From old Futures to modern Technology

Jack Schofield | Futures Micro Guardian | 1985-1994

The success of Futures Micro Guardian, for which I'd written a weekly column from the first issue in 1983, encouraged the Guardian to expand its IT coverage, but this wasn't just an editorial concern. The paper's commercial strategy was to try to dominate the graduate recruitment market, and in the 80s, IT was a growing business with plenty of job ads to chase. I joined the paper to launch Computer Guardian in September 1985, and we chased them.

It had to appear on a Thursday because we aspired to make it something like the media, education and society sections that appeared on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

I didn't have any problem being commercial: I'd spent a decade editing bookstall magazines where you either made money or you didn't survive. But it was interesting to join a paper owned by a charitable trust.

It was also like stepping back in time, because the Guardian didn't seem to have any computers. Like many computer journalists, I was already an online addict, and used BT's Telecom Gold service when editing Practical Computing, one of the early monthlies. I started publishing my email address in the Guardian and used that and Cix to receive copy electronically. This became even more useful when, post Wapping, our minicomputer-based Atex publishing system arrived. Before that, Computer Guardian pages were made up in Manchester, with stories being sent up a week before publication.

Computer Guardian covered everything from talking teddy bears to supercomputers. Features on the opening broadsheet page were usually aimed more at the general reader, and we covered microcomputers from Acorn, Amstrad, Atari, Commodore and Sinclair. These were extremely popular at the time, mainly for playing games, so I added a column of games reviews. Features on the inside panels, next to the job ads, covered more professional and industry topics. Regulars included Keith Devlin's maths column, continued from Futures Micro Guardian, and the Workspace column written by a retired IT manager, the late Ralph Cornes.

Over time, the two side's interests converged as IBM PC-compatible machines became affordable, and as both home and professional users adopted Microsoft Windows 3 after its launch in 1990. Indeed, in the use of online systems such as Fidonet bulletin boards, Prestel, CompuServe and Cix, some home users were ahead. Many readers were on Demon, which started via a Cix conference, before big companies woke up to the net.

In the early 80s, it was axiomatic that microchips would change the world, as they got faster and cheaper every year. Having seen computers move from number-crunching to word processing, and then to graphics and video, I fondly imagined the PC eventually challenging television. Also, as more and more of the world was transformed by the microprocessor, it seemed it must eventually make sense for each bit of the Guardian to have its own technology coverage instead of hiving it off into a separate section. There's still a long way to go, but we've gone further than I really expected.

Nick Passmore | OnLine | 1994-95

I'm not sure I ever was officially OnLine's editor – Alan Rusbridger, then still deputy to Peter Preston, asked if someone would look after the launch and I volunteered. Alan had bought a modem in the US that he had to run off a huge 115v transformer and I always suspected he gave me the job because I'd helped get it working for him …

The Guardian had form of course, Vic Keegan and Jack Schofield had been writing about computers in its pages since the mid 1980s but my own online qualifications were limited to a bit of lurking on Cix and having used AppleLink and its successor, eWorld. Also involved was Tim Radford, a science editor with a gift for popularisation and an extensive contacts book. (Tim took me to lunch with Professor Steve Rose to see if we could persuade him to write for OnLine rather than the Telegraph. We were hardly promising to make him rich, but I think he was only partly joking when he said he didn't want to write regularly for the Guardian because so many of his colleagues read it and would be eager to offer him free criticism.)

We knew that if we were going to preach weekly about the possibilities and potential of the internet we should practise too. It wasn't obvious how, though: we launched with plans for a CompuServe forum and months were spent fruitlessly trying to negotiate a contract that would allow free two-way interaction with our "readers".

Luckily, one of the brightest of the bright young things around the place at the time was Azeem Azhar, who started putting some of our content on the web and, with the help of a Mac extracted from Apple and a line from Pipex, set up Go2 (Guardian OnLine online) which went live in November 1995. Go2 was not just a home on the web for content printed in the paper but was added to through the week.

Go2 was soon overtaken by and absorbed into the Guardian's wider ambitions for the web but it played its part in developing those ambitions.

OnLine made another contribution to our technical development: in 1994, most of the paper was still written and edited in an Atex system – dumb terminals hooked up to modified DEC PDP-11 minicomputers – not only did most journalists have no access to the internet, a good proportion had never even used a mouse.

OnLine was the first of our newsprint sections produced usinong the Quark Publishing System and gave us an opportunity to work out how to use QPS for "hard" news departments. It worked pretty well and in 1998/99 we installed it to replace Atex for the whole paper. As part of that change we had software written that created a structured (in SGML and later XML) feed of content for the website from every page as soon as the page went to press. Having that feed meant that, even with its very limited resources, the website could build the critical mass of content it needed to make itself one of the places on the web worth visiting every day.

Bill O'Neill | OnLine | 1996-99

I arrived in January 1996 from New Scientist where, as a leaving present, they'd grudgingly allowed me to attend a week-long Microsoft training course that had been booked for editorial staff. I don't remember gagging for the exposure but, after all, these were the halcyon days of Windows 95 and it must have seemed a useful way of working out my notice period. And it was, though not as I'd expected.

Guardian journalists relied on an archaic text-based system supported by a network of terminals, called Atex, and though the system was clunky and temperamental, it did the job. Meanwhile, the Guardian OnLine section consisted of a couple of desks in a corner of the paper's newsroom in Farringdon, and a clutch of sparkling Apple Macs. I'd never seen a Mac outside of a publisher's design department and I was worried.

The OnLine section also came with two bright young things who'd clearly been born with an Apple in their cots (as they would proudly attest). I quickly discovered that you didn't need a training course to work a Mac. Then, just a few days later, I found myself in the paper's daily morning conference arguing that a story in the business pages about the plummeting commercial fortunes of the Apple Computer company should be taken up by the Guardian's flagship comment section. The idea was taken up, not surprisingly in view of the likely number of Guardian readers who were also Mac users.

And therein lies the germ of what somehow became the guiding principles throughout my tenure at OnLine's helm. I arrived keen to reveal the latest developments in technology (and science) and how they could change people's lives, but wary, in particular, of IT's burdensome marketing and PR hype. It was easy to accept that Microsoft would dominate and that Apple would go under, but rather boring.

For most people, the internet (and the associated communications revolution) was still more of an interesting phenomenon, with exhilarating and frightening potential, rather than a must-have for modern life. But many of these potential and actual readers were computer illiterati buying their first machine, and needed intelligible guidance. They demanded hard facts shorn of tortuous writing, presented winningly and couched within a provocative line. Arguments would ensue – lots of them that bred more – but it seemed the way to go.

OnLine's esteemed predecessor, published within the Guardian, seemed to have emerged from computer magazines and be aimed at folk who understood the jargon and liked to get their fingers inside the machine. Technological developments gave the new section independence and the paper's management allowed it breath-taking autonomy – just make it sexy, advised the features editor (and he wasn't talking "sexed-up"), and geeky (rather than nerdy), suggested a senior editor.

And so OnLine emerged from the paper's editorial department as a very separate and independent supplement. All the editing and design, and much of the writing, was done on those Macs (PCs, by which non-Macs were then universally known, were not up to the job); contributors, inside and outside the paper, yielded copy that stimulated readers to join the revolution; and OnLine's artwork was put up for award.Then, quite suddenly, those territorial battles of the burgeoning internet age that made such good copy – Apple v Microsoft, Dell v Sun, security v surveillance, Linux v allcomers, copyright v free-for-all, and so on – seemed to lose their edginess. Apple was on the mend again and Jobs was even talking to Gates (perhaps he always was). In any event, it was time to tackle new challenges.

Charles Arthur | Technology | 2005-2009

Of the thousands of words that I've edited in Guardian Technology since November 2005, none has delighted me quite so much as the opening of Sean Dodson's article in May 2006: "In 1824 an English bricklayer named Joseph Aspdin rediscovered one of the great secrets of the ancient world." It has it all: mystery, storytelling, and most of all it's about the sort of technology that you can drop on your foot. (Don't quite recall what he rediscovered? Find out online).

It always seemed to me that the mutation of OnLine paired with Science (as "Life") into Technology, as the Guardian moved to its Berliner format, called out for an exploration beyond the computer keyboard, to examine topics, such as: ow-power lightbulbs, the realities of standby consumption, the usefulness of otherwise of the International Space Station, personal DNA sequencing and laser fusion.

But the internet is of course the driving force behind much of society today. And it seemed to me obvious that the Guardian's Technology section should try to direct some of that force to everyone's benefit.

Soon after starting on the section, I talked to Michael Cross, who provided our public sector coverage, about how we might go about creating a campaign for the section to pursue. What mattered? We agreed that public sector (impersonal) data held enormous commercial value – but that to realise that value also meant persuading government to let anyone use it, so that everyone could benefit from it.

The "Free Our Data" campaign kicked off in March 2006, and helped to influenced Tom Watson MP, who later ascended to the Cabinet Office under Gordon Brown: he in turn made the case throughout government.

"[Free data] has gone from being a minority sport to the mood music in the civil service," as one key figure told me recently. And, importantly, the campaign has succeeded: from April, key map and postcode data will be free, and more will follow. It has been worth the effort.

Regrettably, we could not reinvent our business model in print as quickly as we could reinvent the government's approach to data. That huge sucking sound? Well, that's the internet taking away the job adverts that paid for the print edition.

Paper, though delightful, is expensive to make. Shifting electrons around on a screen is far cheaper. Thank you for reading for so long – right to the conclusion. We've enjoyed it.

The name game

Futures Micro Guardian 20 October, 1983; edited by Tim Radford

Computer Guardian 19 September, 1985; edited by Jack Schofield

OnLine 19 May, 1994; edited by Nick Passmore to December 1995, Bill O'Neill to March 1999; Online Victor Keegan to August 2005

Technology 15 September, 2005 – 15 December 2009; edited by Richard Adams to November 2005; Charles Arthur to December 2009, continuing online

Buying a computer, 1983

"It might be cheap but sometimes it's nasty – Jack Schofield offers a guide to the first-time buyer:
Choosing a machine for its software is not easy. You have to find a shop that stocks it, and is willing to demonstrate it at some length … Some machines are a better bet than others, but bear in mind there are no certainties. My shortlist of micros to look at would be – in alphabetical order – the Acorn BBC Model B (£400) and the Acorn -Electron (£200), the Atari 600XL (£160) and 800XL (£250), and the Commodore 64 (£230)."