I recall quite a lot of agonising even so, but I must in fact have done it fairly quickly, because the acceptance from the publishers – the first reference I can find to the book in my files – is dated only eighteen months (and seventy or so weekly columns) later. The advice of my then editor, Richard Ollard (himself a distinguished writer and historian) was pretty much the exact converse of my agent’s about the earlier book – it was the first thirty or so pages that he didn’t like. I was greatly cheered, of course, by this shift in the balance of approval, and was happy to accept his advice to consign those first thirty to the same oblivion as the previous 330.
He had a lot of other good suggestions, too, and I was touched to see, when I looked up the subsequent correspondence in my files just now, that in his letters there are also many comments added in another hand – the early scribblings of my eldest daughter, then aged two, now long since a novelist and screenwriter herself.
*
So, 1965.
T. S. Eliot had died at the beginning of the year and Winston Churchill was just about to. The Beatles were conquering the world, and America was being slowly sucked into Vietnam. Somewhere beyond the headlines computers – the tin men of my title – were beginning to make their importance felt, if only by their ponderous size and cost. They were produced, mostly by IBM, for a small elite of academic and commercial users, and they were as imposing in their way as the great steam engines that had ushered in an earlier technological revolution. There’s a picture on Wikipedia of an IBM 704 mainframe dated 1964. It occupies an entire room – four steel cabinets as tall and voluminous as commercial refrigerators, together with a steel desk suite as imposing as the control room of an aircraft-carrier. Amongst it all, easy to overlook surrounded by all that hardware, is a demure young woman in a pencil skirt who is presumably the operator. She seems as overawed as all the rest of us, and as unaware as IBM themselves that in forty or fifty years time the balance of power would have been reversed, and she would be carrying the same capacity and more tucked away unnoticed inside the smartphone in her shirt pocket.
It was mighty IBM mainframes that I envisaged as the equipment of the William Morris Institute of Automation Research, where my story is set. The scale of the hardware seems to have overpowered the judgment of a lot of readers and reviewers, who thought it was the machines and their programmers that I was mocking, whereas I had supposed that my target was the professional people – the journalists, lawyers, clergymen, etc. – whose thinking was so stereotyped that it could be carried out just as effectively by a machine. I hadn’t in those days heard of the Turing Test – Alan Turing’s proposal that a computer could be said to think if its conversational powers were shown to be indistinguishable from a human being’s – so I didn’t realise that what I was suggesting was a kind of converse of it: a demotion of human beings to the status of machines if their intellectual performance was indistinguishable from a computer’s, and they become tin men in their turn.