Writing - Pre and Post Word Processors etc.

This is kind of a spin-off of the "Praise for the RATE Group" topic, which is currently at message 32.My schooling was in the pre-Personal Computer era. The electronic calculator showed up while I was in high school.Anyhow, it seems that writing a paper now days, is not nearly the ordeal it used to be. Now you can just get on the word processor, babble away, and refine until you have a finished product. Especially with the internet, copying and pasting goes a long way.In the "good old days", even if you had a finished version of what you wanted to say, the typing itself was still a pain.Moose

Well, the point of technology is to make the conversion from mental idea to physical copy as painless and as transparent as possible. I predict this will extend to every field of creative endeavor. In the future ("in the year twooo-thooooou-saaaand...") musical instruments will be as easy to play as thinking about music. This will have the advantage of opening musical expression to a lot more people. This will have the disadvantage of opening musical expression to a lot more people.

LOL, but I'm not sure that would make the pop charts noticeably worse.Ah, the Olivetti days! The joys of footnoting, underlining to indicate italics, releasing the platten to type subscripts...

And the joys of a dissertation that had to be typed on that weird thin paper with no corrections.... had I tried that myself, I'd still be in grad school.One thing that I have noticed about word processor composition is that some of the errors that do get through are really doozies. An utterly wrong word choice, as long as it spell-checks, can get through apparently easier than of old. The most remarkable may be when a kid discovers the thesaurus on his 'puter....

Just a warning - I'll cut the fingers off the first old geezer who waxes nostalgic about EMACS. I swear!

I learned to type on an old manual Olivetti, several years after those calculators were introduced. I liked typing on that machine and never cared for electric typewriters. The first word processor I used was WordStar. I used to save my work (often with a sincere prayer) on fairly unreliable 5.25" floppy disks. From that I "upgraded" to WordPerfect (the most unintuitive software environment I've ever encountered) and then to Word 2.0 for Windows. In my case it was more like Windows for Word; it was years before I found any other software I wanted to run under Windows.Word processing has come a long way since WordStar, but what has changed even more dramatically in my mind is the online experience. The best place to debate the sorts of topics we see here and elsewhere on the internet was CompuServe and its forums. CompuServe was a great place where you could communicate with people all over the world, but it was expensive. It was so expensive that the average user spent considerable time learning to run automation software that allowed you to download threads, disconnect, then read and reply offline. Once all your responses were composed you would reconnect and the program would automatically post them at maximum speed.Of course, maximum speed back then was about 2,400bps. I remember upgrading to a 9,600bps modem that cost me a bit over $500.00. I was able to justify the cost by savings on my CompuServe bill. 2,400bps connections were billed at about $12.00 per hour, while 9,600 was billed at about $22. Since 9,600 is 4x 2,400, using automation software enabled a considerable savings, even in spite of the fact that no local 9,600 connection was available. I had to call long distance to Columbus, Ohio to connect at that speed.

I'm not sure what your point is, moose, I think electronic means of typing are the single greatest thing ever to have happened to the written word. But then I'm somwhat Dyslexic and badly Dysgraphic. Spell-checking, fast typing and the ability to alter already written thoughts can only lend a clearer end-product.