WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME, the bright red advertisement

asks in mock irritation, WHAT A PERSONAL COMPUTER CAN DO? The ad

provides not merely an answer, but 100 of them. A personal

computer, it says, can send letters at the speed of light,

diagnose a sick poodle, custom-tailor an insurance program in

minutes, test recipes for beer. Testimonials abound. Michael

Lamb of Tucson figured out how a personal computer could monitor

anesthesia during surgery; the rock group Earth, Wind and Fire

uses one to explode smoke bombs onstage during concerts; the Rev.

Ron Jaenisch of Sunnyvale, Calif., programmed his machine so it

can recite an entire wedding ceremony.

In the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center a month ago,

more than 1,000 computer companies large and small were showing

off their wares, their floppy discs and disc drives, joy sticks

and modems, to a mob of some 50,000 buyers, middlemen and

assorted technology buffs. Look! Here is Hewlett-Packard's

HP9000, on which you can sketch a new airplane, say, and

immediately see the results in 3-D through holograph imaging;

here is how the Votan can answer and act on a telephone call in

the middle of the night from a salesman on the other side of the

country; here is the Olivetti M20 that entertains bystanders by

drawing garishly colored pictures of Marilyn Monroe, here is a

program designed by The Alien Group that enables an Atari

computer to say aloud anything typed on its keyboard in any

language. It also sings, in a buzzing humanoid voice, Amazing

Grace and When I'm 64 or anything else that anyone wants to teach

it.



As both the Apple Computer advertisement and the Las Vegas

circus indicate, the enduring American love affairs with the

automobile and the television set are now being transformed into

a giddy passion for the personal computer. This passion is

partly fad, partly a sense of how life could be made better,

partly a gigantic sales campaign. Above all, it is the end

result of a technological revolution that has been in the making

for four decades and is now, quite literally, hitting home.



Americans are receptive to the revolution and optimistic

about its impact. A new poll for TIME by Yankelovich, Skelly and

White indicates that nearly 80% of Americans expect that in the

fairly near future, home computers will be a commonplace as

television sets or dishwashers. Although they see dangers of

unemployment and dehumanization, solid majorities feel that the

computer revolution will ultimately raise production and

therefore living standards (67%), and that it will improve the

quality of their children's education (68%). [The telephone

survey of 1,019 registered voters was conducted on Dec. 8 and 9.

The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3%.]



The sales figures are awesome and will become more so. In

1980 some two dozen firms sold 724,000 personal computers for

$1.8 billion. The following year 20 more companies joined the

stampede, including giant IBM, and sales doubled to 1.4 million

units at just under $3 billion. When the final figures are in for

1982, according to Dataquest, a California research firm, more

than 100 companies will probably have sold 2.8 million units for

$4.9 billion.



To be sure, the big, complex, costly "mainframe" computer

has been playing an increasingly important role in practically

everyone's life for the past quarter-century. It predicts the

weather, processes checks, scrutinizes tax returns, guides

intercontinental missiles and performs innumerable other

operations for governments and corporations. The computer has

made possible the exploration of space. It has changed the way

wars are fought, as the Exocet missile proved in the South

Atlantic and Israel's electronically sophisticated forces did in

Lebanon.



Despite its size, however, the mainframe does its work all

but invisibly, behind the closed doors of a special,

climate-controlled room. Now, thanks to the transistor and the

silicon chip, the computer has been reduced so dramatically in

both bulk and price that it is accessible to millions. In 1982 a

cascade of computers beeped and blipped their way into the

American office, the American school, the American home. The

"information revolution" that futurists have long predicted has

arrived, bringing with it the promise of dramatic changes in the

way people live and work, perhaps even in the way they think.

America will never be the same.



In a larger perspective, the entire world will never be the

same. The industrialized nations of the West are already

scrambling to computerize (1982 sales: 435,000 in Japan, 392,000

in Western Europe). The effect of the machines on the Third World

is more uncertain. Some experts argue that computers will, if

anything, widen the gap between haves and have-nots. But the

prophets of high technology believe the computer is so cheap and

so powerful that it could enable under-developed nations to

bypass the whole industrial revolution. While robot factories

could fill the need for manufactured goods, the microprocessor

would create myriad new industries, and an international computer

network could bring important agricultural and medical

information to even the most remote villages. "What networks of

railroads, highways and canals were in another age, networks of

telecommunications, information and computerization...are today,"

says Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky. Says French Editor

Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, who believes that the computer's

teaching capability can conquer the Third World's illiteracy and

even its tradition of high birth rates: "It is the source of new

life that has been delivered to us."



The year 1982 was filled with notable events around the

globe. It was a year in which death finally pried loose Leonid

Brezhnev's frozen grip on the Soviet Union, and Yuri Andropov,

the cold-eyed ex-chief of the KGB, took command. It was a year

in which Israel's truculent Prime Minister Menachem Begin

completely redrew the power map of the Middle East by invading

neighboring Lebanon and smashing the Palestinian guerrilla forces

there. The military campaign was a success, but all the world

looked with dismay at the thunder of Israeli bombs on Beirut's

civilians and at the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps.

It was a year in which Argentina tested the decline of European

power by seizing the Falkland Islands, only to see Britain, led

by doughty Margaret Thatcher, meet the test by taking them back

again.



Nor did all of the year's major news derive from wars or the

threat of international violence. Even as Ronald Reagan cheered

the sharpest decline in the U.S. inflation rate in ten years,

1982 brought the worse unemployment since the Great Depression

(12 million jobless) as well as budget deficits that may reach an

unprecedented $180 billion in fiscal 1982. High unemployment

plagued Western Europe as well, and the multibillion-dollar debts

of more than two dozen nations gave international financiers a

severe fright. It was also a year in which the first artificial

heart began pumping life inside a dying man's chest, a year in

which millions cheered the birth of cherubic Prince William

Arthur Philip Louis of Britain, and millions more rooted for a

wrinkled, turtle-like figure struggling to find its way home to

outer space.



There are some occasions, though, when the most significant

force in a year's news is not a single individual but a process,

and a widespread recognition by a whole society that this process

is changing the course of all other processes. That is why,

after weighing the ebb and flow of events around the world, TIME

has decided that 1982 is the year of the computer. It would have

been possible to single out as Man of the Year one of the

engineers or entrepreneurs who masterminded this technological

revolution, but no one person has clearly dominated those

turbulent events. More important, such a selection would obscure

the main point. TIME's Man of the Year for 1982, the greatest

influence for good or evil, is not a man at all. It is a

machine: the computer.



It is easy enough to look at the world around us and

conclude that the computer has not changed things all that

drastically. But one can conclude from similar observations that

the earth is flat, and that the sun circles it every 24 hours.

Although everything seems much the same from one day to the next,

changes under the surface of life's routines are actually

occurring it almost unimaginable speed. Just 100 years ago,

parts of New York City were lighted for the first time by a

strange new force called electricity; just 100 years ago, the

German Engineer Gottlieb Daimler began building a gasoline-fueled

internal combustion engine (three more years passed before he

fitted it to a bicycle). So it is with the computer.



The first fully electronic digital computer built in the

U.S. dates back only to the end of World War II. Created at the

University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC weighed 30 tons and contained

18,000 vacuum tubes, which failed at an average of one every

seven minutes. The arrival of the transistor and miniaturized

circuit in the 1950s made it possible to reduce a room-size

computer to a silicon chip the size of a pea. And prices kept

dropping. In contract to the $487,000 paid for ENIAC, a top IBM

personal computer today costs about $4,000, and some discounters

offer a basic Timex-Sinclair 1000 for $77.95. One computer

expert illustrates the trend by estimating that if the automobile

business had developed like the computer business, a Rolls-Royce

would now cost $2.75 and run 3 million miles on a gallon of gas.



Looking ahead, the computer industry sees pure gold. There

are 83 million U.S. homes with TV sets, 54 million white-collar

workers, 26 million professionals, 4 million small businesses.

Computer salesmen are hungrily eyeing every one of them.

Estimates for the number of personal computers in use by the end

of the century run as high as 80 million. Then there are all the

auxiliary industries: desks to hold computers, luggage to carry

them, cleansers to polish them. "The surface is barely

scratched," says Ulric Weil, an analyst for Morgan Stanley.



Beyond the computer hardware lies the virtually limitless

market for software, all those prerecorded programs that tell the

willing but mindless computer what to do. These discs and

cassettes range from John Wiley & Sons' investment analysis

program for $59.95 (some run as high as $5,000) to Control Data's

PLATO programs that teach Spanish or physics ($45 for the first

lesson, $35 for succeeding ones) to a profusion of space wars,

treasure hunts and other electronic games.



This most visible aspect of the computer revolution, the

video game, is its least significant. But even if the buzz and

clang of the arcades is largely a teen-age fad, doomed to go the

way of Rubik's Cube and the Hula Hoop, it is nonetheless a

remarkable phenomenon. About 20 corporations are selling some

250 different game cassettes for roughly $2 billion this year.

According to some estimates, more than half of all the personal

computers bought for home use are devoted mainly to games.



Computer enthusiasts argue that these games have educational

value, by teaching logic, or vocabulary, or something. Some are

even used for medical therapy. Probably the most important

effect of these games, however, is that they have brought a form

of the computer into millions of homes and convinced millions of

people that it is both pleasant and easy to operate, what

computer buffs call "user friendly." Games, says Philip D.

Estridge, head of IBM's personal computer operations, "aid in the

discovery process."



Apart from games, the two things that the computer does best

have wide implications but are quite basic. One is simply

computation, manipulating thousands of numbers per second. The

other is the ability to store, sort through and rapidly retrieve

immense amounts of information. More than half of all employed

Americans now earn their living not by producing things but as

"knowledge workers," exchanging various kinds of information, and

the personal computer stands ready to change how all of them do

their jobs.



Frank Herringer, a group vice president of Transamerica

Corp., installed an Apple in his suburban home in Lafayette,

Calif., and spent a weekend analyzing various proposals for

Transamerica's $300 million takeover of the New York insurance

brokerage firm of Fred S. James Co. Inc. "It allowed me to get a

good feel for the critical numbers," says Herringer. "I could

work through alternative options, and there were no leaks."



Terry Howard, 44, used to have a long commute to his job at

a San Francisco stock brokerage, where all his work involved

computer data and telephoning. With a personal computer, he set

up his own firm at home in San Rafael. Instead of rising at 6

a.m. to drive to the city, he runs five miles before settling

down to work. Says he: "It didn't make sense to spend two hours

of every day burning up gas, when my customers on the telephone

don't care whether I'm sitting at home or in a high rise in San

Francisco."



John Watkins, safety director at Harriet & Henderson Yarns,

in Henderson, N.C., is one of 20 key employees whom the company

helped to buy home computers and paid to get trained this year.

Watkins is trying to design a program that will record and

analyze all mill accidents: who was injured, how, when, why.

Says he: "I keep track of all the cases that are referred to a

doctor, but for every doctor case, there are 25 times as many

first-aid cases that should be recorded." Meantime, he has

designed a math program for his son Brent and is shopping for a

word-processing program to help his wife Mary Edith write her

master's thesis in psychology. Says he: "I don't know what it

can't do. It's like asking yourself, 'What's the most exciting

thing you've ever done?' Well, I don't know because I haven't

done it yet."



Aaron Brown, a former defensive end for the Kansas City

Chiefs and now an office-furniture salesman in Minneapolis, was

converted to the computer by his son Sean, 15, who was converted

at a summer course in computer math. "I thought of computers

very much as toys," says Brown, "but Sean started telling me.

'You could use a computer in your work.' I said, 'Yeah, yeah,

yeah.'" Three years ago, the family took a vote on whether to go

to California for a vacation or to buy an Apple. The Apple won,

3 to 1, and to prove its value, Sean wrote his father a program

that computes gross profits and commissions on any sale.



Brown started with "simple things," like filing the names

and telephone numbers of potential customers. "Say I was going

to a particular area of the city," Brown says. "I would ask the

computer to pull up the accounts in a certain zip-code area, or

if I wanted all the customers who were interested in whole office

systems, I could pull that up too." The payoff: since he started

using the computer, he has doubled his annual sales to more than

$1 million.



Brown has spent about $1,500 on software, all bound in vinyl

notebooks along a wall of his home in Golden Valley, Minn., but

Sean still does a lot of programming on his won. He likes to

demonstrate one that he designed to teach French. "Vive la

France!" it says, and then starts beeping the first notes of La

Marseillaise. His mother Reatha uses the computer to help her

manage a gourmet cookware store, and even Sister Terri, who

originally cast the family's lone vote against the computer, uses

it to store her high school class notes. Says Brown: "It's

become kind of like the bathroom. Is someone is using it, you

wait your turn."



Reatha Brown has been lobbying for a new carpet, but she is

becoming resigned to the prospect that the family will acquire a

new hard-disc drive instead. "The video-cassette recorder," she

sighs, pointing across the room, "that was my other carpet."

Replies her husband, setting forth an argument that is likely to

be replayed in millions of household in the years just ahead:

"We make money with the computer, but all we can do with a new

carpet is walk on it. Somebody once said there were five reasons

to spend money: on necessities, on investments, on

self-improvement, on memories and to impress your friends. The

carpet falls in that last category, but the computer falls in all

five."



By itself, the personal computer is a machine with

formidable capabilities for tabulating, modeling or recording.

Those capabilities can be multiplied almost indefinitely by

plugging it into a network of other computers. This is generally

done by attaching a desk-top model to a telephone line (two-way

cables and earth satellites are coming increasingly into use).

One can then dial an electronic data base, which not only

provides all manner of information but also collects and

transmits messages: electronic mail.



The 1,450 data bases that now exist in the U.S. range from

general information services like the Source, a Reader's Digest

subsidiary in McLean, Va., which can provide stock prices,

airline schedules or movie reviews, to more specialized services

like the American Medical Association's AMA/NET, to real

esoterica like the Hughes Rotary Rig Report. Fees vary from $300

an hour to less than $10.



Just as the term personal computer can apply to both a home

machine and an office machine (and indeed blurs the distinction

between the two places) many of the first enthusiastic users of

these devices have been people who do much of their work at home:

doctors, lawyers, small businessmen, writers, engineers. Such

people also have special needs for the networks of specialized

data.



Orthopedic Surgeon Jon Love, of Madisonville, Ky., connects

the Apple in his home to both the AMA/NET, which offers, among

other things, information on 1,500 different drugs, and Medline,

a compendium of all medical articles published in the U.S. "One

day I accessed the computer three times in twelve minutes," he

says. "I needed information on arthritis and cancer in the leg.

It saved me an hour and a half of reading time. I want it to pay

me back every time I sit down at it."



Charles Manly III practices law in Grinnell, Iowa (pop.

8,700) a town without a law library, so he pays $425 a month to

connect his CPT work processor to Westlaw, a legal data base in

St. Paul. Just now he needs precedents in an auto insurance

case. He dials the Westlaw telephone number, identifies himself

by code, then types: "Courts (Iowa) underinsurance." The

computer promptly tells him there is only one such Iowa case, and

it is 14 years old. Manly asks for a check on other Midwestern

states, and it gives him a long list of precedents in Michigan

and Minnesota. I'm not a chiphead," he says, "but if you don't

keep up with the new developments, even in a rural general

practice, you're not going to have the competitive edge."
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