![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
And that "youth" would be a relative term, too.
My first work computer was an Osborne 1 that I bought in 1983, if memory serves. It replaced my IBM Selectric, which had the neat multiple self-correcting feature that remembered the several most recently pressed keys and would backspace and restrike said keys in the right order using an adhesive ribbon that lifted just-typed letters right off the paper.
Unlike older machines that used cotton ribbons, the Selectric used a "ribbon" of very thin plastic coated with carbon on the side facing the paper. When you typed a letter, a carbon image of the letter was pressed onto the surface of the paper, creating very crisp letter images. Within the limits set by the typewriter keyboard, fonts were interchangeable—I recall owning a ball with Cyrillic letters—which made it relavitely easy to create products with a polished, professional look.
It was a crazy time among those who used "microcomputers." A fellow engineer had written some pretty sophisticated programs in BASIC—or to be more precise, in Sinclair BASIC—which would run only on the Timex Sinclair 1000, a machine that was initially sold to US nerds as a "build-it-yourself" kit for $99 and ended up a victim of its own mass production, priced at $19.95 for a no-frills unit, fully assembled, that displayed output on a television screen.
My first micro was a Commodore VIC-20, which featured—again, if memory serves—a 40-column, 24-line screen and could accommodate game cartridges much the same way today's game consoles can, except the quality of those early games was, comparatively speaking, Stone Age. (Can you say "Pong"?)
The decision to buy an Osborne over the IBM PC had to do with the fact that for just under $2,000, you got a pretty complete system: a computer, keyboard, two floppy drives, 64 KB of memory, a monitor (52-column), and loads of software, including BASIC, SuperCalc and WordStar. The same amount of cash would get you a plain-vanilla 16-KB PC with DOS, a keyboard, and a single floppy, which wasn't very useful without a video card, monitor and software.
I cut my word processing teeth on WordStar. Recently, I sat down with a Windows version of GNU Emacs and tried to capture some of the magic of working with a pre-mouse editor.
Don't get me wrong, I do my best to avoid using the mouse while using Microsoft Word, but with an editor like WordStar or emacs, using a mouse simply wasn't an option, because only a few people—such as a handful of researchers at Xerox PARC—had even an inkling of such a device.
The key to mastering Emacs (assuming such a status is attainable by a mere mortal) is likely the same as it was to mastering WordStar. You learn key chords by using the editor, not by memorization. You use the editor until what you want to do is "automatically" keyed in by your fingers (much in the same way as when you touch type).
Enough of that.
* * * I hadn't realized that the bottle of "Nikita" Noodler's Ink (4.5 fl. oz.) was so big. It arrived today, and the color is an amazingly nice hue of red, which goes along nicely with the image of Nikita Khrushchev and his immortal "We will bury you!" on the label. The UPS guy is counting the days until Christmas, when the madness lets up for a brief spell.
In other news, I have returned to using SuperMemo after a hiatus of about a decade. It finally dawned on me that the use of mnemonics to remember things is not enough—at least in my case. Repetiion—and more specifically, the spaced repetition that SuperMemo is so good at—plays a role too, at least for me, as my ability to create unforgettable images has either burned out or was substandard in the first place. (That said, there are some fragments that have remained unforgettable over the years, such as this one green chiffon dress with chartreuse sequins...)
I finished the work that came in yesterday, and plan to invoice it all tomorrow.
Cheers...
My first work computer was an Osborne 1 that I bought in 1983, if memory serves. It replaced my IBM Selectric, which had the neat multiple self-correcting feature that remembered the several most recently pressed keys and would backspace and restrike said keys in the right order using an adhesive ribbon that lifted just-typed letters right off the paper.
Unlike older machines that used cotton ribbons, the Selectric used a "ribbon" of very thin plastic coated with carbon on the side facing the paper. When you typed a letter, a carbon image of the letter was pressed onto the surface of the paper, creating very crisp letter images. Within the limits set by the typewriter keyboard, fonts were interchangeable—I recall owning a ball with Cyrillic letters—which made it relavitely easy to create products with a polished, professional look.
It was a crazy time among those who used "microcomputers." A fellow engineer had written some pretty sophisticated programs in BASIC—or to be more precise, in Sinclair BASIC—which would run only on the Timex Sinclair 1000, a machine that was initially sold to US nerds as a "build-it-yourself" kit for $99 and ended up a victim of its own mass production, priced at $19.95 for a no-frills unit, fully assembled, that displayed output on a television screen.
My first micro was a Commodore VIC-20, which featured—again, if memory serves—a 40-column, 24-line screen and could accommodate game cartridges much the same way today's game consoles can, except the quality of those early games was, comparatively speaking, Stone Age. (Can you say "Pong"?)
The decision to buy an Osborne over the IBM PC had to do with the fact that for just under $2,000, you got a pretty complete system: a computer, keyboard, two floppy drives, 64 KB of memory, a monitor (52-column), and loads of software, including BASIC, SuperCalc and WordStar. The same amount of cash would get you a plain-vanilla 16-KB PC with DOS, a keyboard, and a single floppy, which wasn't very useful without a video card, monitor and software.
I cut my word processing teeth on WordStar. Recently, I sat down with a Windows version of GNU Emacs and tried to capture some of the magic of working with a pre-mouse editor.
Don't get me wrong, I do my best to avoid using the mouse while using Microsoft Word, but with an editor like WordStar or emacs, using a mouse simply wasn't an option, because only a few people—such as a handful of researchers at Xerox PARC—had even an inkling of such a device.
The key to mastering Emacs (assuming such a status is attainable by a mere mortal) is likely the same as it was to mastering WordStar. You learn key chords by using the editor, not by memorization. You use the editor until what you want to do is "automatically" keyed in by your fingers (much in the same way as when you touch type).
Enough of that.
In other news, I have returned to using SuperMemo after a hiatus of about a decade. It finally dawned on me that the use of mnemonics to remember things is not enough—at least in my case. Repetiion—and more specifically, the spaced repetition that SuperMemo is so good at—plays a role too, at least for me, as my ability to create unforgettable images has either burned out or was substandard in the first place. (That said, there are some fragments that have remained unforgettable over the years, such as this one green chiffon dress with chartreuse sequins...)
I finished the work that came in yesterday, and plan to invoice it all tomorrow.
Cheers...
