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History of Research @ AT&T
The Picture Phone
The videophone -- what AT&T in those days called the picture phone -- is perhaps the most interesting of the technologies shown, at least from the standpoint of human-machine interactions. In spite of the considerable research on this technology carried out at AT&T, and in spite of the memo they wrote about it for the producers, I see no particular advances in the technology over what is possible today. There are even a few problems. One is the number of digits required for the phone number: eleven digits dialed in groups of three, three, and five. That's rather interesting. It was as if they planned for a three-digit area code (as today), a three-digit exchange code (as today), and a five-digit personal code (today we use four). The extra digit is good, because we will certainly have to move to at least eleven-digit telephone numbers by the year 2001 (probably before). But what about a country code? Surely a call from the international space station would have to indicate a country; yet repeated study of the dialing sequence always yields the same pattern of 3-3-5: no country code there.
Note too how rapidly the connection is made -- faster than for even local calls today -- and the charge -- $1.70 for several minutes of video connection. That's impressively cheap. I also liked the way the caller was told the cost of the call. Even AT&T's most advanced screen telephones today don't provide that information, although the technology to do so is available. That strikes me as a great advance, but not necessarily one a telephone company's director of marketing would like.
Actually, the book was more realistic than the movie. It specifies both a country code (83 for the United States rather than today's code of 1) and a twelve-digit home number. That's actually quite realistic. By the year 2001, we will have run out of combinations for the current ten-digit numbers and will very likely have moved to eleven or twelve digits.
The major flaw in the scenes showing use of the videophone was the
problem of eye contact; that is, Dr. Floyd and his daughter appear to
be looking at one another, but they couldn't with the camera placed as
it is shown. The camera is above the screen, so that for Floyd's
daughter to look at her father's eyes, she would have to look below
the camera, and Floyd would see her looking down instead of at
him. This is a well-known problem that is being worked on today but
was evidently not considered during filming.
Boredom, the Greatest Challenge
One of the real dangers of a long, extended trip through space is
boredom, which would be greatly exacerbated by a system as heavily
automated as Discovery 1. With HAL, what is there for the
astronauts to do? The film does convey the tediousness of space life
quite well. We see David and Frank exercising and sunbathing, eating
bland food, watching video shows about themselves. What else did they
do with their time?
On the space platform too, there is little to do. Consider the person
sitting listlessly at the Hilton check-in desk. The job of the poor
woman (all women are uniformly called girls in the movie) is to check
visitor's identities -- or, rather, direct them to the machine that
checks their identities. She can, however, manually select the
language to be used on the machine. Manually select? In an age where
automation was all-powerful, why would such a simple choice be left to
an attendant? Surely if this task couldn't be done automatically,
users could easily do it themselves, couldn't they? What must it have
cost to maintain the three or four people needed to maintain the desk
at all hours of the day?
