The early stages of the tech revolt didn't interest me very much, though its effect was beyond my comprehension at the time.
Today I could give a damn about the refinements in word processing, except if you try to steal my laptop with Word installed I'll hunt you down and kill you dead.
Like several of the authors named in the article, I've found what I need in the computing world and I'm happy with it. But it was a matter of luck, and I've fallen into something that works for me.
I don't own an iPhone and wouldn't have one unless somebody gave it to me and paid the monthly charges. The gizmo is too small for my hands.
I want to type the old-fashioned way that I learned 50 years ago in high school. I'm not interested in the phone's other functions, including its internet capabilities. My texting dexterity is nil. My buddy TC shoots wonderful photos with his iPhone. I prefer a cheap camera. Notebooks and the iPad are net-worthy but boring.
I simply want a decent-sized keyboard. To write.
Thirty-five years ago, I might have been through three sheets of wadded up paper by now and much more frustrated than I am at the moment.
The first time I ever confronted computing was in 1984. I had a portable Corona typewriter at home at the time, which suited me fine. The behemoth IBM computers (like the one pictured) I confronted for the first time in the offices of Good Samaritan Hospital where I went to work as a scriptwriter, were daunting at first, but hell, you could not deny some of their time-saving features.
I figured out the basics of the floppy system and gained a rudimentary understanding of DOS, but I never became fluent with it.
Out of my tech fallibility, I found myself using the same writing process I used with my portable typewriter, except I didn't have to throw away a mountain of crumpled paper each day. I tried to organize my thoughts, and thus my scripts, in advance so I wouldn't have to make a lot of changes to the initial draft. Even now I write without much alteration if I can get away with it. I follow the commands for misspellings and sentence structure, and make corrections as I go. I fill in paragraphs, rewrite, subtract and add. I seldom move whole blocks of print, something I didn't learn how to do with DOS.
I live with the results of my current expertise, and you do too if you've read this far.
It ain't always pretty, fer sure.
I can do much more with Windows and Word than I could with DOS, of course. Every dummy can. That was the genius of Microsoft; its eventual ease. But again, bound to my old habits, I use few of the program's advanced functions. I had to learn some of it as I started publishing books, but I am not nearly as fluid as your average secretary who deals with a constant array of documents every work day.
The command of the story makes the writer. The tech is a secondary concern. Writing with clarity is important. One true sentence after another, as Hem said.
The 75 words-a-minute office worker has become the know-it-all word processing savant these days. That's why he/she makes the big money.
***
Now we're back in 1984, and I'm doing my best to please everyone, and I'm having lunch with a group of co-workers from the hospital's Human Resources Department because I'm writing a slide show for them. One of the HR managers asks me what kind of "PC" I planned to purchase. I dropped my fork, not knowing what she meant. I can still recall my innocence in the moment.
I recovered enough to say, " I don't know." The group I was with started talking about the differences between Apple and Microsoft. I didn't know what the letters "PC" stood for. In other words, I hadn't at that time even considered buying a personal computer.
All I knew about Microsoft was that DOS was giving me a hard time.
Apple wasn't in my brain quite yet.
I think the people I was dealing with were talking about where they might sink their money; in which company's stock. Had I known anything back then I might have chimed in, "Go with Nike."
***
I'll end this swiftly, mercifully.
A couple of years ago I read a piece about Woody Allen's writing method. He still uses a typewriter, scissors and paste to mock up his scripts before copying them.
My favorite history prof at PSU in 2005, David Horowitz, didn't have an email account, or an office computer.
Even I was shocked by that happenstance just a decade ago. But he was tenured, and his obsolescence could have been his "fuck you" to technology.
TS
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