Techno-nostalgia (Was: What thrills you? )

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- FS -dot- COM -dot- AU>]

Rick Lippincott said:

> Back in the old days, when we would use typewriters (usually while sitting
> around the campfire in our bearskins, after a hard day of hunting sabre
> toothed tigers...)

Technology arrived half-way through my course. All my first-year assign-
ments were typed. I remember one essay that appeared in three different
type faces. The first two typewriters died with me in the saddle.

In my second year, two sexy looking IBM DisplayWriters appeared in
the terminal room. The non-computing academic were stunned; they'd
never seen such gorgeous looking assignments (same old rubbish inside,
unfortunately :^(

I still have two 8" 128KB floppies at home somewhere.

> ... we'd have a stack of rough draft material that went before
> the final copy.  In a case like Stuarts, I'd have pulled out all the
> rough copy, plopped it on the lecturer's desk, and said "If I've
> plagerised, then I also had to fake these pages..."

I used to do pages of notes in pencil before the first typed draft. Not
so much these days. I can't remember if I kept the notes, in this case.

> I have heard, though, that literary historians are distressed by the in-
> creased use of word processing tools in writing. They say that the practice
> of doing all the revisions in one file, thus erasing early drafts, destroys
> their ability to later come in and study the "history" of the document...

Perhaps when CD-ROM burners become commonplace, the practice of saving
drafts will come back. Writers will just write their backups until they
fill a CD, then start another.

Stuart