He stared. “That’s a computer?”
I pulled out one of the little magnetic memory sticks you could feed it. “I can write programs on here in a language called Assembler, and it can do things quicker than I would ever be able to calculate by hand or look up in a book.” I put it down on the table between us. “Do you have any video games at home?”
“What are those?”
“You know, like Pong or an Atari game system.”
Captain Summers smiled at that. “I bought a Pong for Christmas. We have it hooked up to an old TV in the den.” Suddenly he looked curious. “Are you saying that’s a computer?”
“Input, output, memory, processing — you bet, Captain, those are computers. Now, imagine sometime in the future. You have a Pong, and you want to play somebody else with a Pong. You have to combine them somehow, in a network of computers. That’s computer networking, and that’s the sort of thing our paper will help with.”
“Networks of Pong playing teenagers?” he commented, derisively.
“Think about it, Captain. How much do kids spend now on arcade games? How much would that be worth to the first guy who can figure out how to let them do it at home?”
“So what does this have to do with the Army?” he asked.
I pulled my calculator out again. “Do you know how artillery works, sir? We don’t actually see the target, so somebody has to give us some map coordinates, and we have to be able to calculate, using geometry and trigonometry, where to aim the howitzer. Right now, every battery and section chief and officer has to have books of tables and a slide rule to figure it out, along with a calculator to do it faster.” I waved my calculator at him. “In a few years, every howitzer will come with a calculator even more powerful than this. A few years after that, those calculators will be able to talk to each other. We’ll be able to move faster, set up faster, start firing faster, and scoot away faster. It will be safer for us and more dangerous for the bad guys.”
I think that actually stunned him for a second. He may have been a publicity asshole, but he knew enough about the military to know that being on the receiving end of an artillery barrage was a really bad thing, and that speed was critical.
“You’re serious?”
“Ask me again in ten years, sir. You won’t even recognize what we’ll be doing then.”
“What do you mean by that? What else will computers do for the Army?”
I smiled. Holding up the calculator again, I answered, “Imagine if we put a computer into a radio. You’ll end up with a radio that can’t be jammed and can’t be intercepted by the enemy. Imagine putting a computer into a tank, and getting a targeting system that never misses. Never, ever! One shot, one kill! What if you can give a computer like this to a sniper, who can then pick off targets a mile away and never worry about calculating for wind or drift? What happens when we can have computerized maps? Imagine if soldiers didn’t get lost anymore.”
“And you’re saying computers will be able to do these things?” For once he seemed to respect the idea of mathematics.
“Captain, I can guarantee you that in labs all across the country, these things are being developed. Computers will change America even more than electricity did a century ago. I will make a couple of final predictions. Ten years from now, 1988, the Army won’t even seem to be the same, we’ll have changed so much. Twenty years from now, in 1998, we will be the most lethal and most feared military on the planet. Technology and soldiers able to use it will change it all.”
“Unbelievable. You make it sound like Star Wars.”
I laughed at that. “Well, I don’t think we’ll have spaceships by then.”
In many ways, what I had just told Captain Summers was the unvarnished truth. In 1978 we were just on the verge of one of the greatest transformations in human history, the digitalization of the world. Computers ended up in everything.
In 1978, we were still fighting with weapons and equipment that would have been recognizable to a soldier in World War II, Korea, or Viet Nam. Not much had changed. We wore the same uniforms, the same helmets and armor, had pretty much the same weapons, and the same commo and recon gear. Transistors had replaced tubes, but it was the same basic gear.
The army that ripped through Saddam Hussein’s army in 1991 was basically invented in the 1980s, with computers in everything. The M1 Abrams tank, the Humvee, the MLRS rockets, the night vision gear that everybody carried, and the GPS units that even privates had — all of these had been invented in the late Seventies and early Eighties with computers. The other thing that changed drastically in the Eighties was the type of training we received. Training ranges became giant laboratories, with computers and lasers and the ability to watch people do it right and do it wrong and figure out how to do it for real.
Another big change was in the personnel who enlisted. During World War II, most armies had mechanized units, outfits with tanks and trucks and armored personnel carriers. One of America’s big secrets was that almost all of the boys who got drafted were familiar with motors and vehicles, at a far higher rate than elsewhere in the world. They could keep things running a lot easier. Likewise now, most of the guys we would be recruiting over the next ten years had at least seen calculators and computers and such, at a much higher rate than the rest of the world, and would be able to adapt and train with it quicker.
“What made you join the Army, Lieutenant?” he asked.
I gave him the two minute family-in-the-service-since-the-War-of-1812 speech, and then said, “Besides, I went to college on an ROTC scholarship, so it’s payback time. My father had a Navy ROTC scholarship during World War II, and it was the only way for a farmboy to end up in the Ivy League. It worked for him, too.”
“So why’d you join the Army and not the Navy?”
I laughed at that. “I get seasick!”
That got the other two to laughing, and then the captain turned his attention to Marilyn. “Let me ask you a few questions. Marilyn, right?”
“Who? Me?” she squeaked, suddenly in the spotlight. I chuckled at this.
“How did you meet the Lieutenant here?”
I just started laughing at that, which got Marilyn stewing at me. Finally she just elbowed me and answered, “We met at a party in college our freshman year.”
I laughed some more. “Do you want me to tell the real story behind that night?”
“Not if you want me to marry you this summer!” she answered. I laughed at that and she said, “Asshole!”
I pointed at the tape recorder and her eyes widened. “Please, God, I want a transcript!” To the captain I laughed, “If I tell you the real story, promise to send me a copy! I’ll be able to use it for blackmail for years to come!”
The captain laughed at this as well, especially when Marilyn gave me another elbow to the ribs. This was pretty much the end of the interview, especially when he asked her why she put up with me, and I answered for her that, “Artillerymen have bigger guns.”
That got her squawking even louder. “You want to get punched?” she asked, waving a balled up fist at me.
I shrugged and smiled. “You hit like a girl.”
“Oooh! You are going to get it for that!”
We broke apart at that point. Captain Summers took his tape recorder and headed to his room to start writing his article, and I took Marilyn’s hand and we walked through DC for a bit until lunchtime. After lunch, I grabbed my agenda for the meeting and led the way to a symposium on asymmetric key cryptography, which had only been developed the year before, and was about to become a major breakthrough in code making and breaking. I found it all quite fascinating and especially useful to someone like myself with an interest in information theory.