energy, to smugly add that “trees don’t vote.” You already made the point dude, now by adding in some smugness you have alienated a portion of your audience. Way to make friends and influence people.
Digital Life is Crichton’s 1980s guide to IBM compatible computers and similar. He wrote it when the personal computing revolution was still in its infancy, and his target is friends and family who are too afraid to pick up a computer on its own. I love this sort of pre-90s futurism for the combination of things gotten wrong and right. On the wrong side with this one, it’s natural that Crichton’s assessment of how to approach a computer would age similar to that probably apocryphal Bill Gates quote about “how much” RAM someone would need. Crichton talks about how experienced programmers approach a computer and “just look at it” for a while, before commenting that it has a hard drive or a disk drive. Pretty funny, when you compare that to a modern motherboard.
On the right side, there’s a whole sequence talking about digital art. If you did a find and replace here, the conversation would be perfectly modern and talking about our current concerns with AI art. My criticisms of Crichton’s weirdass personality aside, the man was very good at speculative sci-fi, which is why he once had the number one movie, TV show, and book simultaneously (Jurassic Park, ER, Sphere). Ultimately, I wanted to know what Crichton thought about computers back when they were a little scary and new. I am neither surprised, nor do I disagree with very much of his take. This sort of future-forward thinking was his speciality, except for climate change. He’s a complete asshole about climate change.
Read this book if you are a computer professional and want a chuckle and some interesting takes on the space from 40 years ago.