Living With a Computer (1982)

A few random thoughts on the early era:

1. I paid to have a freelancer type my college thesis in 1974 (I routinely used a typewriter but for 35 pages it was worth paying $.50/page to avoid having to slog through and manually format all that material when cut and paste literally meant taking a scissors, cutting pre-typed text into little ribbon strips, and pasting them on to a fresh sheet of paper where you would manually "insert" them between other portions of text).

2. By the late 1970s, Wang was king of word processing in larger companies, at $15k a pop for its dedicated word processors. Very impressive in appearance, it was a bulky piece of hardware that made it seem like you were using a giant, specialized machine to automate working with text. Only large companies could afford them; the rest of us drooled while continuing to use typewriters with "magcart" memory tapes (I think that is what they were called) that could keep a few lines of text in "memory" for a typewriter for standard re-use in legal documents.

3. IBM Selectrics were ubiquitous - every office had them in abundance, and they were the standard tool for secretaries of the day.

4. Young lawyers like me at the time couldn't wait for computerized systems to do our work more efficiently. Partners would not touch a computer. That was "secretary's work." The system used at my big firm (circa 1980) was based on a Wang minicomputer system, with dumb terminals dispersed throughout the firm, mostly for the use of the secretaries. Every week a memo would circulate (carried by hand) telling us to give our secretaries a list of documents that could be deleted from the central system because storage was so expensive.

5. When I set up my small office around early 1984, we used WordStar on a dual-floppy IBM PC. For a long document (e.g., 20-page bylaws), you would give the program a command to go from the start of the document to the end, and it would literally take the cursor some 10 seconds to get there. Printing was also slow, and very loud, as "cartwheel" printers would manually rotate and clank very loudly as each key struck the page while the document printed out in a manner that simulated what an "automated typewriter" would do.

6. Document redlining was not possible in that era for a little operation because it simply was not cost effective. In that era, a "redline" consisted of the original document being marked up manually by a live person who would lay the drafts side by side, read them through by comparing one against the other, manually hand-write "inserts" into the redline version by using little carrots and writing the new text above the line, and manually striking through deleted text, all done laboriously line-by-line. Imagine the human labor involved in doing this repeatedly with a 50-page document.

7. The only way to get a same-day communication in that era was by hand delivery or via faxes sent on machines costing thousands of dollars. Most companies did not have fax machines because they could not afford them. Thus, getting a message across town to someone who didn't have a fax machine (i.e., to most people companies) would typically cost you $40 or so if you wanted it to go "same day." It was unthinkable in that day that an individual would own or have access to a fax machine outside of a big-company environment.

Slow and clunky as the early computers, etc. seem today, we truly marveled at them in the day. What I love about this article is how the author captures that sense of wonder (wow, you could watch the characters appear on a screen!). This piece brings back a lot of memories and makes me appreciate all the more the vast progress that has occurred since that time.

Whoa.

There is even an editing step possible only with the machines. When I think I'm finished with an article, I set the print speed to Slow. This runs the printer at about 100 words per minute, or roughly the pace of reading aloud. I stuff my ears with earplugs and then lean over the platen as the printing begins. Watching the article printed at this speed is like hearing it read; infelicities are more difficult to ignore than when you are scooting your eye over words on a page.

  In a perfect world, everyone who had a home computer would also have 
  an Osborne to travel with. According to dealers, Osbornes are selling 
  so fast that many people must have decided that it makes sense not 
  just as their second computer but as their first.

He ended up as a program designer for Microsoft for a while, so perhaps that BASIC experience on a tax program didn't go to waste.

little did the author know how that will turn out...

I suppose any sufficiently advanced technology actually is indistinguishable from magic.

Somehow I think we have failed, if writing basic programs like this is now outside the realm of most computer users.

64k of RAM.

Cassette vs floppy.

Dot matrix vs daisy wheel.

Makes me want to get the old DECmate II down from the attic & boot it up one more time.