Isaac Asimov recently complained in Popular Computing that his word-processor didn't save him much time on revisions, since he composes at ninety words per minute and "95 per cent of what I write in the first draft stays in the second [and final] draft."
This has got to be the grand champion of it's-not-a-bug-it's-a-feature:
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.
"When I want to know how many prime numbers there are between one million and two million, or how quickly my mortgage payments would bankrupt me if interest rates rose to 35 percent—that is, when I don't want to do my work—I can kill ten minutes writing programs to tell me the answer. Getting down to business, I use the computer to do my income tax. My economic life is a mess of $2.75 parking-lot tickets and $13.89 lunch receipts, which used to pile up like fall leaves until I spent a week burrowing through them at income-tax time. Now all I do is sit down at the machine for five minutes every few nights and type in all transactions of interest to the tax man—so much in from my employers, so much out to the credit-card company. At the end of the year, I load the income-tax program into the computer, push the button marked "Run," and watch as my tax return is prepared. Since it took me only about six months to learn BASIC (and the tax laws) well enough to write the program, I figure this approach will save me time by 1993."
Somehow I think we have failed, if writing basic programs like this is now outside the realm of most computer users.
You've got it backwards. In 1982 only the people who could write basic programs like this would put in the enormous investment of time and money to become computer users.
The fact that the electronics industry has managed to make it's products so much cheaper and so much easier to use that even (e.g.) the illiterate and innumerate can usefully enjoy them is a big triumph.
And in the process, much of the promise has been lost. I suppose it should be no surprise--television was hailed at its invention as a medium for education and culture even though within years it degenerated into an endless stream of fixed quiz shows and formulaic sitcoms. And now personal computers are for most people more of a distraction and an impediment to creativity than they are any help.
Maybe it's right to be cynical--new technology can't reach a mass market without turning into just another form of television, because the mass of people won't create no matter what. I just wish that making computers accessible to more people meant giving more people the creative potential that this guy had in 1982, rather than just giving them another television with 500 channels of cute kitty pictures with amusing subtitles.
Most people were not computer users in 1982, that’s different today. I would guess that today there are vastly more people on this planet who can write basic programs. Ten times as many, maybe? One hundred times as many? I don’t know but I wouldn’t be surprised by that.
I went through my undergraduate and law school years, as well as the first couple of years of my career, during the typewriter era.
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.
Wow. For someone born in 1982, this sounds like a whole other era. But I have to remind myself that my kids will probably think the same of the technology that I'm using right now ("Oh dad, you mean your 'Mac Pro' only had 8 cores and 8 gigs of RAM?").
Weirdly, as someone born in 1981, it starts sounding eerily familiar around #4. It's very hazy, but I remember using Apple Writer II (word-processing software) along with an ImageWriter II sometime in the late 1980s to do my elementary-school homework, which sounds vaguely like that description.
I think my parents were pretty pleased that I had managed to find a productive use for the home computer they bought, in an era when my dad was still using pen-and-pencil and the occasional mainframe terminal for his day job with a big engineering firm.
Whoa.