2005-11-20T18:48:00.000-08:00

The first time I used a computer was in 1979. I was getting ready to start writing my dissertation at The University of Texas, but I didn't have a typewriter or enough money to pay a typist to help me with the manuscript, nor did I have the typing skills to do the job myself. In those days, you typed with carbon paper, and, if you made a mistake, you had to use a razor blade to scrape off each incorrect letter. If you were really lucky or rich, you had access to an IBM correcting Selectric--on that machine, when you typed the wrong letter, you could go backwards and white it out with a special piece of tape. In both cases, correction was exceedingly time consuming. You certainly didn't consider revising entire sentences or paragraphs after they were typed!

To solve my problem, another graduate student in the program, Hugh Burns, suggested that I learn how to use the university mainframe computer. Graduate students could get large accounts on this machine for free, and, Hugh knew where there was a computer terminal in the English Department office that very few people knew how to use. He suggested that I could type text use the terminal and its attached keyboard to send text to the mainframe. Then, he taught me to use RUNOFF, a very early type of word-processing program that would send text formatting commands to the mainframe. These commands would tell the computer how to print the text.

This process of typing and tagging with RUNOFF was much like working with raw hmtl coding todayÂone put a programming tag before and after every different single kind of text--headings, body text, new paragraphs, etc. Although this process was tedious, the typing itself seemed magical to us for one simple reason--if you made a mistake in your typing, you could backspace using the keyboard, and the letters and words would disappear! This meant you could read your words on the computer terminal--before they were actually printed on a piece of paper--and you could revise whole sentences and paragraphs if you wanted to.

For me, this approach was terrifically powerful--it made writing dynamic, changeable, unfixed. Thee effect was liberating in a major way.

Of course, it didn't solve all my problems! There were no spelling checkers in those days, and I was a terrible speller as well as a terrible typist. In fact, the word "computer" is misspelled on the very first page of my dissertation.

Writing is a humbling sport--on or off a computer!

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