

Living With a Computer (1982) - atestu
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/82jul/fallows.htm

======
grellas
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.

~~~
MikeCapone
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?").

~~~
_delirium
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.

------
noonespecial
_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."_

Whoa.

------
mnemonicsloth
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._

------
alexgartrell

      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.
    

Wow, this guy really nailed the laptop thing.

~~~
sp332
And we might still be using Osborne-brand laptops today, if it weren't for the
whole Osborne Effect thing.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Computer_Corporation>

~~~
idoh
It turns out that the Osborne effect is a myth:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect#The_Osborne_Myth>

------
ebiester
<http://www.theatlantic.com/james-fallows/> \-- the author's current blog.

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.

------
osipov
"many people suspect that IBM will wage a counteroffensive with a DOS of its
own"

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

------
j-g-faustus
"When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I
simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen."

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

~~~
sp332
<http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20081205> "Any sufficiently
analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science!"

------
philwelch
"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.

~~~
mechanical_fish
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.

~~~
philwelch
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.

------
rm-rf
The article describes home computing of that era quite well.

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.

