Toying With Computers

At the uppermost reaches of corporate America on a day late in April, an unusual gift is arriving by Federal Express messenger. One thousand chief executive officers of the nation's largest companies -- among them Lee Iacocca, chairman of Chrysler; Walter Wriston, chairman of Citicorp; and Frank Borman, chairman of Eastern Airlines -- are each receiving a small silver and blue computer terminal with a full keyboard and one-line display, no bigger than a paperback book. Unlike larger terminals, though, its native tongue is not computerese but ordinary, written English, punctuated with friendly audible beeps and boops. Switch it on and, with no special prompting, each industry titan is greeted by his own first name. The display line reads, "HI LEE."

IXO Inc., as the start-up company is called, is beginning a most unconventional product launch, further distinguished by three consecutive full pages of advertising appearing across the United States in The Wall Street Journal on that same day. The marketing tab for the day's blitz will come to about $375,000. Surprisingly, however, this little terminal -- the IXO Telecomputing System -- is not another technological tour de force from California's Silicon Valley or Boston's Route 128. Its genealogy is entirely different. Its older brother was a toy, its birthplace a three-decker house in an unassuming neighborhood in Cambridge, Mass., and its parents, a husband-and-wife team of astrophysicists.

An ordinary, full-size computer terminal in his third-floor Cambridge study reminds Bob Doyle of what drove him and his wife, Holly, to develop a tiny terminal for use even by technological illiterates. He is trying to use the conventional terminal to communicate with a remote airline-scheduling directory offered by The Source, a database subscription service. He flips through an instruction manual and types on a keyboard to enter four or five long series of numbers before the service is hooked up through the telephone line. At least two minutes have elapsed since he began. "I personally see this as a jungle," he says. "With our terminal, we've automated everything. We dial the number for you, too. And we don't have a manual."

The screen lists flights from Boston to Denver, but Bob Doyle, normally a very patient man, is getting fed up. He has typed his preferred flight time as 9 a.m. but the computer doesn't understand. It calls his entry an "illegal command." It wants the correct format: 0900. "Can you believe this?" he asks. "These programs are written by engineers.Nobody else can use them." Shaking his head in disbelief, he says, "That's what we'll be trying to overcome. The computer should be willing to guess, or at least ask you questions and give you a chance to say yes or no."

Building toylike terminals and teaching computers the language of human beings may not be the most likely work for two PhD astrophysicists. But since the mid-1970s, Bob and Holly Doyle, both 46, have spent very little time looking beyond the planet Earth.Instead, they have collaborated to put the much-touted powers of modern technology into the hands of ordinary, even frightened, grown-ups and their children.

Instead of teaching middle-aged Americans computerese in order to do such varied computer tasks as letting a salesman enter product orders from the field or letting a consumer pay bills from home, the Doyles plan to teach computers colloquial English. "We want our terminals to be usable by the totally untrained person," Holly says. "We don't think any training should be required." Her husband nods his head in agreement. But he adds, "If we're a success, we'll have displaced human beings as computer operators. The drudge work will be done by computers."

As ambitious as the goal may sound, thinking up creative solutions to problems has long been a way of life for the Doyles. "When Bob was a kid," Holly notes, "he always invented stuff." As an undergraduate at Brown University in the mid-1950s, for example, Bob wrote to CBS newsman Walter Cronkite suggesting a new device that could turn on the radio automatically for important news developments. Only recently has such a product been introduced -- by Dow Jones & Co. for alerting investors about stocks.

The Doyles' more studied approach in the early '70s to creative problem-solving, however, was motivated by the most practical of considerations: earning a living and supporting their two young boys. After completing their doctorates at Harvard University, where they met, they had temporary posts as research fellows there. But the chances of finding two suitable jobs for astrophysicists in the same city were next to nil. While Holly worked as a specialist in solar magnetic fields at Harvard's observatory, Bob spent part of the time away from his wife and family at Houston's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, supervising a staff of astronomers designing experiments for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Skylab space crews. By 1974, though, Skylab was grounded.

Deciding to stay in Boston, Holly continued her research at the observatory while Bob began to test commercial applications for some of his ideas. Around this time "Bob started to become interested in how people make money," Holly recalls. His first venture involved a method he developed for synchronizing a tape-recorded sound track with super 8 home movies. Placing a small ad in a trade magazine, he began taking orders for $250,000 worth of Japanese tape recorders he modified in his workshop.

Super 8 sound movies were overtaken by home video developments. But other ideas were germinating. Waving his arm at the walls of books and trade magazines lining his study, Bob says, "Whenever we read, we try to find good ideas to work on. We try to figure out if there's anything out there in the future we can help bring about."