This is fascinating as a window into another mind. I'm a decade younger at least, but I have vivid memories of the computers and places I used in that era. Like Alta Vista, the search engine that I used before Google, and which really did pioneer extensive indexing combined with sophisticated search algorithms. Or the Bates College library computer lab Mac SEs that I used.
Yeah, if I concentrate, I can summon up all sorts of details from hours and hours of experience--the hideous NCR-made computers I wrote my undergraduate thesis on, near to the college mainframe (I also played more than a few games of Zork and Adventure on them); the first Mac I had at home; lots of time on GEnie especially the SFRT; definitely Alta Vista, and so on. But the weird thing for me is that it takes concentration now. I haven't forgotten any of it, but it's not viscerally available as a sense memory either.
This hit home with me, Tim. As you know, I hand write my fiction drafts into notebooks, and I do it because there feels like a direct connection between my body and my imagination as I write. Later in the day, I go back and revise from the notebook into my laptop. The minute the words change from my hand to computer text, they begin to feel less immediate and less mine. I did learn to compose on the computer, eventually, for my academic writing, but never for this other, more intensely personal writing. Thinking back to all the computers I’ve had since my first Apple doorstop, none of them seem as real to me as the decision to choose one kind of pen over another, or finding the paper I like best to write on. All those desktops and laptops have disappeared from my consciousness; it takes a lot to recall any of them. Not as much my paper notebooks, filled with the evidence of my internal voice, externalized into a distinctive script.
This is fascinating as a window into another mind. I'm a decade younger at least, but I have vivid memories of the computers and places I used in that era. Like Alta Vista, the search engine that I used before Google, and which really did pioneer extensive indexing combined with sophisticated search algorithms. Or the Bates College library computer lab Mac SEs that I used.
Yeah, if I concentrate, I can summon up all sorts of details from hours and hours of experience--the hideous NCR-made computers I wrote my undergraduate thesis on, near to the college mainframe (I also played more than a few games of Zork and Adventure on them); the first Mac I had at home; lots of time on GEnie especially the SFRT; definitely Alta Vista, and so on. But the weird thing for me is that it takes concentration now. I haven't forgotten any of it, but it's not viscerally available as a sense memory either.
This hit home with me, Tim. As you know, I hand write my fiction drafts into notebooks, and I do it because there feels like a direct connection between my body and my imagination as I write. Later in the day, I go back and revise from the notebook into my laptop. The minute the words change from my hand to computer text, they begin to feel less immediate and less mine. I did learn to compose on the computer, eventually, for my academic writing, but never for this other, more intensely personal writing. Thinking back to all the computers I’ve had since my first Apple doorstop, none of them seem as real to me as the decision to choose one kind of pen over another, or finding the paper I like best to write on. All those desktops and laptops have disappeared from my consciousness; it takes a lot to recall any of them. Not as much my paper notebooks, filled with the evidence of my internal voice, externalized into a distinctive script.