Arise, geeks

THE Dick Smith VZ-200 loomed large in my mind as I sat in a Deakin University one-day workshop last week about Intermediate Python.

That’s not a middle-sized snake that can wrap itself around my neck.

It’s a much friendlier programming language often used for data analysis, famous for being easy to learn and capable of creating super things like YouTube.

Anyone can download it and learn to code.

Kids even do it at school on their $50 Raspberry Pi projects.

When I were a lad and went to school, programming was reserved for the learned types in university commerce and science courses.

Humanities was banned, with students chased off by officious and pompous gits with a distinctly mainframe arrogance.

Then along came a bunch of consumer devices that unlocked the opportunity for anyone to have a go.

The Commodore 64, the Amstrad, the Amiga, the BBC and my first computer, the Dick Smith VZ-200, which launched in 1983. I was 23. The Commodore 64 had stormed the world the year before, but I couldn’t afford it.

It was the equivalent of $US1500 and I was on a D Grade journalist’s wage, so those two things were mutually exclusive.

I had to buy a car, you know, and a Pioneer stereo tape deck to go in it. Priorities.

Then along came Dick the Disrupter and his little VZ with its bare bones 8kb of RAM for $250.

That’s right: 8kb. Not megabytes. Kilobytes. I was sold. I’d dabbled in Basic coding at uni on terminals that didn’t require a logon, where the code was saved on punch tape.

Now I could discover it all at home and no one could swat me away from the late night computer labs.

The 8kb of RAM was never going to be enough so I added another 8kb for $30 and quickly ran out of memory again.

Innovation loves constraint and the lack of memory forced me to find more economical ways to get the job done with my code.

I wrote many small programs, mostly text games, and modified tons of others printed in magazines, which frequently contained errors.

By day, I was a young sports journo covering local footy in Albury.

By night, I was learning the language of a science fiction future.

Dick Smith (pictured) sold 200,000 of these units, but I never met anyone who had one.

And most people who bought a Commodore 64 played the games others made, rather than learn to code themselves.

I didn’t know anyone who could code.

If I hit a snag, there was literally no one who could help me.

Fast forward 35 years and I’m surrounded by helpful advice from anywhere on the planet.

The university has even torn down its own walls and allowed a civilian into one of its courses.

But in the media industry, which is steeped in a tradition of crafting words and images, data science and coding skills in the newsrooms are nascent, not much better than in 1983.

Don’t get me wrong. Media companies have batteries of developers and data scientists informing the business and creating new products.

The skills are definitely in the business.

They’re just not part of the journalist’s toolkit, certainly not to the level where journalists can ask questions of the data as if it was a person.

And that’s where we need to be.

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives — where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance — are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models.

Journalists, who pride themselves on speaking truth to power and holding institutions to account, are powerless to do so if they can’t interrogate the information themselves, but rely on the analysis of others.

Does this keep me awake at night? Absolutely. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Maybe. But I think it’s in Grade 1 at Lara Primary School.