{"id":575,"date":"2009-07-22T16:52:45","date_gmt":"2009-07-22T23:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.wavewithoutashore.cwgservices.org\/?p=575"},"modified":"2009-07-22T16:52:45","modified_gmt":"2009-07-22T23:52:45","slug":"computer-archaeologywhat-was-your-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/computer-archaeologywhat-was-your-first\/","title":{"rendered":"computer archaeology…what was your first?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Downbelow Station<\/em> was the book that convinced me I had to get into computers. First Don Wollheim (DAW) said it was too long and maybe I didn’t need all the scene-setting: you know that book has a lot of scene-shifts, some scenes only 10 lines long. So I rewrote it and took out all the setting and description. Don came back saying never mind the length, just put the stuff back in. But Betsy suggested time-stamps on the sections, and I liked that idea, so I did. But typing a book is about a 3 month operation even if you’ve already written it.<\/p>\n

So after sending off the world’s shaggiest manuscript, the whole thing cut and pasted, and re-cut and re-pasted—I got a cellwriter. Mistake. It had about 120 cells (recording strips) on which you could write and it would retain it. But it would only play back one cell at a time, as you turned the dial, and heaven help you if you got anything out of order. You had to keep meticulous records of what scene was in what cell—ie, you were your own FAT table.<\/p>\n

Now, my typewriters all met horrid fates. My speed and the pounding wrecked typeballs and sent letter slugs flying. I had to have cams repaired. And I didn’t trust the tech of that cellwriter.<\/p>\n

So I went to a store and took a look at a 48 k Atari. It had little ‘cards’ or modules you shoved into one of two slots, to let it do basic. You had two disk drives, each about the size and behavior of a toaster. You put your program in one, your writing disk in the other (flat 5″ floppies) and you strung I\/O cable from the computer to the interface, a unit about the size of a modern laptop, then another cable to the first drive, and then a cable from the first drive to the second drive, as I recall, and then one from the second drive back to the interface: or maybe not. Each disc could record about 30 pages of typescript. And adding scenes out of order meant creative numbering, like ForAd2b: that’s Foreigner part A disk 2 part b. So it was better than the cellwriter…<\/p>\n

The whole wordprocessing program was about 14 k. That let you have 48-14=34k left to write with. Did I mention old LetterPerfect didn’t have a warning when you filled the buffer? It’d bounce, and you’d lose the last sentence you’d typed, to clear enough memory for it to actually save the file. Which would whirr and grind. Then you’d load another disk, label it, format it, and type your next bit.<\/p>\n

There was no warning when you were going to close without saving. No Are You Sures? It just did what you told it. And yes, I lost an entire Thieves’ World story that way. I had to do it completely over. I lost a very key scene out of 40,000 in Gehenna and had to reconstruct it.<\/p>\n

And let’s not even mention power backups (there weren’t) and power outs (there were. Edmond power went out when a particularly heavy pigeon landed on a line.) Thunderstorms. No battery. If it was too wild to plug in, you were dead until the storm passed.<\/p>\n

CRT screen. Not only did I have a dot matrix printer, the screen displayed that way, too: you could see the pixels.<\/p>\n

Eventually I got a portable…uh…luggable. It looked like a sewing machine and closed with a suitcase clasp. It weighed 30 pounds and had a really bad screen. It was a Sharp.<\/p>\n

But I kept the old Atari going. I added a buffer that would let me load in a whole novel at once: wow! so I didn’t have to get up every 15 minutes all night long when it was time to print out, so I could change disks. And let me tell you, if we had a power glitch in the middle of loading a three inch stack of disks into that buffer, the air turned blue around me. The buffer slowed down my musical career: I’d taught myself to play the guitar while waiting for that Centronics printer. Multitasking? Ha. With 48 k you just feel grateful if it saved your file.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Downbelow Station was the book that convinced me I had to get into computers. First Don Wollheim (DAW) said it was too long and maybe I didn’t need all the scene-setting: you know that book has a lot of scene-shifts, some scenes only 10 lines long. So I rewrote it and took out all the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":751,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[41],"class_list":["post-575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-computer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/751"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}