Summer 2004

Pioneer in Print

How I produced the first I.S. on a personal computer

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My pocket-sized personal digital assistant weighs just a few ounces and includes a word processor, spell checker, thesaurus, a dozen foreign language dictionaries, a Bible, an interactive map of the London Underground, and thousands of addresses and appointments. It goes almost everywhere with me. Today, even a casual writer likely uses some electronic device. But it wasn’t very long ago that all writing was done on paper.

My digital revolution began in 1982, when my senior Independent Study was the first one to be written and published on a “personal” computer.

In 1978, Professor E. Carl Zimmerman (mathematics) constituted the entire CompSci department at Wooster. My class arrived on campus with clunky portable typewriters. We wrote and revised our work in longhand, and only after completing the creative process did we fix it permanently on a page through typing. A few typos were inevitable. Correction was a two-step process involving the careful removal of text followed by some never-quite-neat-enough over-typing, or in extreme cases, hand printing with a ball point pen. Gritty rubber wheels attached to stiff green brushes, typing erasers could bore holes through onionskin paper in seconds. We had alternatives to the eraser, but they all resulted in horribly messy documents. The faculty especially dreaded Corrasable paper. Chemically treated to allow use of a pencil eraser, such ease of erasure brought significant disadvantages. Typed text came out sort of a sickly gray, erased text left a faint shadow, and text was forever subject to smearing unless you took the uniquely heroic step of coating it with hair spray.

Whatever correction method we used, our typed pages never really looked good. For a significant academic thesis like Independent Study, virtually everyone hired a typist. These specialists had to be scheduled, because there weren’t enough typists in Wooster to do everyone’s I.S. at the same time. Last minute alterations or corrections were impossible.

Fall 1981 saw us lining up for access to the eighteen Terak microcomputers that sat waiting in a new facility in Andrews Library basement. The previous year, a few of us Computer Center regulars had experimented with using them to write assignments. We printed our papers on dot-matrix printers, which created ugly, mechanical-looking text. Like 8.5´´ x 11´´ postage stamps, the paper had perforations at the top and bottom and rows of tractor-feed holes down the sides. We had to ask professors for permission to hand in such weird-looking papers. However, in my senior year, a new ‘typewriter quality’ printer provided a quantum leap in document appearance. Although that doesn’t seem like much of a benchmark today, it meant that anyone patient enough to wait for the printer to finish could have a document that was noticeably neat. Well, anyone technically proficient enough to know how to create and process the document. We had nothing like a modern word processor, so what we had was effectively limited to the minority of students who had used a Terak “PC” for coursework.

The Terak text editor was primitive, but it did have “word wrap,” a new efficiency which meant we didn’t have to hit a return lever or “Enter” key every eighty characters. It was quicker to type text on the computer than to write it longhand or use a typewriter. With arrow keys, minor changes were easy and, unlike typing, you couldn’t detect where you made changes. More significantly, the text editor allowed us to cut out words, sentences, even paragraphs, then paste them back in a different order. Those who could figure out the arcane system could perform a wholesale rearrangement of text in seconds.

Formatting such as line spacing, indentation, and underlining wasn’t visible on the screen. Instead it was awkwardly specified by putting special instructions in stand-alone lines of text preceded by a period (“.IN 5” meant indent the following line of text by five spaces). The new printer could do tricks that were difficult or impossible on the typewriter, like printing quotes from German language sources with German characters. Unlike a typewriter, the printer used proportional fonts, meaning that each letter took up only as much width as was needed, just like a magazine or book. To further distinguish my printed I.S. from typewritten ones, I made it fully justified, with straight margins on both sides of the page. All this extra formatting meant it took several noisy hours to print my hundred-plus page I.S. (on the “Gospel of Thomas”).

In retrospect, the significance of personal computing was not in the word presentation but in the word processing. The experience of being a Wooster student was already changing, and computers were no longer just for programming. They were becoming generalized idea manipulation tools. Social anthropologists suggest that there are significant differences in thought processes and cultural values between purely oral societies and those that make constant use of reading and writing. As we increasingly rely upon digital technology to collect, store, manipulate, and communicate ideas, are we undergoing a comparable level of intellectual change?

Aristotle warned that literacy reduces memorization capacity. After twenty-five years on the keyboard, I certainly have lost the ability to compose on paper. But have I also gained something? Has ubiquitous PC word processing changed the very way we think, or even what we value? Sounds like a great question for a Wooster student to examine in Independent Study.

Jay Heiser ’82 is an information security analyst with TruSecure in London, England