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Tuesday, 14 April, 2009
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RANT 'O THE WEEK:
by WritersCollege.com Director Steve Morrill
I'm out of here in a few hours to help some friends move a sailboat from one side of Florida to the other side. Strangely, this does not always mean going the long way around, as there is a way across through Lake Okeechobee in the middle. I think Lake Okeechobee is the largest lake entirely inside the United States but, much like myself, it may be wide but it is very shallow.
Getting ready for the trip takes me all of about ten minutes, as I already have all the gear. One thing I will take is my laptop, and I just transferred a book to it, actually a manuscript on which I am working. Why read store-bought books by other people when you can read your own book that you are writing, and work on it some more in those spare hours? One advantage of being a writer, when we want to read something we have our favorite author right at hand.
WritersCollege.com will trundle along without me for a few days. Anyone registering this week, I'll process by class-starting time on Monday, have no fear.
SCHOOL
NEWS: Sorry to report that we are losing Jan Sparkman's short story course. Jan is retiring and we certainly wish her well.
Registrations overall are down whch actually surprises me a bit. Yes, the economy is in the toilet but what better time to learn more about a new career, some new potential income, even a new hobby? Don't ask me, I know about as much about economics as—well—as those people who got us into this mess.
ESSAY: The Web's Wild Ride
I had not recalled, until I did some research a few weeks ago for a client, that there was no World Wide Web until 1990, but I had my first computer, with Internet access, back in 1984. I'm not usually that clever but I instantly saw this as the future of data and word processing and knew the world was not going to be the same. I was the first writer I know of (and I knew a few, I was just getting started in the writing biz, part-time) to use a computer and computer printer as my primary tool.
I had worked at a steamship agency with a staff of seven, sufficient to handle the bulk cargo ships that we specialized in but inadequate to deal with general cargo and the new container ships that I saw as the future of maritime shipping. Too much paperwork when one ship could be carrying a thousand separate items, each with its own bill of lading. But with the computer, I reasoned, we could do more with the same people. I hauled my computer to the office one day to show it off. My boss, informed that it cost about $2500 (in 1984 dollars) was horrified. Our accountant was horrified. The secretaries loved it. The other agent in the office (I was both the other "boarding agent" and the office manager) wanted to know if there was anything on the Internet about bass fishing.
There probably was. I recall typing in links to specific servers (often run by enthusiastic high school kids who shut off their servers when their moms told them it was time for bed) and then going through endless lists of 1-5 or 1-15 choices, just numbered lines of type, this being 'way before graphics. Each choice led to more choices. It was tedious but I still recall how, at one point, I realized I was reading a document in a Japanese university library. "Who the heck is paying for this long-distance call" I wondered. That part still mystifies me. By 1985 I was writing full-time and when I discovered that I could transmit an article as a computer file to a Swedish publisher, I about fell off my chair. I immediately reset all my deadline priorities. No more of that business of doing it quickly so as to get it into the mail for the 3-4 days it took to get to the editor. Now I could work all night and send it the day it was due. Not sure that was an improvement.
In those days I said—and to a small extent it's still true—that computing was a science, but printing it was an art. I had both a dot-matrix 9-pin and a daisy-wheel with several print wheels that sounded like a Browning Automatic Rifle. The output was so perfect-looking that one editor told me she was almost afraid to edit the paper. They don't seem to have that fear now. I also went through the evolution of storage media, from tape drive to 8" floppy to 5" floppy to 3.5" floppy (not so floppy any more but inside a hard case) to CD to DVD to...?
All this remembering comes about because the Web and, worst of all, Wikipedia, is like opening a dictionary. You can't stop reading. This morning I read an article in The Guardian (and thanks to the Web you can read newspapers across the world) that mentioned Timothy Berners-Lee as the creator of the Web. "Oh sure," I thought. "Like Al Gore invented the Internet and the Russians invented television."
Well, the Russians DID invent the TV, Al Gore helped with government funding for the Internet (and that's another story too, involving the Department of Defense's ultra-secret ARPA) and Berners-Lee is, in fact, the inventor of the Web.
The Web took away those endless lists to chose among, replacing it with something intuitive to humans, hypertext and graphics and all using the new mouse control. Suddenly I can be inside that Japanese library in seconds instead of a half-hour—though I still don't know who's paying for this. Suddenly I can put up my own web site and say anything I want to the whole world without needing to be wealthy enough to hire a printer. And without the Web and its associated email system, too, I would be ignorant about Viagra, Canadian pharmacies, Nigerian officials wanting my bank account number, porn, low-cost instant Ph.D. degrees and every breathless PR release by every obscure tourist attraction in the world. To think I might have missed that but for Berners-Lee!
And here's a really cool thing: ]The very first Web server. It runs on a NeXTcube (remember when Steve Jobs left Apple to start NeXT to develop some very far-reaching ideas? Apparently CERN, the Swiss nuclear particle research organization, for whom Berners-Lee worked at the time, scooped up a bunch of those NeXT computers before Jobs merged NeXt back into Apple once more. I'm typing this now using a computer (iMac) developed using NeXT construction and programming.
It's been an amazing ride, these past 25 years of personal computing, and Berners-Lee is still working, now at MIT, on further developing the Web to make it better yet, using the concept of the Semantic Web.
Send me your memories of your first use of computers to director@writerscollege.com
FEATURED
COURSES: (Also see our homepage for daily featured courses)
| Be
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Learn
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| Body-Build
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| Book
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| Book
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| Magazine
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WEB LINKS:
Here's a fun and uplifting moment at the Antwerp railroad station
New York Times on the increase in fiction reading by adults.
MediaBistro is a good place for news of the magazine world.
The Writer Beware is a good place to keep up on the worst of the scammers out there.
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