Written by Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Readers may recall the previous two posts that became this series. My writing tool life so farThe tools here are very analog printed books like the OED; Expressing my life so far in printwhere the type that conveys the text is first physical (a typewriter) and then analog (phototypesetting machine) and finally digital (AM Varityper). The transition from analog to digital started at the keyboard, ended up inside the printer, and culminated in a start-to-finish bit (decimal digit) workflow (of course, the decimal numbers in my hands were (excluding). At the time, these phase transitions manifested themselves in changes in the flow of my workday as I flitted from job to job like Eliza hopping from ice floe to ice floe down the Ohio River (embarrassingly, Whenever I “reach for Eliza”) ” I always figure out Motown’s “little eva” Budd Lambert’s Associative Memory). Looking back, I was riding the tide of great change, with entire industries drying up and new ones emerging from Silicon Valley. — has officially appeared.
After a few stints as a production manager, while still working in the printing industry, I ended up working as a part-time hand-pasting artist at a print shop. Because I felt like I wanted to work on writing. This too was in vain – my university friends had long since dispersed – but somehow I ended up going to an exhibition and saw the Macintosh there. At that time, there were newsstands. This is a rack for printed magazines that you can read standing up without placing any magazines on them. inevitably And Cambridge (down and up the Red Line from Boston) was famous for them. So I perused computer magazines and found out with interest that there were now smaller, more sophisticated, and cheaper computers dedicated to doing what the AM Varityper (which didn’t have that name at this point) did. Ta. Hmm….
The Apple Macintosh (“Mac”) I saw was completely new and different from the AM Varityper, but it had all the same elements, including the keyboard, monitor, and disk drive. It looked like this:
There was a rainbow logo, but it didn’t look corporate-like (Apple’s later aesthetic of winter white hadn’t yet emerged). Additionally, Mac is clearly designed;the curvaceous yet cute “Hello” reminded me of my family’s friendly, trusty VW Bugs (and Mac users have long had the same attitude as VW drivers, saluting each other in passing). ). The other thing I learned was that there was something called an “application.” MacPaint, a program that could draw bits on the screen to create art, was one, and MacWrite ran something called “Word.” process. “Best of all, fontRoman, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic font (all bitmaps on the screen, if you look closely they look jagged). But as I read the book at the newsstand, I realized that a floppy drive wasn’t enough to do any real work. I discovered that there are actually “tips” on the proper way to hold newspapers. Funded by Apple advertising, the print magazine ecosystem is rapidly evolving. Ejecting the new floppy disk allows you to insert it immediately when ejecting the old floppy disk. My AM Varityper disk was large and the drive was bulky, but I didn’t need it at all. So I waited…
Eventually, the Mac 512KE (so called because of its 512 kilobytes of RAM (my current Mac has 16 gigabytes)) appeared on the market. I was still pretty poor, so I negotiated the rent and they let me off the belt (which was generous considering my difficulties in school, and this gift helped me get some real work, including this job). It was wise because it led me down the path to a career). In the end, I ended up with a machine that looked like this (with a few modifications):
I took the box back to my Somerville apartment under cover of darkness and placed it on the table I had made. Then I sat down in my drafting chair and turned it on (“booted”). there is nothing. In fact, there was nothing for two days. Then, on the third day, I accidentally hit the mouse. AM Varityper didn’t have a mouse. Then, the screen came to life. I found that my machine had the following versions: PonI controlled it with a mouse and all I did was play Pong for two days. So I thought, “Wait a minute,” and quit, and I’ve never played a computer game (on my machine or anyone else’s) since.
As for part names, the legendary Steve Jobs apparently hated fans, so the Mac was air-cooled, just like the VW Bug. The screen was 2 bits, one black and one white (0 and 1 in the machine’s RAM). If you look closely, the image across the screen is an array of black and white dots. And it’s incredible. — The dot was (I read) 1/72 inch. Like the scale of my Pika ruler. I needed a big disk for the floppy drive, and I also bought a hard disk (I forget the brand, but it held a huge amount of data: 10 megabytes, enough for half a RAW file these days) But it’s good enough for large word processing files) The keyboard is very strange, at least after the professional feel of AM Varityper, and like most Apple keyboards, if the truth be known, it’s weird and clunky. It felt like it was, but at least it wasn’t. mushy. and, Doug Engelbart style mouse (I think it’s from the tail-like code):
mechanical mouse There is a ball on its lower abdomen, and when you move the mouse, the ball rolls. Tiny rollers inside the mouse detect this movement and send signals that tell the computer how far and in which direction the mouse is moving. This information is used to move the cursor on the screen accordingly.
All was well except for the ball (rubber in this version) picking up things rolling around. So periodically when the mouse movement gets stuck and starts to become random, the rubber ball had to cleanthere was a huge sick element to this. I still shudder when I think about it.
The pica-friendliness of fonts and screens led directly to so-called “desktop publishing.” In this desktop publishing, the Mac did everything that the typesetting department, art room, and page makeup department used to do in a single application within the computer. (Also, it’s surprisingly easy to be productive if you already understand type, page shape, and the language of publication in general, which I did (again, thanks to my parents’ generosity) Thanks to your wisdom, I didn’t have to ask again).
But this post isn’t about the DTP department I’m in the middle of my so-called career (even though I loved that job almost as much as manual pasting).
This article is about writing.
After getting a computer, I started joining computer user groups and attending meetings. This group was run entirely by volunteers (here we recall the chroniclers). Macauley Library and correspondent of the OED). One of the things that volunteers were doing was writing (conference reports, reviews), so I volunteered to do that.
The difficulty of my writing, whether with pen on paper or with a typewriter, is a kind of mousetrap. I start writing words in rapid succession, then write a few paragraphs, then a few pages, but I always come across a topic that I have to dig deeper into, and I need to dig deeper, and I need to dig deeper, and It seemed like it couldn’t be found. I quit because there was a way to get out of the rat hole and move on. could never finish Anything! I was too young to know about Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote his compositions on index cards, or PG Wodehouse, who wrote them on sheets of paper and attached them with clothespins to strings hanging from the ceiling. Both techniques allow for repositioning, and I needed it, but I didn’t know I needed it — I was blaming myself for unclear thinking — and it was possible I didn’t even know it was.
Then I discovered the following Mac desk accessories (like widgets): Actor(1). Acta is an outliner and I created outlines just like I was trained to do in school. Rather than explain what an overview is, the first post in this series will provide a partial overview. My writing tool life so far:
As you can see, the outline items are numbered in Harvard style (I., A., 1., a., etc.), but you can turn off numbering (unless you want to count paragraphs). Masu. Enough to show the structure.
Important points: Outline items can be reordered. I could simply write down the text in any order I wanted, then refine and rearrange it until I was done. The mouse hole is now unclogged. I was able to finish it! This is my first time creating a report using Acta. I also wrote a product review on the same day. The feeling was amazing.
So insofar as writing can be an art, and insofar as I was able to master it, I owe it to the Mac and to the author of Acta, who made both possible. Thanks to the digital transformation that has taken place. Of course, it goes without saying that before that, we had spent years converting words into print (2). I can finish it!
reader notes
My identity is pretty vague at this point, as it’s becoming somewhat autobiographical. But, dear reader, I would appreciate it if you would not speculate about that in the comments or speculate about the institutions and places mentioned in these articles. It doesn’t make sense for Google to make life any easier than it already is. thank you!
Precautions
(1) When Mac OS became Unix-based, desk accessories were discontinued. David Dunham, the author of Acta, wrote something surprisingly simple. opal Outliner is no longer maintained (and I dread the day when a so-called upgrade causes my one must-have software application to fail). Microsoft virtually killed off a product category by including a brutal and terrifying outliner in its Microsoft Word bloatware. (I think this post also corrects the record, but it doesn’t correct either) Outliner history, This is not there eitherrefers to Acta or Opal.
(2) That’s one of the reasons I think Well, Besides the fact that you use a Mac, the user interface and keyboard shortcuts are etched into your muscles, nerves, and brain.
