It isn't obvious today, when anyone can pick up a copy of Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer and prepare text in any of the major languages of the world, but it wasn't so many years ago that writing anything on a computer except in English and a few Western European languages typically wasn't feasible. So in the early 1980s, when the Voice of America canceled the planned purchase of a mainframe computer system for its English-only central news department and solicited proposals for a distributed computer network to support all 40 of its broadcast language services, the prospects for the success of the procurement were far from certain.

I was one of two "computer guerrillas" who persuaded management to scuttle the centralized English-only system proposed for VOA by the information technology staff of our parent organization, the former United States Information Agency. The other was my colleague Don Barth, a radio technician who had single-handedly installed a primitive network of early microcomputers in our central newsroom. Don recruited me because I had done some computer programming in college during the middle 1960s and had assembled a couple of microcomputer kits as a hobby while working for VOA as a journalist. I'm amazed in retrospect that two amateurs were able to derail the USIA project. But those were simpler times. The traditional bureaucratic rivalry between VOA and its parent agency undoubtedly helped.

Casting for Type
At the climax of the Cold War, the majority of VOA broadcasters were preparing radio scripts for the "accurate, objective and comprehensive" news mandated by their legislative charter on a motley collection of electrical and mechanical typewriters, a few of which had actually been manufactured before World War II. Some were almost impossible to maintain: it wasn't easy to find spare parts for a Bulgarian typewriter in downtown Washington. Even when the machinery worked properly, typing many of our languages required both dexterity and the patience to backspace and sometimes raise or lower the typewriter platen so base characters could be combined with diacritic marks to create the composite glyphs that would form the words. In some VOA language services, typewriters were either unavailable or too difficult for the broadcasters to use; radio scripts were written by hand and edited by hand, and the scrawls were painfully-and often quite audibly-deciphered in real-time by the on-air talent.

We were therefore delighted when one of the four bids submitted in response to our request for proposals was a commercial product that already offered word processing in the majority of the VOA languages, at least in prototype, and clearly could be coaxed into supporting all of them. The product was the Xerox Star, a computer workstation with what was at the time a radical design featuring a bit-mapped display, a graphical office motif with folders depicting filesystem directories and icons representing other objects, and copy and move and save and print operators which functioned by selecting one operand with a pointing gizmo called a mouse and dragging it to the location of the second operand on the computer monitor.

The 'Net before the 'Net
Not only that, but the Star workstation was the front end to a remarkably sophisticated distributed computing environment that had most of the major attributes of the modern Internet Protocol. The Xerox Network Systems protocol and suite of services offered central or departmental filing, remote printing, electronic mail, authentication, and directory services for all the computers and users on the network. The "IBM PCs" of the era offered vastly inferior facilities on the desktop, and either operated standalone or on networks which were comparatively primitive. Xerox, like all the other bidders, proposed to install PCs in our English central news department in order to maintain a competitive price. But at the insistence of the newsroom representatives on the evaluation team, we selected a contract option to provide Star workstations for the central news staff. (We ultimately wound up upgrading to a somewhat faster successor to the Star product which ran the same software as the Star.) Don Barth coined the name System for News and Programming for the new network; the acronym SNAP had a nice ring to it and, as lagniappe, a "snap" was the term the Reuters news agency used for what we in the United States referred to as a news "bulletin."

The installation began in 1986. Aside from the United Nations headquarters in New York, there is probably no place in America where so many people from so many cultures, speaking so many languages, are packed into a single building. We figured some parts of the organization would have more difficulty assimilating the new computer technology than others and, with the help of the Xerox federal marketing staff, we prepared a fairly elaborate series of briefings and training sessions to ease the transition. But we couldn't anticipate all the reactions, and on more than one occasion we were taken completely off-guard.

- The full text of this essay is available on Chris Kern's Web site.
- Also by Chris Kern on PublicDiplomacy.org: Voice of America: First on the Internet.