Orwell's Revenge (50 page)

completing his last novel:
Shelden, p. 425.

The Machine

the job 1 would like to have:
“As I Please” (1945),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 357.

produced individually, as you know:
1984,
p. 215.

Or why not five:
As a broadcaster for the BBC Orwell himself engineered the writing of a “Story by Five Authors.” They were: Orwell himself, Inez Holden, L.A.G. Strong, Martin Armstrong, and E. M. Forster.
Broadcast,
p. 41.

as often as was necessary:
1984,
p. 41. Orwell himself is fond of doing this sort of thing to others, particularly to religious texts. See, e.g.,
Burmese Days,
p. 18: “He began to sing aloud, ‘Bloody bloody, bloody, oh, how thou art bloody' to the tune of the hymn ‘Holy, holy, holy oh how Thou art holy'”;
Burmese Days,
p. 79: “What shall it profit a man if he save his own soul and lose the whole world?”;
Aspidistra
(frontpiece): “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money,” etc.; A
Clergyman's Daughter,
p. 214: “[I]f you took I Corinthians, chapter thirteen, and in every verse wrote ‘money' instead of ‘charity'”; “The Prevention of Literature” (1946),
Essays,
III, p. 336: “To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a ‘Don't' at the beginning of each line.”

rewrite Orwell's book beginning to end:
I realized this in late 1991. It seemed like a propitious time to undertake the job, as we approached the tenth anniversary of April 4, 1984, the day on which Winston Smith began his seditious diary. If Orwell had stuck with his original plan, his book would in fact have been called
1994
rather than
1984.
The title of the book came from reversing two digits in 1948, when Orwell actually finished writing it. But the book was not published until 1949.

concerned with prostitutes:
Cf. Shelden, p. 9.

a number of his own books and essays:
For example:
Coming Up for Air,
p. 163, includes a capsule summary of A
Clergyman s Daughter:
“She lives on some kind of tiny fixed income, an annuity or something, and I fancy she's a left-over from the old society of West Bletchley, when it was a little country town, before the suburb grew up. . . . It's written all over her that her father was a clergyman and sat on her pretty heavily while he lived.”
Down and Out,
p. 192, includes a mention of Lower Binfield, which is the center of the story in
Coming Up for Air. Burmese Days,
p. 58, contains discrete references to “magnified aspidistras” and describes a woman's frustration at meeting “a veritable artist who was willing to work penniless all his life rather than sell himself to a bank or an insurance company.” This is, of course, a capsule summary of
Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

all literature builds on common experience:
As
Orwell's Revenge
went into galleys I stumbled across this in the Sunday edition of the New
York Times:
“There's nothing scandalous about this sort of borrowing. The history of literature is a history of appropriation. Shelley's gothic novel, ‘Zastrozzi,' is a deliberate pastiche of novels and stories by his well-known predecessors Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe, right down to the characters' names. Joyce plundered the entire canon of English literature, adapting it for his purposes. Literature, like property, is theft.” J. Atlas, “Who Owns a Life? Asks a Poet, When His Is Turned into Fiction,” New
York Times,
February 20, 1994, p. E14.

always remain a solitary endeavor:
“The Prevention of Literature” (1946),
Essays,
III, p. 343: “Serious prose, in any case, has to be composed in solitude.”

Orwell wrote in 1984:
1984,
p. 35.

time to shape what is:
For further philosophical reflections on the hyper-intelligent future, see Albert Borgmann,
Crossing the Postmodern Divide
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 102-109.

but Thou mayest:
John Steinbeck,
East of Eden
(Penguin Books ed., 1986), pp. 395, 399.

Loose Ends

tyranny can perhaps never he complete:
“Poetry and the Microphone” (1945),
Essays,
III, p. 245.

million employees:
At its apogee, just prior to divestiture, the Bell System had annual revenues of $58 billion and total assets of $138 billion; it employed over 1 million people. By 1986, IBM had 407 employees. “The End of I.B.M.'s Overshadowing Role,”
New York Times,
December 20, 1992, 3: 2.

would he considered indispensable:
Robert W Garnet,
The Telephone Enterprise: The Evolution of the Bell System's Horizontal Structure, 1876-1909
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 12.

shifting the unit from mouth to ear:
See George David Smith, The
Anatomy of a Business Strategy: Bell, Western Electric, and the Origins of the American Telephone Industry
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 20-22.

directly to each other:
Garnet, The
Telephone Enterprise,
p. 15.

inexorably back toward monopoly:
See Garnet, The
Telephone Enterprise,
p. 23, for a discussion of these problems and rationale.

either folded or were acquired:
See Robinson, “The Federal Communications Act: An Essay on Origins and Regulatory Purpose,” reprinted in A
Legislative History of the Communications Act of 1934
(Paglin ed., 1989), p. 7; Burch, “Common Carrier Communications by Wire and Radio: A Retrospective,”
Federal Communications Law Journal
37 (1985): 85, 87; Warren G. Lavey “The Public Policies That Changed the Telephone Industry Into Regulated Monopolies: Lessons from Around 1915,”
Federal Communications LawJournal39
(1987): 171.

cricket game was improving rapidly:
Shelden, p. 39.

name to International Business Machines:
Richard Thomas DeLamarter,
Big Blue: IBM's Use and Abuse of Power
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), p. 15.

the humble punch card itself:
Card sales would account for almost a quarter of IBM's net income in the two decades after 1930. Robert Sobel, I.B.M.:
Colossus in Transition
(New York: limes Books, 1981), p. 210.

became prohibitively expensive:
DeLamarter,
Big Blue,
pp. 19-20.

superintendent of police in Burma:
Shelden, p. 81.

a messaging system for ships:
Edward Anton Doering,
Federal Control of Broadcasting Versus Freedom of the Air
(Washington, D.C., 1939), p. 4.

a factor of importance:
Quoted in Ithiel de Sola Pool,
Technologies of Freedom
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

The military was interested too:
My summary here is taken from R. H. Coase, “The Federal Communications Commission,”
Journal of Law and Economics
2 (1959), and from Thomas W Hazlett, “The Rationality of U.S. Regulation of Broadcast Spectrum,”
Journal of Law and Economics
33 (1990).

he sailed back to England:
Shelden, p. 111.

and legitimize its monopoly:
See Richard McKenna, “Preemption under the Communications Act,”
Federal Communications Law Journal
37 (1985): 1, 8; Sen. Larry Pressler & Kevin V Schieffer, “A Proposal for Universal Service,”
Federal Communications Law Journal
40 (1988): 351, 356; Robinson, “The Federal Communications Act,” pp. 6-7.

covers only that part which is profitable:
Statement of Theodore Vail, Bell chairman, quoted in Gerald W Brock,
The Telecommunications Industry: The Dynamics of Market Structure
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 158-159.

create a separate Federal Communications Commission:
S. Doc. No. 244, 73d Cong., 2d sess. (1934).

had passed legislation:
See
Congressional Record,
June 9, 1934, pp. 10,912,10,995.

into law on June 18:
Congressional Record,
June 9, 1934, p. 12, 451.

adequate facilities at reasonable charges:
Communications Act of 1934, ch. 652, sec. 1, 48 Stat. 1064 (1934), (codified as amended at 47 U.S.C. sec. 151 (1988)). The new commission was to regulate radio as well as wire communications and, hence, replace the Federal Radio Commission established by the Radio Act of 1927, 44 Stat. 1162 (1927).

under his own name:
Shelden, p. 165.

on the bodies of their enemies:
Burmese Days,
p. 14.

cards from anyone but IBM:
DeLamarter,
Big Blue,
pp. 21-22.

crowded office environments:
Hush-A-Phone, 20 F.C.C. 391 (1955); 238 F.2d 266 (D.C. Cir. 1956);
on remand, 22
FCC. 112 (1957).

all foreign attachments:
A typical such provision reads as follows: “NÒ equipment, apparatus, circuit, or device not furnished by the Telephone Company shall be attached to or connected with the facilities furnished by the Telephone Company, whether, physically, by induction or otherwise, except as provided in this tariff. In case any such unauthorized attachment or connection is made, the Telephone Company shall have the right to remove or disconnect the same; or to suspend the service during the continuance of said attachment or connection; or to terminate the service.” Jordaphone, 18 F.C.C. 644, 647 (1954).

for the Hush-A-Phone:
Hush-A-Phone, 20 F.C.C, at 397.

talking in a low tone of voice:
Hush-A-Phone, 20 F.C.C, at 398.

went up to the U.S. Supreme Court:
DeLamarter,
Big Blue,
p. 22.

settled in a 1956 decree:
DeLamarter,
Big Blue,
p. 23; Sobel,
I.B.M.,
p. 142.

without being publicly detrimental:
Hush-A-Phone, 238 F.2d 266, 269 (D.C. Cir. 1956).

and verse by the U.S. Supreme Court:
Red Lion Broadcasting Co. Inc. v. FCC, 395 U.S. 367 (1969).

Bell's long-distance network:
Richard H. K. Vietor, “AT&T and the Public Good: Regulation and Competition in Telecommunications, 1910-1987,” in
Future Competition in Telecommunications,
ed. Stephen P Bradley and Jerry A. Hausman (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1989), pp. 27, 52.

television network in 1948:
Morton I. Hamburg,
All About Cable,
rev. ed. (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 1-6.

domestic long-distance calls:
John Brooks,
Telephone: The First Hundred Years
(New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 244.

on one substrate:
See T. R. Reid,
The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).

between St. Louis and Chicago:
The following relies primarily on Peter Temin,
The Fall of the Bell System
(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 47-54.

unique and special characteristics:
Quoted in Temin,
Bell System,
p. 50.

limited common carriers:
General Mobile Radio Serv. Allocation of Frequencies between 25 & 30 Megacycles, 13 F.C.C. 1190, 1228 (1949).

significant interest in both licenses:
See Amendment of the Commission's Rules, 98 F.C.C.2d 175, 218 (1984).

enjoyed by affiliates:
See, e.g., An Inquiry into the Use of Bands 825-845 MHz & 870-890 MHz for Cellular Communications Systems, 86 F.C.C.2d 469, 495-496 (1981); Amendment of Part 21 of the Commission's Rules with Respect to the 150.8-162 Mc/s Band to Allocate Presently Unassignable Spectrum to the Domestic Public Land Mobile Radio Service by Adjustment of Certain of the Band Edges, 12 F.CC.2d 841, 849-850 (1968), aff'd, sub nom. Radio Relay Corp. v. FCC, 409 F.2d 322 (2d Cir. 1969).

failed to recognize its importance:
Regis McKenna,
Who's Afraid of Big Blue? How Companies Are Challenging IBM—and Winning
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989), p. 18.

from $1.7 billion to $7.5 billion:
DeLamarter,
Big Blue,
p. 349.

library of application programs:
McKenna, Who's
Afraid of Big Blue?,
p. 22.

three hundred meters into the air:
1984,
p. 5.

to enter the computer business:
In 1991 it purchases NCR, the former National Cash Register, where Tom Watson first learned how to sell business machines,

IBMs 3090, introduced in 1985:
Intel, “The Next Revolution,”
Business Week,
September 26, 1988, p. 74. To be sure, a microprocessor, no matter how fast, is not a full working computer; a crude MIPS comparison somewhat overstates the advance of the microprocessor. But only somewhat.

a million dollar mainframe of the 1970s:
Peter H. Lewis, “Chips for the Year 2,”
New York Times,
June 19, 1990, p. C8.