Living with a Computer (1982)

I loved my old Diablo 630 daisywheel printer. The sound it made was great - it sounded like a machine gun when hammering out your document. Watching it furiously type was quite a sight. It was bulletproof, too. I couldn't find a computer museum to take it. So sad.

My laserjet is so much better, but still.

My mother used to be a primary school teacher; she has the habit when reading carefully (correcting homework) to read while dragging a ruler over the paper in order to occlude the next line.

After many years of reviewing and debugging code, I can't read books comfortably fast anymore, I'm too focused on catching every single word and punctuation. I'll often go back half a sentence if I thought I might have seen some kind of error. Can't help it...

Yes and no. The biggest writing task I do is film scripts (which run about 20-25,000 words). I'm used to editing as I go and I have the whole story plus a lot of the language in my head while I'm writing (or more often, typing - the composition part usually takes place away from the keyboard).

But once I'm done with a draft, the next day I go get it printed and then I go through it with a pencil, crossing things out and scribbling notes on it. Not being able to edit the paper version makes some errors suddenly visible (like misplaced subject errors that a spelling/grammar checker can't easily catch) and more importantly it gives me a much better sense of the narrative pacing and suchlike.

I do very much appreciate the capabilities of a good word processor. The idea of writing in linear fashion using a typewriter isn't appealing at all. Incidentally I'd like to mention I use Fade In, which is a one-man project by Kent Tessman who answers all his own support queries. It's well worth the $50 he asks and vastly more pleasant to use than Final Draft.

I would occasionally copy my college papers into a text file and use my Mac's say command

  say -f paper.txt

Yes, absolutely. This is standard practice among my peers in creative writing; the last step of editing is to read your piece aloud (to the cat, or the dog, or to the mirror, or a human victim, or just to yourself), slowly and carefully.

My friend who is finishing up his novel is currently in the reading-aloud stage. He's had various friends in and out of his house to listen to chapters as he does it, too.

As for myself, I've been caught by my friends standing in back stairwells reading papers aloud thirty minutes before class more times than I care to admit.

I try doing this with code I wrote, reviewing all files with `git diff --staged | less` before commiting; although reading it aloud would be strange.

The internationalization of the United States was vastly accelerated by the PC market. It just became too much trouble to be parochial. And in a way, strong IP law was a big cause of the PC market being so international.

Quick, name a car produced by the big three in 1982 that you would actually want to own. "Morning in America" was loaded jingoism. In the eighties and early nineties Walmart filled its stores with a "Buy American" campaign.

That's part one.

The second part is that the audience of the Atlantic 1982 contained a lot of people born before the baby boom who lived through World War II and listened to a lot of anti-Japanese propaganda during their formative years. The casual racism it produced (helped along by the formal racism of their youth) was one reason jingoism was revived as a successful political strategy in the 1980, 82, and 84 election cycles.

Jingoism is still successful, but it had been before the early '80's, the 1960's and 70's were the exception, not the norm. What nobody would have bet on in 1982 is a non-white president or same-sex marriage. Old attitudes toward Japan die off with the people who hold them.

Maybe there is room for some kind of 'accelerated history of computing' where you get to replay the last 40 years or so.

Just like in school we start you out with arithmetic and progress from there it might make sense to see the computing world through some kind of compressed time curriculum to increase understanding and possibly avoid the re-learning of some rather painful lessons from the past.

I can relate a bit. Even though assembling components was a thing until early 2K, it's barely not anymore. Only gamer or very demanding people picks the pieces. Any laptop will do now, and even though I love my ThinkPad, I miss the physical interaction with wires and cards. It's not rare to feel that way, we like to sense, so miniaturization is taking something away from us. Also, even in the 90s, assembling a computer wasn't the same as in the 80s, the interfaces were complex and it was transitioning between DIY to plug'n'play so you didn't understand a lot of what was happening. Not the same as really controlling all the pieces with your own code.

You were rather limited in what you could do with them relative to now. These are the good old days.

I've often thought this. It's something Woz mentions in his book, iWoz. There's something to be said about having a wholistic appreciation of the machine, and there was a time when a somewhat ordinary individual could hold a mental model of all the components -- software and hardware -- of their machine.

It's also a bit reminiscent of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- the hero rides an older bike, while his buddy rides a newer BMW model that the buddy can't maintain himself. There's less of a connection between the technology and the user; less "feel".

Oh the manuals that came with the machines...they had schematics in them and explained every part of the machine and what it did. It was glorious.

It would also be difficult to do now as the machines are more complex. But if you imagine today that every new PC came with a full MSDN subscription and the Intel system programmer's manuals, that's about how it was.

Of course, it took many minutes to load a program from floppy disk, so there was a lot of not-so-glorious waiting.

It also meant far fewer people were inclined to own them, and they were far less accessible.

These days we still do the same thing, those of us who are inclined - but we do it with the internet, funky web services, a thousand programming languages, and so on.

And if we want to tinker... we go buy an arduino or something.

I got my first computer in 1983 (a TRS-80), and at that point the old codgers were complaining that computers had gotten too commercialized and that the purity of the old hobbyist days had gone. They were probably right, though it certainly seems hobbyist now.

I wonder if the success of the Raspberry Pi is an indication a lot of people do still like hobbyist computer building, though?

The reference to (insane early-80s) interest rates was fun too.

Yeah, they do die. My old IBM PC, put in storage in working condition, came out and when I turned it on there was a snapping noise and the machine died.

This fate has befallen all my machines older than 15 years or so. They won't turn on, or turn on and fail the POST, won't boot, whatever. Sometimes there's that fine smell of smoke being released accompanying the failure.

On the other hand, my Carver amp I bought 30+ years ago still works fine and I run it 16 hours a day, every day. It's the best, by far, piece of electronics I've ever bought when considering bang for the buck. The same goes for the Dahlquist speakers it drives.