10 PRINT "Copilot is taking us back to the future!"

I was talking to a colleague last week and I had an epiphany. "Prompting" an AI like Copilot for Microsoft 365 was a lot like my earliest days in computing - in the best possible way. Let me explain.

Growing up in Seattle, I was fortunate to have a computing enthusiast as a neighbor. His name was Bob Hughes, and he was a TITAN of a man and the best neighbor you could ever hope for. Without Bob, I probably wouldn't have ended up working for Microsoft.

Bob always "crossed the chasm" first - he bought his first personal computer in the late 70's, acquired an Apple Macintosh when they became available in 1984, and generally kept his technology up to date with each generation of personal computing thereafter. The benefit of being the kid next door was that a) he always let me play around with his gear, and b) he would sell me his prior generation tech at rock bottom prices as soon as he upgraded. That meant that in 1984, once that Macintosh supplanted his old Atari 800 (equipped with tape drive, phone coupler modem, and numerous cartridges and other accessories), the Atari was mine.

As a kid growing up in Seattle, the timing couldn't have been better for me to acquire my first computer. I'd already been exposed to Logo programming in elementary school, but I had dreams of bigger things. The previous summer, War Games (starring a very young Matthew Broderick) had been released. As a fellow bright, undermotivated Seattle teenager, I had dreams of using my newly acquired phone-coupler 300 baud rate modem to hack into various government agencies or to change my grades... Or at least find a BBS with some weird and controversial content. I had better luck with the latter and absolutely no luck with the former. That's probably a good thing.

Booting up that old Atari was always a fun experience, and I spent untold hours in my basement writing remedial programs using the BASIC interpreter, which itself was a ROM-based cartridge. If I wanted that computer to do anything other than play cartridge-based games, it was up to me to program it. Within a few months I had managed to build a small library of applications, primarily to help me run Dungeons & Dragons campaigns (yes, I am a true child of the 80s!). My random character name generator was a favorite accomplishment - with a good deal of refinement, it stopped producing names like "Mxiulytlmephit" and eventually started coming up with cool stuff like "Zenexious" or "Riphaldon". That was bad ass!

Side note: one of the most frustrating things with that old computer was saving a program to the analog tape drive (which also used baud tones to transform digital to analog data). The tapes deteriorated fast - and if you couldn't find the right start point on the tape to hear the baud tone, that was it, your program was lost. 😖

Evolving modalities

For over 40 years, humans have been taught to interact with computers through a Graphical User Interface (GUI). The story of XEROX PARC is fascinating, and you really can't understate the criticality of their research and designs in shaping modern computing. GUIs made it easy to discover functionality in applications, and even novices could quickly start to use software on a Mac or on a PC, at least once Windows 3.0 was released.

The advent of iOS brought us the concept of an App Store in 2008, and while Apple has found itself in legal trouble for the suffocating terms it imposes on developers, it nonetheless brought about an incredible revolution in software development and distribution, making it much easier to distribute programs to billions of potential consumers.

While there's no doubt the App Store has been a boon to consumers, I've often lamented that it's been an impediment for young people to want to learn how to code -- there's just no need for most of them to learn, since just about anything they can think of is already available commercially in an app store.

Sure, there are commercial reasons to build apps, but the imperative to build something is no longer there. If I were 12 today, there are innumerable apps that would help me run my RPG campaigns, and I'm certain they're better than what I dreamed up back in 1984.

While the underlying operating systems have changed and improved, new operating systems have entered the market (Android, iOS, others), input modalities have changed (touch, AR/VR, sensors, etc.) and app stores have revolutionized distribution, the fundamental paradigm for interacting with personal computing devices has largely remained the same:

1. Launch apps/programs via familiar icons;
2. Interact with applications through menus and embedded iconography;
3. Memorize patterns to facilitate productivity - especially for less technical users;
4. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Alright, so what does ANY of this have to do with AI or Copilot?!?

As a Microsoft employee, I've had access to Copilot for several months. I'm still figuring out ways to leverage it to support my own productivity - sometimes I'm delighted by the results, occasionally I'm disappointed... But I'm always AMAZED to consider that I'm interacting with my PC through an entirely new input modality - prompting.

Staring at that "Ask me anything..." box, it hit me that interacting with Copilot feels a heck of a lot like 1984 when I stared at that "Ready" prompt on my old Atari-800.

And I mean that in the best possible way!

• No longer am I bound by a rigid and set menu structure within my applications.
• No longer do I have to search for terms in a browser and just hope that the top returned sites have accurate information and aren't just SEO optimized click farms.
• No longer do I have to approach my PC as an inflexible tool powered by a limited set of software that I've either personally acquired or my employer has provided for me.

Copilot enables me to do things that even the developers of those apps likely hadn't conceived of while they were developing their solutions.

The challenge, though, is with that new power comes a steep learning curve. When you can literally type anything in a prompt, what do you type? It's like my joke with Alexa - when your smart speaker has the power to play almost any song ever recorded, how do you know what to choose? In my house, there's almost always a moment of panic, before asking Alexa to fall back on Tom Petty or U2 (see, child of the 80s).

For me, Copilot is the same thing, and like almost any new experience, it requires time and practice to start to get the most value from this entirely new way of thinking about human-computer interaction. It just won't feel natural the first time you use it... And probably the second time either. But by the third time or the fourth, you'll start to get the hang of it. And eventually? Game changer.

And the cool thing is, you're not just following a preset pathway as defined by the GUI. You're interacting with your PC in an entirely new way. The journey is yours, much like it was for me in 1984. For me, computing is actually fun and interesting again - even when it's frustrating.

While I'm not likely to find ways for Copilot to act like JOSHUA and finally help me hack into WOPR, it's the first time in a while that I feel like the potential of computing to change our modern world is endless. Interestingly, it's because of that same interface that I grew accustomed to back in 1984: "READY".

Staring at a blank prompt: What now?

If you're interested in learning more about prompting in Copilot, check out Microsoft's Copilot Lab (cloud.microsoft) site. And if you want some tips on how to craft your own prompts, here's some guidance from my expert colleagues at Microsoft:

10 PRINT CHR$(125);
20 PRINT "THANKS FOR READING!"
30 END