[Me in the mid-'60s]

When I was about eight years old my mother brought home an old used Smith-Corona (or was it a Remington?) typewriter and my romance with the printed word began. I remember bragging to the kid next door that "we have a typewriter" at home.

Of course I didn't know touch typing then, but that didn't stop me. After much practice I was able to type "Now is the time for all good men . . ." for one minute at the rate of 60 words a minute, with two index fingers.

Those old typewriters were mechanical marvels. In high school I learned touch typing on a splendid, manual Royal. My fingers still vibrate when I think of the wonderful "touch" of that machine. I got off to a slow start in Typing I. But by doing my "home"work (typing "ask a lad" over and over and over again) I finally got the hang of it and became the most improved (building my typing speed up from about 12 wpm to 30+ wam in a week's time). By the end of the semester I was doing 55 and 60.

I put my typing to work. I became the editor of my church's youth department newsletter, produced by cutting mimeograph stencils. Not content with straight typing, I had to enhance it by manually justifying all the lines to create an even left and right margin. This was accomplished by typing all the copy on plain paper, drawing a line down the right side to indicate the right margin, and then retyping each line on the stencil, inserting the necessary spaces (or half-spaces) to stretch lines to the right margin, and diminishing some spaces to half-spaces to squeeze extra-long lines to the right length. And this was without a halfspace key. Imagine my delight when I met my first half-space key! I felt like I could conquer the world.

The disparity between typewriting and typesetting was becoming more and more obvious to me. As hard as I tried I couldn't produce anything that looked anywhere near typeset. This was basically because typewriters (except the old IBM Executive) gave an equal amount of horizontal space to every character, whereas typesetters gave only the amount necessary for each character (called proportional spacing). Other frustrations were the limited characters available on the conventional typewriter. We always had to draw our square brackets in by hand. Same with the "+" sign. Degree signs (º) were accomplished by typing a slightly elevated "o". Underlining was slow, and sometimes turned out red because your black and red ribbon wasn't adjusted right. Italics of course were out of the question. So was bold. These were not considerations for typists, but for typesetters.

After high school I took Data Processing I at night school, but, being only the late '60s, that didn't seem to have much promise for improving the typewriting world. There were even fewer special characters available in the computer, and also we were limited to only CAPITAL LETTERS, kind of an e. e. cummings in reverse.

When I got my job at Beloit College (1979), I was kind of settling in for a life of Selectrics, or possibly memory typewriters. Selectrics had been around for about 14 years and people thought they were the real ultimate. Imagine, no more key jams. Imagine, carbon ribbons. Imagine, self-correction. Imagine, dual pitch. My first year or so here involved a lot of work on the Selectric. Some professors would bring me handwritten papers which I would dutifully convert to "beautiful" typed pages. Then they would find errors and if I couldn't patch them up to their satisfaction, the entire page (or pages) would have to be typed over. And of course that would introduce new errors. It could be frustrating. Not only was I upset when they found my errors, but they would sometimes hesitate to call errors to my attention, because they knew all the additional work it would mean for me.

Enter word processing. My boss, Zeddie Bowen, was hoping to get our office set up with "electronic word processing." Liking adventure, I nodded my head and said, "Yes, that would be nice."

I remember one phone conversation where Randy Williams was explaining to me how you could just "forget about the margins." They were already set. You could just type your lines at any length and they format beautifully into paragraphs. I couldn't really see what the big advantage was (boy, was I naive). Then he explained that if you added more text or deleted text at any point, the paragraphs would re-format automatically. Now this was starting make sense.

We got our word processor (TDP on the HP3000). Keith Nelson gave me a five-minute lesson and I was off. After working the kinks out of my brain I got the hang of it. I even brought the manual home to study. The biggest milestone was learning the difference between a "\" and a "/". That might not seem like much to you, but in TDP it is crucial. Also, I had to remember never to use a small "1" instead of a true numerical "1".

It was great. Now we could start typing jobs without having all the specifications. We didn't have to call someone to find out if they wanted double-spacing before we could type. We could type now, and worry about the fine details later. One professor in particular changed his whole style of writing because of our word processor. We would type his material. He'd proofread it. We'd insert corrections. He'd come back later with more refinements and revisions. We'd update the file. After about ten versions he'd have his writing so polished, it would shine to a high sheen.

Our printer was the NEC Spinwriter 5525. Fifty-five characters a second! Marvelous.

Noisy, but marvelous. Want another typeface? Just pop in another thimble. Splendid. I soon had a growing collection of thimbles. We had to wait until a couple years later though for bolding because the 5525 didn't support it. Italics were tricky: Stop the printing at just the right point (you had to have good reflexes). Change thimbles. Print the italicized word(s). Stop the printing again. Change thimbles back. Commence printing again. I remember doing this for only one job, for obvious reasons.

The next few years were a blur of snowballing technology. Convincing the college we needed a text scanner, we were forced to get a PC to go with it. We chose WordPerfect (version 4.1) as our word processor. Our Spinwriter (now a 7710) could now do things like bolding, proportional spacing, and half-line feeds to our hearts content. Then Ken Yasukawa got us thinking about laser printers. Convinced that they produced quality output we got an HP Laserjet+. It proved to be another revolution to our technique. Swift and quiet, it was a fantastic upgrade from the Spinwriter and the HP2680 letter quality. Italics became practical for the first time. We also got true bolding. And superscripts didn't cause paperfeed registration problems. And graphics! It could even do half a page of graphics in one pass.

Enter Ventura Desktop Publishing. Thanks to the efforts of Karen Neuendorf we got Ventura 1.0. And wow! that Laserjet came to life. I now had so much control over the printed word, I was finally thinking I had arrived.

But these days, just when you think you have the last word in technology, along comes something else that makes it look primitive. We got a Postscript printer. Its scalable fonts (35 resident) made the Laserjet seem archaic. And full page graphics.

Imagine, sizing fonts to the nearest tenth of a point. Imagine, adjusting letterspacing, kerning, leading, underline thickness, underline position, superscript position, superscript size, 1500 characters at your disposal in any size from 1 point to 72 points, outline characters, shadow characters, gray characters, reversed characters, inverted characters, sideways characters, imported Chart and Lotus graphs, scanning photographs and line art that can then be sized, cropped, stretched, squeezed.

Back to typing. Frankly, I'm not crazy about typing. I welcome any technology that takes my hands away from the keyboard. My romance is with the printed word, not with the act of pressing keys with fingers. So when I hear about voice recognition, or when I encounter the World Wide Web with its "unprinted" pages, I really feel that weve made some quantum leaps since my mother brought that typewriter home to an eight-year-old's delight.

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