How Times Have Changed!

I knew throughout the 90s and 00s that I would always and forever need Word, or a word processing program. Even before pc’s I hadn’t lived without word processors. In the 80s they weren’t household items, so I wrote at work. I published little poem books with xerox copies of my original drawings on whatever proprietary equipment I was using at the time, so they couldn’t be transferred to any other equipment, and were all outdated within a few years, so unfortunately the stuff I wrote in the 80s never made it through the dozens of conversions technology demanded through time.

One of the most regrettable losses was my collection of Vydec (http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/Home/equipment/vydec-1800) animation. I searched the internet for Vydec and Vydec operator, but nothing comes up. It occurs to me now that I was really remiss for never taking any pictures of me and my fellow Vydec operators in our natural setting. It is lost to history.

The Vydecs I used were huge consoles.  They were NOT those cute little desk machines with a slim smiling model standing next to them, that come up on a search.  And there were big rooms of these consoles.  Oh, I've worked at small companies that had just one or two Vydecs, but the large law firms had huge rooms of them with shifts around the clock. Many times you just sat down to start your shift picking up where the previous operator left off, just sat down and threw the printer paper in for the next page, or continued revising right on the screen where he/she left off.  The machine was large and noisy and hot and surrounded your body.  None of my image searches turned up a proper Vydec.  You could see upper bodies if you were standing up, but once you sat down the other operators disappeared.  All you saw was your console, unless you did a back bend or slid your chair out to converse, which we often did. One operator I remember wore the closest to a bathing suit that appropriate work attire would allow, and always brought a change of shirt, because she sweat so much. I was always cold so the Vydec warmth suited me. Anyway, we'd get bored and create animation on those things. There was no internet in those days, my collection was painstakingly hand collected from each operator’s station. But by the 90s there was no longer any way to play a Vydec disk, so I threw them out, never suspecting they might be a useful addition to a Vydec museum some day.

Anyway, here I am today, barely conversant in Mac, happily typing straight into my blog. My fingers are constantly reaching for all my macros, and Word’s built-in keyboard bells and whistles, which is frustrating and annoying, but that’s because I use them every day keeping my finger memory alive. Once I retire and use only my Mac, that will stop. I see myself traveling really light, and no longer even owning a desktop computer. And I do have a word processing program on the Mac anyway. It’s a free office download that is perfectly adequate for my needs (I would have downloaded Word for Mac but the reviews for it were terrible).

So, these days I hardly use word processing programs.  I write directly into my blog, or I’m in email writing brilliant thoughts to somebody that get cut and paste into my blog.  Holy crap. Look at me keep up with technology!