I’ve Outlived a Lot of Computer Technology
Over the course of my journalism career, I’ve seen a lot of technology come and go.
When I was in high school, in the mid-1970s, I worked on the student paper. We used typewriters (remember them?) to write our news stories. Then I had to copy each story, letter by letter, onto sheets of paper covered with little squares. It was like taking out a classified ad, where each letter had to fit in its own square. It was a hellishly time-consuming and tedious task. This process somehow ensured that all the words would fit the width of the column in our layout.
In the late 1970s, at my first newspaper job, with The Sentinel in East Brunswick, New Jersey, I remember we had typesetters who would type the stories into a machine, which would produce long strips of yellow paper with holes punched in it. This paper would end up, somehow, producing the stories that would be pasted into the paper.
Around 1979, I remember seeing my first desktop computer while I was in journalism school. No one used it except the teacher. There was no such thing as a Mac.
After I graduated from college in 1980, I had a newspaper job doing pasteup. (For younger people, this was when you had to print out the story in a strip and then actually paste the story into place on the layout.)
I wonder what electronics I use today will be outmoded in the near future.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
I am a newbie to the whole field of design for print, when I started, I did pasteup (very little), and then went to Pagemaker on an SE30. Pagemaker no longer exists, I am not using MacPaint or MacDraw for graphic work anymore, but I am still using my Mac and CS3.
Do you remember the configuration of the first computer you ever met? Mine was 2 blocks long and one block wide, and now we have the iPhone…the computer and phone you can carry in a pocket.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
I remember a computer-type thing that took up a room. This was when I was in college.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
I remember when my father did computer punch cards.
January 24th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
I was in the high school class of ‘78, and we actually had computers in the high school for the last couple of years. I took Fortran in college, and I was the last semester to use punch cards (they sucked!)
Pretty soon, everything Gene Roddenberry predicted will be true and more!
January 24th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
I have worked with software and computers since 1979. The first data center I worked in actually looked like the bridge of Starship Enterprise. Technology improvements have been dramatic but the Internet is the single fundamental change that has occurred while I’ve been in the business.
January 24th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Similar stuff – In broadcasting school, I learned to edit by physically cutting up reel-to-reel tapes and taping them back together. Now I just press a couple of keys on the keyboard and it’s all done in clean as a whistle digital sound. And, if I don’t like the edit? Just hit another key and start over. Hours, literally, saved. Amazing.
January 24th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
My first experience with computers was with an IBM 1620 using FORTRAN using punch cards and the that was followed by an IBM 360 that I learned to program with BASIC. For my senior project in college, I built a computer using INTEL 8008 microprocessor and it was programmed by flipping toggle switches. That was followed by a Rockwell AIM65 single board computer that used a 40 character LED display and printer. It had a BASIC interpreter and 8K RAM.
Then in 1978, I bought an Apple II with something new called a Disk Operating System, 64K RAM and I went on-line using a dialup timeshare network called Delphi.
January 24th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Remember the horrific noise (and smokey haze) of the newsrooms?
January 24th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
I remember using typewriters through college (1977). Our kids at 17 and 19 find it hard to fathom how we adults managed to survive with X86 PC’s with DOS. Now the PC is not so esoteric, and is pretty inexpensive for what it can do. But the computer won’t make anyone say, a better layout editor, you need to have the eye to know what is a good layout…the computer is as it always was, a tool (even a 286)
January 25th, 2008 at 2:13 am
I think robots will write for us and all we have to do is “think” it.
And Steve Jobs will have his own church.
January 25th, 2008 at 9:51 am
I remember my grandfather taking me to where he worked setting type into a Linotype machine. I was only 4 or 5 at the time but I was fascinated with machines from day one (almost) and the memory is still clear as a bell. I swear I remember thinking what a lousy way of doing things that was.
Funny how it seems I think the same thing about how I used to do things when I first started out in computers (1977). I’ve had experience with card punchers and readers, paper tape readers and writers, magnetic tape drives, early hard drives where the disk spins in an open air drawer with hydraulically actuated heads, hard drives with stacked, 2 foot wide platters spun by synchro motors the size of industrial furnace blower motors and still I think what a lousy way of doing things that was.
Displays embedded in contact lenses, micro computers on a chip connected to your brain, computer tables where the entire surface is a touch screen yet you can eat of of it, our grown children/grandchildren telling their friends that their parents actually had to drive their car…
Whatever is in store for us as far as the world of computers, electronics, the WWW and the Internet that it rides within I hope I never grow too old to keep up with it.
January 25th, 2008 at 10:37 am
My freshman year in college I was very excited to have an ELECTRIC typewriter. I typed older students’ papers for spending money. We had one of those room-sized computers with punch cards too. But my campus job was in the psychology department where I ran copies of tests and handouts on the mimeograph machine (remember the blue print?), then collated and stapled by hand.
January 25th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
I remember mimeograph. To think of it now almost seems comical.
January 25th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
I love this topic! I remember how exciting it was to get that typewriter that had a whole sentence on the screen, so you could correct before it printed! But my pride and joy (which I still have in the back of my upstairs closet) was my Kaypro. Come to think of it, it was a Kaypro portable which weighed a mere 25 lbs and came in a metal case that could (and did!) survive a fall down an escalator. It had no harddrive but it did have two 5 1/4 inch disk drives. Who really needed anything more? And best of all–it was a bargain at $3000!
January 25th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Mimeograph? Oh the memories of cranking out copy after copy of the church bulletin every Saturday afternoon for the service on Sunday. And I do mean crank. (my father was a Methodist minister. He typed ‘em, I cranked ‘em).
January 26th, 2008 at 8:43 am
I’ve outlived a bunch of technology, too. Now I’m playing catch-up and learning to integrate the old with the new (via online learning and classrooms tudies!).
January 26th, 2008 at 9:21 am
You took me back in time. My first job for the local newspaper during high school was doing pasteups and painting over dust spots in the negatives. My first visit to your blog. I’ll be back!
January 26th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
[quote]# Kirk M Says:
January 25th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Mimeograph? Oh the memories of cranking out copy after copy of the church bulletin every Saturday afternoon for the service on Sunday. And I do mean crank. (my father was a Methodist minister. He typed ‘em, I cranked ‘em).[/quote]
I remember in class getting Mimeograph handouts and everyone smelling to get a buzz.
January 27th, 2008 at 10:43 am
I bought a business from an “old guy” in ‘91 – he was still doing paste up. I started using my computer to layout ads and that upset him (he worked with me for a year). I remember one of his old customers was Winn Dixie, but they had recently replaced him and their entire in-house graphics department with computers.
I can’t keep up with technology – too expensive, lol.
January 27th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
The first school “newspaper” I put together we did on the mimeograph – what a pain!
I also remember having to be careful not to use a blue pen on the charts in my dad’s office because the blue wouldn’t be picked up by the old copier machines!